Waiting.....

Our world is pretty topsy turvey right now!

The studio is in bits and bundles. The family china is wrapped, boxed and gone already.    Nothing to but wait for the packers and movers this coming week.   

 The calm before the storm...

I think Calli suspects something is going on. She keeps pretty close to either us or her bed. The suitcases purposefully haven't come out of storage  as yet as when they do, that means 'kennel-visit' to her'.  Except this time she's coming with us.

It will be my one year anniversary of my new knee on the 28th. What a difference a year makes!

See you on the other side of this adventure in moving...

Down the Rabbit Hole

Where did a month go?    I'm still here...... honest!

Well, it seems that my getting back into weaving that fast was perhaps a bit too much, too fast and I have been resting my knee and leg (other than the mandatory exercises).  

I fell down a proverbial rabbit hole!

Paternal great x3 aunt, only known as Ms Bowers.

I started sorting and scanning old family pictures instead to be useful with my time while my knee settles down.   Its like an old murder mystery but minus the murder part and you track clues and family trees.... and oh, look its midnight!

Olive  age 3, 1924

I have  family pictures for both my sets of grandparents and even some of great grandparents, then add to the mix one paternal aunt and her two marriages, and also two maternal aunts and their spouses  and all of the pictures taken by my father and mother over their lifetimes and I have literally thousands to sort, identify and scan.

Twins 1934
 

Twins approx 1937

Twins approx 1940-41

Twins approx 1948-49

I have an account with Ancestry and so can double check years and dates, family connections and then I have been sending these out one by one to family.   I had thought that 12-15 per day would take me 2-3 years but I decided to speed things up a bit.     So long as they sort using my subject lines, then all photos will group together as an individual or family.

Paternal great uncles Bill and Fred

Its fascinating seeing Life in another place and time, from their births to their old age. Its been a quite cathartic experience and it sure puts what's important .... truly important into perspective.

Paternal great aunt Hilda 

I'm doing my best with each and every one I handle as now that my father has passed on,  I'm the eldest in our family and for some of these people, I'm the only one to have met them or know their names.  

Unknown family member... no one recorded his name on the back. 

I just didn't want them to remain nameless or end up in a garbage bin or second hand shop someday. That is so sad.  

Family weddings....

If you have old style paper photographs, even if you don't organize them, at least write names on the back so someone one day who does organize them has names to go with faces.  Its one of those jobs that everyone says they must do sometime but it never seems important until its too late.

and funerals

Trust me, we all become a line on a family tree someday and with the technology around now, you can add pictures, stories, and even video's.

Consider it a gift to the future family.....

new babies

I did manage to ever so slowly weave off the last portion of my recent  scarves and they are threatening us with some sunshine tomorrow so I hope to put Madge Mannequin outside for some beauty shots.

Meanwhile we had an overflow from our four year old dishwasher and so our four year old hard wood floor is being lifted in places and  replaced with new boards this weekend.   The offending dishwasher is still here and we are hand washing until we decide which route to take: repair or replace.  Hand washing is a very time consuming job.   :(

Then there have also been some mysterious plumbing 'issues' downstairs which has four plumbers scratching their heads while we search for solutions.  

Now you know why the Rabbit Hole has been so appealing....    next post, weaving.... promise!

Smiling Through The Tears

I recently received ten large boxes of family documents and photographs. I had volunteered to organize and eventually scan them into a digital format, and then share them with family.  I knew it was going to take some time but I had no idea of how many photographs there were! Turns out that there are all my parents pictures, my paternal grandparents, maternal grandparents and two aunts and their marriages. Also my Dad's entire Royal Navy career and tours of duty.  We are the 'end of the line' for so many family members.  Its all rather sobering....

I had some large brown envelopes on hand and simply started sorting pictures into family groups, countries, time periods.  In time I had a large box filled with paper and recyclables and another with plastics and garbage.... and have been down the proverbial "Rabbit Hole" for roughly two weeks working my way through the boxes and many albums. Its quite addictive! Besides getting the organization started, I wanted to reduce the sheer amount and bulk of the collection down to something more manageable size wise for storage.   You see, all those boxes are in my studio and I can't move in there!

Its coming along just fine. I have separated out all scenery and non-people shots and they will be stored and done at a later time. All negatives are securely stored; all documents together by family.  Its been reduced down to something I can at least move around now! You see, it all must stay accessible for some time and in my studio space until its all done and concluded. 

Sometime after Christmas I hope to get a new scanner and work out a real plan.  Right now I think scanning one family group at a time and then release them via the Cloud to family here and overseas as they are done so they have something to  view while I work on the next batch.   It will be a long slow process and I reckon two years? Maybe three years?  The documents will be invaluable when it comes to updating and building parts of the family trees on Ancestry!  Some scanners can take six minutes to do a full resolution scan.   The pictures below were scanned by my father...

Great Grandfather Edwin Barton

Great Aunt (no first name known) Miss Bowers

Great Grandfather Edwin Barton and his bride Elizabeth Bowers, 1906

One of their daughters, my grandmother Louisa Barton and my grandfather Reginald Waterfield.

1930.

Great great grandfather Alfred Barton, his son Edwin Barton, my grandmother Louisa and my father as a new born infant on her lap. 1930.

My paternal great grandfather Alfred Waterfield and his first wife Ellen Shaw. They had three young sons and one daughter. Ellen died in 1912.

Alfred remarried. My step great-grandmother Elizabeth Fryer.

Here is Elizabeth (Fryer) Waterfield holding me in 1956

My parents after their wedding ceremony in 1954.

Their first house in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1960. They arrived just as winter was starting. What a welcome to Canada!

The same house today taken from the internet.  My bedroom was the small window below the picture window in the basement. Yes, the house was tiny!

Dad and me in 1957 in the UK.  

Its all so bittersweet and I feel the real need to do this right now, so my looms are waiting for me.  So I have been spending time with my big family every afternoon lately. 

Knee Report:  I have been released from physiotherapy having reached the goals they set for me! I still must do my exercises daily otherwise the knee / leg stiffens up and my bend is reduced. I get swelling daily by mid afternoon.  Its normal and comes from being upright and using it.  Elevation and icing it is how I spend most evenings.   There is far less pain, no nerve pain jolts as nerves heal and fire up again. I take some pain meds still  and will for while yet according to my surgeon. I saw him last week for my 8 week check up and he told me that two months is considered *very* early in the recovery process.  Real improvement will come at six months to one full year.  My next visit with him is next September at one year post op.  

Speaking of one full year.... my new right hip is one year old this coming Friday December 4th!  It hasn't been an issue for me for at least half a year, but they say healing continues for a full year post surgery.  And what a year it has been!

Some fibre news to share:  I have been bombarded with emails from various yarn companies encouraging me to "buy, buy, buy" lately as I'm sure you have too. Today I finally broke down and went and took a look at one, Webs, to see what was truly on sale.  I was browsing and not really finding anything calling to me.  I have lots on hand and was about to close out the page when I spotted something new on their 8/2 tencel page..... new colours!!!

birch

hummingbird 

whipple blue

ecru

They are on the way to me.... of course......   my Christmas present to myself!   

If at First You Don't Succeed.....

We had a nasty rain and wind storm recently and the next morning as the sun broke through, this fine fellow came and sat on a branch near our house to fluff up and dry off.  Its a sharp shinned hawk and the first one that we have seen here. He stayed for over an hour warming up and having a major preening session.  I guess if we put up a bird feeder they would visit more often..... as it eats other small birds that eat seed off the ground.  Ah, we won't be doing that....

If we could roll the clock back a few weeks..... okay, a couple of months at least!  I had wound a fine linen warp of 40/2 of approx 10 yards in length. I was looking forward to weaving up some guest towels and enjoying that crisp look that comes with linen and hemstitching! This was the very start and a test bit to check the threading:

The sett was 36 epi and I had used this before with great success but this time it wasn't working so well for me. The warp threads were literally binding on each other.     Okay, so I resleyed to 32 epi, thinking the reduction of four warp ends would give them more elbow room.      Apparently not....

So a third sley and the sett is now 28 epi and now only some were grabbing each other where they were in the same dent and the tension was all screwy on the left hand side.  I also really didn't like the way the warp threads were bunching up  and producing very heavy reed marks.

So I sat and considered my investment of time and yarn:  its been threaded twice,  I fixed two threading errors, resleyed three times and its still not resolved.   I wanted to have this project on, woven up and off the loom before I  went for my surgery the end of September.  The goal was to be able to hand sew the hems while I recovered. I also wanted to get a new warp on the loom so it was all set and ready to weave when I was ready to get back in the game.

So out came the scissors....     Yup, all of it, in the garbage.    No regrets.

So I adjusted the project to work with 10/2 cotton and got busy winding a warp of natural colour mercerized cotton.  Bruce helped me wind on the eleven yards. This time everything went just right! There were no threading errors, no sleying errors, nice even warp tension and the 24 epi sett worked beautifully.

*Big sigh of relief!*

I wove my hem allowance, then hemstitched every four warp threads. Then I placed a thick cord and then started on the border.  I pulled out the slippery cord out and then hemstitched the top edge.    Complete the lace detail in the border and then hemstitch the top edge.   Place the cord again and weave the initial plain weave shots for the main portion of the towel. Pull the cord again and hemstitch the final edge using what ever colour of weft is being used for the towel.     {If you give this a try yourself, be sure to leave  five times the width of the project for the hemstitch yarn. }

Virginia West's classic book  "Finishing Touches for the Handweaver"     This book is a real treasure if you wish to have your work beautifully finished. It was a game changer for me when I got my copy nearly twenty years ago!

I had purchased some cones of yarn in a series of soft neutral colours in a fine bamboo (6300 yds/lb) and decided to use them as my weft. The Bambu 12 is soft, has a great sheen and and would give the towels a lovely hand. They would be naturally anti microbial and anti fungal which is a nice property to have in a small towels that might sit wet after hand washing.

I'm weaving an eight shaft huck lace that makes a repeating diamond pattern. Its something I had played around with in my Fiberworks program.  I planned to make half the towels with the diamond motif and the other half would have a design I'm calling lattice and flower. I played around with the treadling options to find a pleasing pattern.

I had a project plan guide beside me:  three inches for the hem, a total of eighteen inches for the main part of the towel (including the fancy border), then three inches for the back hem. The hems and border were done with white against the natural, with a colour for the main part of the lace.   I used white for the back hem as well and did full hemstitching where they changed.  {be sure to use seven times the width for this style}. See below and remember to click on the pictures to enlarge:

So that was five rows of hemstitching per towel and over a dozen towels that totals 60 rows altogether.   What the heck was I thinking??   Do a fast project and get it off the loom and reloaded before my surgery date???   I also had to warp up and load the Megado and then we decided to re-assemble the tapestry loom over leaving it as a pile of lumber on the floor.   Timing was going to be tight!

The tapestry loom was re-built, and the Megado loaded. That would be the first choice of loom to weave on thanks to the one treadle and light action so it made sense to get it done first.  After that, I worked away on the towels and got my speed in hemstitching up to new world record speeds!    It was tight for time but the warp came off and a new one went on the same day which also included being hoisted up on crates to change the tie up!

I measured and pressed the hems and pinned them .   It was a nice stack of hand work waiting for my return!   Then, I indulged in a studio cleanup too which I must admit felt real good. My creative work space was all set for when I would be ready.

Anaesthesia does funny things to your head. It makes you fuzzy minded and clumsy for a time. Its surprising how long it lasts in your system. Then there's the pain meds after surgery which add their own complexity to the mix.   I guess it was nearly 3 weeks after my surgery that I was interested enough to try sewing hems.  The cloth was quite fine so good light was necessary but I slowly inched my way across one hem after another.  

Last week I placed them into a gentle wash cycle  and once spun out, I trimmed off any tails and let them line dry over night.  Next morning I lowered the ironing board and pulled up a chair.  I steamed pressed them and I'm very happy with them!  I found only one that had a treadling error, which we politely call a second.

Its a tough time of year to photograph anything.... its so darn dark!  But with every light on in the house and using the 'brighten' function in my editing program I got some nice pictures.  There are six towels with the diamond pattern....

There are five towels with the lattice and flower pattern:

They measure thirteen inches wide by nineteen and a half inches in length. The colours are a soft butter yellow, green tea green, snowy white, a light beige called water chestnut,  and a blue green. The sheen from the bamboo is lovely and the fine cloth has a nice weight to it.   If we do get a bright sunny day, I might try re-photographing them, but this will have to do until then.

So this project was all woven before my surgery (on a wonky knee no less) and I'm happy to report that I have made a start on trying to weave again this past week at six weeks post operative!

I did do some work on the Megado, where I used mainly my right leg for 30-40 treadlings then I would do 10-15 with my left leg and so on. I took the next day off to see how it felt and it was fine.

So yesterday I sat down on my bench and tried two treadling repeats at my Spring loom:

In the case of this treadling plan there is an even division between left and right leg so they both got an equal workout. It didn't feel too bad at all!  I did only two repeats.  My physiotherapist has given me the go ahead to weave and called it a "great quad strengthening exercise" and asked if I had a spinning wheel too?   I said yes and she she told me it was okay to use it as well! 

I'm not 100 % as yet and still a lot of inner healing and more exercises to go, but I feel like I'm finally on the way back!