A little spinning, a little weaving

OK, I finally got to the wheel last night and spun up the North Country Cheviot - a nice, crisp & even skein of 52 yards. No photo yet, the skein is still drying.

I have two more breeds carded & ready to spin and I think I'll try to do a session with the drum carder on Saturday to get more samples carded. I've had trouble with my right wrist since the winter and I think I could get more carding done comfortably with the drum carder.

I'll choose something for spindle spinning at concerts - I'm working two great concerts this weekend, The Hot Seats Friday night in Winchester and Rumisonko Saturday night in Warrenton - check the Bluemont website for details if you are nearby.

The humid weather has broken again and it was lovely this morning, so I took advantage of the pleasant weather to work in my wee studio. I beamed the warp for summer & winter samples - these are for the Weaving Study Buddies group and the samples are due to be mailed by July 31st. It took me a long time to decide what I would weave and now I can't wait to see how the pattern works up.


Here is the warp all tidied up and ready to start threading the heddles.

I also wove a little more on the linked birdseye towels, enough to cut off & cut up as samples to send my 18th c. Linens class from MAFA, as promised. I discovered some threading errors at the class, and in the quiet of my own studio I had another look and realized that I would have to rethread 3/4 of the warp to correct the errors, so I went ahead and put the lease sticks back in, cut off and tied off the correct section and tied off the rest in inch bunches, ready for threading.


Here you can see the small piece of finished cloth and the loom ready to rethread - the small area of threaded heddles to the right and all the empty heddles waiting in place.

When I find a problem in my work, I've found that it is a good idea to give myself some time to think about possible solutions. It's always good to sleep on a problem, if you have the time and let the ideas percolate. But once I've made a decision about how to proceed, I really like to get the project to a stage where it is ready to make new progress - to rip back my knitting to before the error, or in this case, to cut off the warp and prepare it for re-threading.

Then I feel that the work is ready to begin again when I find I have time to come back. It's so easy to put obstacles between ourselves and our creative work, so when the solution to a problem is clear, it feels good to take action and leave things ready for action.