Spa Weekend(2)

Lots of exercise and massage on Friday and Saturday. I attended a class on Zumba dance. I suspect this is an exercise artefact and not a true dance. Anyway after 15 minutes of leaping about the room, my knees started to protest so I chickened out. I've got quite enough wrong with me without my knees giving trouble so I abandoned the class. The other three survived to the end of the 45 minutes but came out saying they needed a long rest.

The party was in our room (Anne and mine) on Saturday evening.  Champagne this time! On Sunday morning I drove from Ashby dela Zouche to Newbury and joined the first Guild weaving class of 2013. Thanks to Bonnie Inouye, the tension problems on the Meyer loom were solved and one of the students wove on it during the whole class time without any problems. Everyone in the class was sorted and working away by the end of the class. One person has actually finished her samples and is getting on with the main body of her weaving.

After the class, I went to a service station and discussed with Linda Scurr what she wanted doing/would accept as a suitable draft for her woven handspun.  The problem is that, as I suspected, it needs to be set at 8epi and a float of any longer than 3 threads is too long so we are stuck with using nothing more complex than a twill variant. It turned out that Linda wanted a dogs-tooth weave anyway so we separated, all happy.  I have all the yarn she has spun and have to weigh it all, work out how many metres of yarn I have and then deal with the colour arrangement. I have 2 black skeins, 2 white skeins and lots of mottled/coloured skeins.

I have one or two little drafting jobs to do immediately but more important than anything, I need to finish a talk I am giving to the Guild next Saturday on Textile Techniques in the Far East. The problem is that I think I have put in far too much info and the audience will be bewildered. So my sister, Dorothy, is going to look at it and give her opinion.