That's how it feels this weekend -- like my engine is on and warming up for the semester. But before I meet my first class, the Emperor and I have to travel to Regional Huge City for a doctor's appointment. We will hopefully leave early enough tomorrow morning that we can do some quarterly shopping for stuff we can't get here at Smack In The Middle, and maybe even have a little fun. Tuesday is going to be all go-go-go.
The fight with the snow and ice continued for a good ten days. I didn't purchase a snow blower until the day after my last update, and as a result the snow got too stale and icy to use a blower on it so I had to move it around by hand with a shovel. I'm happy to say that my back, legs, and arms did not get sore with all of that work! I must be getting used to it, which is good. My wrists, however, did get tired and sore, so I haven't picked up much for knitting for nearly a week, nor have I worked with my loom, which I'll discuss in a minute.
The Emperor was interested in one of the snow blowers at Ace Hardware, and I'd picked out a model at our local small engine dealer. That meant that we had to go and study all the snow blowers before making the purchase, which is actually smart because it was going to cost about five hundred dollars before we were through, and that's a pretty big purchase for us. Anyway, we ended up buying the one I wanted; the Emperor was convinced with the simple statement, "The city bought a whole fleet of these for clearing the parks."
Of course, now that we have a good snow blower in the garage, with gas in it, the instructions absorbed, and ready to go, the weather has been frighteningly spring-like. If we don't get any more significant snow for the rest of the season, I'm going to laugh, and take the blame.
Despite my sore wrists, I've at least thought about the knitting. I renamed the Circular Pluff to "New Fallen Snow Cowl," because that's what it reminds me of, and I thought of a way to predict when to start the garter stitch to end it: weigh the remaining ball, and do some math. Duh. I took the cowl down to my husband's "office" where he volunteers, and used his postal scale to see how much yarn was left. I counted the number of rounds already made, and divided up the weight of yarn used to discover how much each round should weigh. Then, I divided the remaining yarn weight by that number, and voy-lah, I found that I should knit fourteen rounds of stockinette, four rounds of garter, and then do the bind-off, and should have a little bit left but not much. It's all pretty approximate, but I think it will work. I even ran the math backwards to check my calculation, and it seemed to work.
The loom? you ask. Yes, this year for Christmas the Emperor showered me with gifts. I think he was trying to make up for two birthdays, two anniversaries, and a slightly lean Christmas last year. Anyway, I gracefully received the complete first two seasons of Miss Fisher's Mysteries on DVD, the lovely boxed set of Weldon's Practical Needlework, and a Schacht 15" Cricket Loom. The loom arrived after we returned from 'Way Out West, and the next morning we got out the tools and put it together. I dug around in the stash and found a big skein of something expendable to experiment with.
My weaving friends, most of whom have large multi-harness floor looms, have mythologized the process of warping a loom to the point that it sounded like a frightening process. I've seen the warping boards; I've heard the stories. The Cricket loom comes with brief but useful instructions for warping, and you get the equipment you need. Basically, you do a "direct warp", which wraps one end of your ends onto the apron rod, and you measure out your warp across a pre-determined distance to a single peg fastened to a table or other stable surface. Then, you go through a fascinating process to divide your warps in the reed, and tie off the ends. No, I didn't take pictures. I wanted to work through the process once with nothing at stake except the yarn I was using, and it worked. Next time I put on a warp, I'll photograph the process.
I learned a lot during this first warp:
1. Warp should be a strong yarn that isn't squooshy, stretchy, or fuzzy, at least for the first several projects you try to make. Once you've gotten some loom time under your belt, you can branch out to more interesting warps, like that fun one you saw on Pinterest that used spaced-out railroad yarns.
2. You should figure out how long your finished product needs to be, add about a foot on each end, and then find a way to put your warping peg that far away. That's the key to having enough warp to do what you have planned. If you think far enough ahead, you can warp your loom with long enough ends to make more than one woven piece. This could be important if you want to make something in a set, like placemats.
3. You need to roll some kind of paper with your warp when you wind it on the beam. A strong paper that is significantly wider than your warp will work best. It will tweak and try to wind on crookedly. Fight this tendency. The paper is to keep your warps in place, and if you've used a wool yarn for them, it will keep them from felting together as you move the strands into play.
4. Those strips of stiff paper you saw used in tapestry weaving and on Navajo looms? If you want to have a straight end on your woven product, use them on your Cricket loom and add a couple of inches to the warp ahead of time to account for them. Experiment to find the right weight of cardboard/heavy paper/card stock to work with your loom.
Let me explain that last lesson learned. Using the instructions as a guide, I started weaving a little bit. They advise you to do a couple of passes with a waste yarn to evenly space your warps, then start your actual yarn. My warp yarn is slightly fuzzy, so while the first passes evened out the spacing on the warps, I couldn't get them to be straight and perpendicular to the sides, and the actual weaving was similarly crooked. After about an inch of weaving, I decided to take out what I'd done and start again, this time with the two strips of stiffish paper in the warps to create a straight base for the weaving, as I'd seen used in tapestry and Navajo weaving.
This is when I went out to deal with the ice, got the sore wrists, and had a relapse of my cold. I was so miserable that I just retired to my chair, put on a blanket, and drank tea for nearly a week. I let the Emperor do the cooking and dishwashing. I did work on my syllabi for next semester, and that's the only reason I'm not in panic mode today, although I do need to get to my office this afternoon. I use Blackboard websites to disseminate my syllabi instead of printing them out and distributing them to classes, and if I display about two hours of energy and discipline and get everything ready to go for Tuesday morning (when the sites go live) I can think of other stuff for the rest of the day and even the week. That's the joy of teaching two courses regularly, every semester -- you can tweak them and improve them, but the majority of the work is already done. The trick is to tweak during the semester as you go along, and make changes as you discover something can be improved. Otherwise, current events tend to crowd these serendipities out and you find yourself asking, "what was it I wanted to fix in this lesson?"
Oh! There's the Emperor, announcing breakfast. As my dad says, "I'm off to the races like a herd of turtles!"
I wrote most of this post a week ago, and allowed it to sit in the "draft" section of the blog until I had time to take some accompanying photographs. Thus, one might say that the engine has warmed up and the train has left the station. We made the aforementioned trip, I got some shopping done, and I was reasonably prepared for the first week of school. I also have had the chance for two good weaving sessions, and have made several inches of fabric, which you can see here.
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