Progress

Progress has been made on several fronts and backwards in one important topic.

Firstly the little wood next door to us has burst into spring with the best show of bluebells I have seen here and the anemones are doing their usual showing off. We walk the dogs there. The wood is a bit of an oddity because there are various entries from our estate but all of them hidden and no general access from any road and so very few people are ever there and a code of behaviour has been adopted. If you see someone else, you put your dog on a lead and retire into the bushes by 15/20 feet until the others have passed. But that rarely happens.

I have been bookbinding and have finished a rather nice notebook. I bought 6 text blocks before lockdown and intend to do one a week. I have stacks of endpapers and cloth prepared for use as book covers. This one, for my grand niece who is 12, is shown below.

and last  I have been weaving the space dyed silk warp. Very slow until I remembered that I had two ski shuttles. The problem with a boat shuttle is that I do not get much yarn on a bobbin and a stick shuttle is quite short so needs manoeuvring through the shed. But the ski shuttle works and has speeded things up no end.

I am not very keen on the idea of a jacket in this fabric but will reserve the final decision until it has been washed. It would make a lovely baby blanket and I do have a great grandchild due in August. But a silk baby blanket is not good for machine washing in very hot water. I have been considering whether overdying would be a good idea. Indigo? What other colour would work?

And the backwards project? We have terrible trouble with  internet on our desk tops. Not with ipads in the rest of the house but the computer room is a long way from the WIFI input with brick walls between. It is very difficult to watch an online class in daytime. I have tried all sorts of solutions and none of them are any good. I now know more about the WIFI signal than I did but it is not helping. I feel really upset about this. 15 years ago I owned a software firm and earnt money out of Fortran programs. Now, I am quite ignorant and it upsets me.

The Garden is flourishing

The garden has been transformed in the last fortnight. You would think it was summertime. And the greenhouse is full of little plants liking life very much. And needing watering every day. I must set up our summer irrigation system. Anyway - here are a few photos.

In order from the top
pink lily flowered tulip
our garden steps
abutilon
apple blossom
pulsatilla

And the auriculas are coming out as well.

I have decided to sign up for a photo critique. Ten photos have been despatched. I await with anxiety the comments. And I have done a lot of tidying up. The garden shed has been partially done. It needs a lot more attention than I bargained for. But the greenhouse has been tidied and the dirty pots nearly all washed ready for re-use.

APOLOGIES

Last week I was tidying up my hard drive and came across a nice draft blog about Corfe Castle. Never published so I pressed the Publish key and it went out - with that day`s date on it. The draft dated from our holiday last summer in Dorset and did not mean that we had taken a day out from imprisonment to drive to Dorset and back. But because it was dated last week, a lot of friends are very upset. I apologize and assure everyone that I have been at our house in Berkshire  for the last several weeks and look like being here for lots of weeks forward as well. The dogs are very fed up and I spend time throwing the ball for Jerry in the garden. He has learned how to bring the ball back so we both get a lot of exercise.

I have nearly finished warping up the space dyed warp. And I have finished the album which now contains my lino cuts.

But mostly we have been exercised by the poor Wifi signal we are getting at the moment.. It is sometimes so poor that it is non-existent. I have been reading up on the web how Wifi operates and am slowly improving our system. But I suspect that a lot of the problem is just local overload.

I think I shall go away and warp up some more. At least there is something to show at the end.

Another Project Finished

I have been making and album to put my linocuts in. Problems have stemmed from its size which is slightly bigger than A3 and that mean I had to create endpapers from scratch as standard paper is not big enough. Oh well I will know bigger next time.

The cover is done in a linen bookcloth (rather nice and I wish I had bought more of it) with a recessed area in which to insert the lino cut. Lots of empty pages left, by design and should see me out!!!

The other area I have worked on is the spaced dyed silk. Here it is just before threading up in a straight draw on 8 shafts.

More rainbow than I intended. In fact this is so unlike my original ideas that I think I will dye another warp to achieve it. Next time it will be space dyed wool dyed in acid dyes.


I came across a draft blog this morning dating from 2019 (August) at Corfe Castle and just pressed the Publish key. I have had someone point out that I ought not to be going to Corfe Castle at this time. Quite right and my fault for not reading the draft for a date. Anyway that blog  is now deleted and you can all be sure I have been safely in  this house in Burghfield Common for several weeks.

A Project finished

I set up a warp on the Meyer which was based on an 18th c draft altered by me. And it is finished. There never was much warp so, regarded as a scarf, it is rather short at about 1.20m. I like my scarves to be longer than 1.5m. Anyway the pattern is okay. I have tidied up and found more things to rearrange. But the next job, which will be lengthy, is to put the silk space dyed warp on the Schacht.  I am also getting on with book binding and have done a load of weeding this morning. My son-in-law says he has turned out their utility room and it did need it but I cannot imagine where he has put everything. I would have thought a trip to the tip was called for.

The only other thing of note is the tale of the abutilon. I like abutilons. I first saw them in full bloom in a Cotswold garden, about 15 ft high, pyramidal in shape and covered with lilac or white blooms about 3 inches across. I really fell for them and managed to lay my hand on some seed which turned into plants (too many) so all my Malvern friends had an abutilon in their garden. But they are short lived. Less than 10 years despite their size. When I moved to Reading five years ago. I got some more seedlings going but I promised Dorothy I would dig it up when 7 or 8 years old as she thought it would be a bit big for our garden. Last year, it got to 7 foot and had a few lilac flowers. Oh it flowers in May. Well first of all it has shot up over the last winter to 9 or 10 foot now. But what is more, it is flowering. Now!! and it is covered with flower buds. So I said to D that next year I would have it out and she said Oh no need for that, it seems to be getting along fine. Well I never!!!! Let us not argue!! I can look forward to a few years of abutilon pleasure.

Added later. I forgot. Last night (Friday) I watched the first of Covent Garden's free offerings to the public. Peter and the Wolf as a ballet. Done by the youngsters of the Covent Garden school. First rate!! It seems to be available for the next week. Next Friday they are doing Cosi Fan Tutte. I am looking forward to that. Lots of similar institutions are making similar offerings but none so good as Covent Gardens. 

Lots of Dyeing

Given that I am confined to the house, I have done a lot.

Firstly I have finished the deflected double weave from Melanie Venes. See photo below.

Secondly I have woven some of the 18th c draft. It is on 11 shafts and on a table loom with a repeat of 16 weft throws. That is a pest, asking for errors which I have got but nice all the same. Big problem is that I used a two colour warp and I get only one showing up nicely, depending on whether the weft is lighter or darker than the warp.

The biggest project has been space dyeing a silk warp. I wound a warp from each ball of a Debbie Bliss cream silk- ten warps in all. And decided to use Procion dyes not acid.  See photos.

First red was applied to 5 warps, then after an hour, blue was applied. The other five warps were dyed, blue first, then red. The dyes leaked from one place to another and the result is not the tidy dyeing sequence I had planned but I do have ten multicolored warps in toning colours. I shall put these on the Schacht as soon as they are completely dry. The green comes about because the silk is Cornish cream colored, that is, a lot of yellow in it.

We are surviving the lock down. We walk the dogs in the local woods at 0630 am.  and try to get another short walk in later in the day. We have a small wood beside our house and our own gate into it. It has been a sea of mud recently but we thought it might be okay after the last few days of sunshine. And it was. That will make life easier for us.

Battening Down the Hatches

We have been making sure we have all the materials we need to keep from going stir crazy in the next three or four months. Not so fussed about toilet rolls and hand sanitiser. My sister, Dorothy, gets supplies from a medical supplies (she was a GP all her working life) so  we have lots of the right stuff already. I found I was short of yeast though and went into Sainsbury to bu some. I was staggered to see that the many shelves normally full of flour held one pack only. Do not tell me the world is going to make its own bread. I do not believe you. I, on the other hand, have a bread maker and 90% of the bread we eat comes out of the bread maker. We both have a weakness for a certain sort of Sainsburys bread which they were well stocked with.

Everything I might have visited/attended in the next 3/4 months has been cancelled and refunds are following into my bank account. Oh well. The way things are going, there might be horrendous financial follow-ons after this is all over.

So what have we got planned. Dorothy plans to make some quilts which she has been brooding over. I have just finished warping up the Meyer with a pattern from Jeremiah Fielding`s book (only 'adjusted') and will probably start weaving today. The Megado needs a steady amount of attention and I aim to set about dyeing a whole load of silk. A month or so ago I wound all the silk (9 balls of Debbie Bliss silk) into 9 separate warps. Each will be dyed differently. And I hope for a jacket out of the fabric.

The original Jeremiah draft in its modern version is shown below along with my version of it.

Original Modern Draft

My draft (one unit)

Showing a few repeats