Finished and Washed

This strange object is the Small Newbury Coat. I dealt with all knots and ends last night and this morning I washed it in the bath. In the time-honoured fashion, I got in to trample on it and now have very clean feet. After getting out as much water as possible, I have wrapped it round the Foster Patent Drying Device. This is four stout lengths of 3 by 1 inch timber glued round three octagons of thick timber to form a wooden support hollow in the middle. Round this is wrapped a sandwich of large towels and the fabric. Tomorrow after 24 hours, I will unwrap it, discard the towels and put clean dry ones in and roll up from the other end. 24 hours after that it will be ready for pressing. It has shrunk more than I expected. It was 38 inches in the reed and 36 inches off the loom. It is now 31 inches. It has to be more than 30 inches so that's okay.

Enormous amounts of paperwork and tidying up happened this morning. I am having a discussion (euphemism for throwing chairs) with a credit card company. I have a PhD in Physics. I had to ask the man on the phone three times what he meant and even then I did not understand whether I owed him a lot of money or they owed me some money. So I gave in  and opted to go on-line. I do not owe anybody any money. So what was that all about? It certainly took up a lot of my time.

But mostly time was spent sorting out Convergence stuff, punching holes, filing it all away. I have done no textile work but I have thought about drafts. I was horrified to realise that my plans for using a draft based on Mackintosh chairs needed 2390 threads in the warp. So I need to think about that some more. Instead I am going to do the piece of hana-ori. I designed this in 2012 but ordered up some pale yellow 30/2 cotton which took nearly a year to come by which time I had moved on a bit. Time was spent this morning trying to find the yarn! Hana-ori = a thousand flowers or something like it and comes from Okinawa. I bought  a sample piece when I was there and what I am going to  do is a replica. Off to wind the warp. The draft is a point twill on 32 shafts and it may be 38 epi but it is only 12 inches wide.