There hasn’t been a ton going on, but I needed to take a bit of a break from omgmakingstuff for a few weeks because life was getting, frankly, overwhelming. And while I require food, sleep, and time to make things to stay healthy, one of those drops off the list when other seemingly less important things gang up on me and march right into the foreground and into my face.

Lately, I’ve also been deep in thought about the culture of the West, of the First World, and how art, music, literature, and curiosity fits in. Or doesn’t, actually. That train of thought usually starts off at a leisurely pace, innocuously traveling down the rails of the What If Train, and after a bit ends up speeding dangerously fast towards Why Not Station. Emotions churn, then rage, then I have to seek out a not-making-things distraction to avoid explosion and general ranting to people who barely know me. I know musicians who have to work stupidly low paid ‘regular’ jobs just to make ends meet. I know weavers and potters and fiber artists who work so hard at what they do – if anyone worked that hard at a ‘regular’ job, they’d all be CEOs – and every single one is married so has a back up income. It pains me to the core that it seems that first, artists have such a hard time making a basic living being artists, and second, that the ones that are not working 70 hours a week doing the making-marketing-bookkeeping, the ones I know, all have some sort of back up income. (I am gathering momentum to get to Why Not Station, so here’s where I need to change topics.)

I will likely talk about this again when I can more properly and calmly organize my thoughts. In the meantime, if you know and artist, musician, writer, poet, person-who-makes-things, please considering supporting them in any way you can, even if it’s only once. Also, there’s Patreon – please check it out. (I do not have a Patreon page – I’m not sure it would work. Please let me know if you think it would!)

So in other news, before I took a break from stuff, I finally finished the book I was making. Behold!

The cover is probably mat board, but I’m not sure. The cloth is handwoven by me. The paper is lovely 100% cotton rag, and the yarn in the binding is weaving yarn. I will definitely make more, but I think the next one at least will be case bound (a non-naked spine). This one was a gift for my buddy Lee.

Maybe you’ve heard – the Northeast of the US has been having Weather. While California pretty much burns to the ground, we here in western Massachusetts have be inundated by rain. And then rain. And then, by some twist of fate, the skies decide to give us….rain. There have been countless videos posted online of flooding everywhere in the Northeast, huge waterfalls, rivers and streams flooding their banks. The humidity is terrific. The mushrooms prolific.

I wish so much that we could give California our rain.

 

I am pretty sure at least four out of five of these fine mycologic specimens are extremely poisonous. Not that I would test the one that I think might be edible. Oh no. Sudden kidney failure isn’t worth it. I get my edible mushrooms from the grocery store (except for morels – I tried that once and broke out in a nasty case of hives). But I do enjoy seeing these beauties come up. They mostly only last for a couple of days, unless they’re trampled or nibbled by the wildlife – I did catch a squirrel nibbling on a couple recently. I have no idea if he was into tripping, or they were safe, edible mushrooms.

There are a couple of other varieties growing around too. When it stops raining, I’ll see if I can get out and snap a couple of shots.

Here’s the obligatory wildlife shot.

Okay, so not all these were in my neck of the woods. The deer are, and the frog (who I actually booped on the nose very gently). The deer are wonderful. It’s a doe and two fawns who are nearly grown out of their spots (doe right, fawn #1 left…fawn #2 had leapt away for a moment). I see them most mornings while I’m practicing. All of a sudden, I will see a huge brown mass just over the top of the music stand, and there is the doe right in front of the window.

The moth was on my office building’s front door one morning. I helped it off and onto a basket of flowers as I was really afraid someone would not be so careful. The butterfly was in one of the little flower gardens in downtown Amherst.

So then I had a tiny adventure. One day, I was practicing cello, and I accidentally dropped the rosin. Now, normally I practice in a room with a carpet on the floor, and dropping the rosin wouldn’t be a problem, but lately I’ve been practicing downstairs because it’s cooler than upstairs. There’s laminate flooring downstairs. The rosin cake went CRACK as it landed top down, basically shattering. Thankfully, most of it stuck to the cloth and itself, but I did have to sweep up a bit and throw it away.

I could have just bought new rosin, but I despise wasting, and Uncle Google said I could melt together again!

 

I made a form out of aluminum foil by molding it over a vitamin tablet bottle top, put all the broken pieces in the mold, put it in the oven on top of more foil on a cookie sheet, and baked it at 175F for about 15 minutes, then 195F for about 7 or 8 more minutes. I sat on a chair parked right in front of the oven the whole time to be absolutely sure it wouldn’t burn as Google said I should. As soon as I saw the mass of pieces completely melted, I shut off the heat, and left it for about 15 more minutes. Then I removed it from the oven, and pressed the cloth onto the back. The cloth didn’t stick as well as when the rosin was new, and I think if I have to do this again, I’ll press the cloth on as soon as the bits are melted, then shut the oven off and wait for a bit before taking it out to cool completely. But this works.

At some point, I finally got around to measuring a new warp! And then, though it was quite a struggle, I managed to get the warp onto the loom.

There is so much time between when I came up with this design, when I measured the yarn, and when I took this picture, I can’t actually remember how many yards this is. Maybe six. Maybe eight. We’ll find out.

I do love this design. I really wasn’t sure. Normally, if there are stripes, I keep the weave structure very simple. Originally, I had intended to just do this project in a herringbone. Nice clean lines, clean stripes. And I may still do a run of this same design in herringbone. But I have a couple of other cut offs of stripey warps where I’ve experimented with busier weave structures – well, busier to the eye – and everyone who’s seen the cut offs with the actual towels instantly coos over the cut offs. So I took a chance, and chose M&W. I do like this weave an awful lot, and I think it looks nice with these colors, even with the stripes.

Of course, I did the fiddly thing and made the design match up with the stripes. It was a lot of counting, and some basic arithmetic, triple and quadruple checked, and then some period of anxiety when I was done with threading heddles (600+) and sleying the reed (which I kept messing up and having to take out and do over – ugh) because I still wasn’t absolutely sure I hadn’t made a mistake in counting the yarns when I was measuring. But it worked (or at least I haven’t noticed a mistake yet – there’s time for that still). Once the cloth is washed, the pattern will be much clearer.

Grey is so in right now. Grey interiors, especially grey kitchens. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some grey! It’s almost my favourite color. I used to wear it almost exclusively and still have a lot of grey in my wardrobe. But I fear that this will be the olive green, mustard, and burnt orange of the two-thousand-teens. Perhaps the 20s. We’ll look back, and shake our heads: so bland. What were we thinking? It’s so dated. I hope not. I love grey.

(For the record, when I finally have a house of my own, the kitchen will be as white as I can manage. Maybe a bit of light green or yellow, but lots and lots of white.)

So while grey is trendy, don’t you think you need some new hand woven grey cloth in your life? Firstly, these towels will last an awfully long time – years, at least. I would expect a decade. They will be absorbent, they wash very well, they are 100% cotton. Yes, they are expensive. However, they are made by hand with quality yarn, and you will likely actually save money over the long run by not having to buy more crappy towels at the big box store every year. I can even send you a wee cloth sample so you can hold it in your hand and feel it (provided not too many people ask for this!)

Also, if you are itching for something else hand woven with these yarns, I can do placemats, runners (omg, can you imagine a grey, black, and white overshot runner? I’ll do one of those soon, just so you can see!), scarves shawls, and just plain cloth. In fact, I’ve been thinking about just weaving cloth to sell as cloth. Let me know. Poke me about it at islenskr at yahoo dot com. And if you don’t hear from me, leave a comment here, because sometimes yahoo eats emails. (I swear, I was building my own mail server to get away from yahoo, and life happened.)

In any case, I am also building an online shop to sell things I make. I want to fund the Making and the Cello, and (best case scenario) I can throw some at the House Down Payment Fund.

Hopefully, next time, I’ll have pictures of Finished Towels, and possibly printed photographs. I got a couple of test prints done and was very happy with them. Now to get them printed and, gulp, mounted. More soon!