Curtain Fabric finished

 At last the curtain fabric is finished, hemmed and cut off the Megado. It is currently sitting in a pile on the dining room table so that I can (some time soon) inspect it for mistakes before washing it all. 

Apart from the tomato plants which seem to take up too much of my life, I have been thinking about the Megado and eventually decided that what was really bothering me was warping up. I am old and stiff these days. But if I could spend as much time as it takes to put on a ghost warp, a lot of problems would disappear. No more threading and sleying for as long as the ghost warp lasts. Sooooo. I will put on a straight draw on 16 shafts at 24 epi (for 8/2 cotton of which I have masses). It will be 30 inches wide and I have created several nice drafts already including a 4CDW. Length will be 2.5 metres. 

I am so taken with this idea that I will do the same on my 8 shaft Schacht. I will have to crawl under the loom to change the treadling but I can manage that. The Schacht will be devoted to tweed and things woolly.

And as Cally Booker said `you can always do double weave with a much thicker yarn`.

The Bracknell College has reopened to much joy and the Columbia Press has been repaired. It prints so much better than doing the printing by hand. I have corrected a lot of small errors, especially in the clouds and am printing in four colours!!! An edition of 12 has been printed and I must start on the next linocut (lobster pots).

Wildlife

 There is a lot of it about this year. Very noticeable. This means greenery and animals/birds. The local wood has had a superb show of wood anemone. I am told this is a sure sign of an ancient woodland. Well I had noticed the enormous oaks. After the anemones, came a carpet of celandines and now the place is a marvellous show of bluebells. They were nothing like so widespread last year. This year they are everywhere. Our house backs onto this little wood.

And the slightly further away is Wokefield Common which stretches for miles and miles. First the birches, followed by rowans (Hundreds of seedling rowans this year) and alders. No oaks yet and certainly no flowers at all!!

Now the wildlife which all happened in our garden yesterday, startling all of us, the dogs as well. We came out to walk the dogs at 6.45 am and Jerry stiffened and peered at our tiny front garden. Our collie was similarly anxious and came up to investigation. At which moment, something ran along the fence and disappear to a narrow slot by the house - but that is a dead end. So it must have turned back. It burst out of this slot and headed away from the house at very high speed. A Munkjack!

The second happening was in the back garden. It being a nice day we were drinking tea there when a sparrowhawk burst out of the sky, took a baby blackbird from its nest just over our fence in the neighbours garden. And departed. Oh dear. 

Both happenings were a first for us. I have noticed a lot more birds around the garden this year. Normally we have only robins and blackbirds. This year we have blackbirds, robins, sparrows, starlings, a thrush, magpies, rooks and tits of some kind nesting in our camellia (2 nests).

But of course there is also progress in doors on the Megado. Got to 3 metres now. Still on track to finish by the end of May. I am trying to decide what to put on next.

NO I AM NOT WINNING

Progress is being made on the Megado - but there was a very serious hiccup. Over last weekend, the lap top took to switching itself off - -  without any warning. But it could be turned on again and nothing had been lost. Until eventually, it refused to switch on. So I had to send for our on-call computer man who pronounced that it was overheating and if I changed to a Solid State hard drive and used a cooler, it would be okay. And so he cloned my hard drive (which means the old one is a backup.) and actually it does not get the least bit hot. which it did before, and now seems okay. Nevertheless, I am shutting everything down after an hour of use and after taking a note of where the pattern had got to. It does mean I have lost three days when I could have been weaving.

However I have woven two metres and calculations show that I do not have to order up more yarn from William Hall. So I am still on track to finish all 6 metres by the end of May.

Not done much else except watch a Zoom talk by Lester Capon, President of the Designer Bookbinders. His bindings are stupendous. I have not been so bowled over in a long time. I have four A5 textblocks all prepared for binding and the bindings cut out but they have just been discarded while I set out a new episode in my bookbinding. Mind you, he works in leather and I do not but I will do some trials with bookcloth. 

The last bit of news which is an annoying event is that I have to have a procedure next Sunday, sticking a camera down my throat without an anesthetic. Nasty but in a good cause. That is not the annoyance. That is that I must self isolation from now (Thursday) until Sunday afternoon. Not to see anyone, Not to leave the house. It sounds as if gardening is not allowed, nor dog walking. And all this despite having had two vaccinations. Bah.

A WINNING DAY

I expected trouble today - with computers. But it all worked out well!! Let me explain. Start with a Kindle/my Kindle. Bought many years ago, the battery just died 18 months ago and I could not summon up enough energy to do something/anything about it. Over the weekend I came across the carcass and decided I was well enough to cope. So I bought a new Kindle and it was delivered the next day, Sunday. Put it on to charge overnight and wondered if connecting to Wifi was going to work. So I set aside Monday morning to (hopefully) achieve the connexion. It all worked and I was connected in less than ten minutes! All is well. The books I used to have in my library are still there plus, to my astonishment, all Dorothy`s books. She says that what they do these days when people clearly live at the same address. I can see that might not always be acceptable. 

And now to the second adventure - the Megado. This has not been switched on for over a year. Last time I used it, I had terrible trouble with the software which sends commands to the Megado`s relays. I asked Marion Proctor, an expert weaver from our Guild, who I knew had the same equipment as I have. She said she had the same problems but tried a load of experiments and found what worked which is, have absolutely everything connected before switching power on the lap-top. So first thing, connect everything, second thing switch computer on and pray. Next thing, there it was demanding the entry password and in no time at all, I had a working system. Mind you, I then had to consult the desktop down stairs and the 3 metres I have already woven to make sure I get all the colours right. I am weaving lampas and need three colours, that is, three shuttles. two throws of brown, one throw of yellow and one throw of green or beige depending and repeat these four for ever. Being lampas which is really a form of double weave, weaving is a bit slow but I only have 6 yards to go!!! Anyway if I keep at it, I should be finished by the end of May. 

I managed 4 inches this morning which, given the fact I am cook this week, was quite good. The reason for wanting it finished is that I have a nice idea (four colour double weave) for a piece to be shown at the Guild exhibition in September. And for that I need to have the Megado clear by the beginning of June. As they say, watch this space.

Striped Fabic

I have finished the striped fabric which was on the Shacht. It is mended (odd ends to be disposed of) and washed. Not taken photos yet but will shortly. A long time ago (years and years) I asked Stacey Harvey-Brown what she did about photos of her weaving. Did she employ a professional? The answer was they were too expensive. They charged £600 to £800 a day and that would be much more today. Her advice was take  what has to be photographed outside on  a grey overcast (not too overcast)  day and look for a nice background. Well it is definitely a grey day so I will go outside and see what I can manage.

So I have taken loads of photos outdoors and the best four are shown below.

I like the last one best. I do agree that the top two show the fabric better. One thing that did shake me was the shrinkage. On-loom measurements were 0.59 by 4.10m which went to 0.48 by 3.72 m after washing. That is 15% in width and 10% in length.

I am having rest from weaving until next Tuesday when I will try to get the Megado to function after more than a year of neglect. I am tidying up everything.

PS I have a thing about warthogs which I saw wild in Africa and loved on sight. So I have two metal warthogs , Mummy and baby who is in the last photo.

Troubles with the website - or not

 A year ago I got a professional to create a website for me. I specified everything and wrote the text and she did everything else. The contents of the website are articles on various sorts of weaving and dyeing. She left me with instructions for editing the website. And then I became ill in February 2020 and stayed that way for some months.

Oe of the problems was that I am selling The Draughts of Jeremiah Fielding through the website (works beautifully) but because the postage varies madly round the world, I included a few sample costs of postage. Well some countries never change their postage costs and others work on a two-month cycle (USA for example). Now the costs of posting a copy of the book to the USA is 1.5 times the cost the book. And so I feel it is  essential to let potential buyers know what they are letting themselves in for. And this means changing the website text. Until November 2020, I got my grandson to do the editing but he now has a job and I feel quite quite well enough to tackle the job myself.

Besides the website has a section where a reader can download weaving files. This is my son-in-law`s fault. He discovered that I had created handouts, one for each weaving topic, for example woven shibori or lace for the Kennet Valley Guild weaving classes. And he asked what I was going to do with the handouts. He thought they should be freely available. So I promised that I would include them in the new website. But of course, each one had to be edited and brought up to date. Three different topics were put on at the beginning and I slowly edited the other three and have them ready for inclusion in the website. So there were two bits of editing. 

I started on Saturday morning by reading the editor manual. And by the end of the day I had the postage costs all sorted. One problem I had not envisaged was that I had to edit every single section of the website. Part of the slowness was Google which behaves rather oddly and in a way I did not expect. On Sunday, I set about adding the three new files and I happily succeeded with two but would the third one go in? No it would not. So I gave up and called in my grandson who was puzzled at first but after an hour, remembered that in html, you have to use the exact name of the files, and that means upper and lower case. Bingo. I needed a glass of madiera after that. 

I tidied up all the paperwork this morning, took `do the website` off my to-do list  and spent the day weaving peacefully on the Schacht. Done 3 metres, 1.5 metres to go.

Now I need to start on revising the dyeing handouts and  I was just wondering whether to include one on Japanese bookbinding. I wouldn't mind some feed-back on that.

Oelsner plus Daryl Lancaster

 I have warped five metres of fabric combining Daryl Lancaster and a weave from Oelsner (No 363)> Daryl made a waistcoat from some very brightly coloured Fabric and I was taken by the fabric. So I investigated my holdings of cotton in 8/2 and 12/2 and found I had a lot of small quantities. In fact as a resuk of preparing four equal warps, I acquired 18 empty white bobbins!!! and countless small quantities were used. The Oelsner draft is basically an 8 shaft undulating twill. And the sett was 24 epi. I used a reed of 12 slots per inch. Warping was terrible and I ended up with a lot of errors which took me two days to correct. 

And yesterday I started weaving.

And here is the first 0.25 metres. Definitely loud!

The garden is beginning to spring and there are lots of flowers on the camellias.

The lower one is in the front garden. Flowers are six inches in diameter.