Back again

Haven't turned up here in ages! 


To catch up on why there have been no posts, I'll briefly summarize:


We were subject to one of San Francisco's infamous evictions.  Landlord needed to sell house, but didn't want us to move out at first, and tried unsuccessfully to sell house.  Endured almost a year of constant open houses, with strangers walking around the inside of our place with shoes on, opening drawers.  Our valuables we did remove and lock up, but it was weird to open my underwear drawer and see that someone had pawed through it and unfolded everything, and helped themselves to about half of my clean unmentionables.  And we had to sequester our cats every time there was an open house.  And, since we never knew whether we'd have to be out of the house suddenly, I became depressed and stopped weaving.  It just didn't feel like home anymore, and no way was I going to warp up the loom with some nice (expensive) yarn for projects I might not be able to complete.

That went on for about a year, until our landlord decided that he couldn't sell the house with occupants.  So we negotiated a time for us to move, requesting six months, and they allowed us four.


Moving itself was a task I don't even want to think about.  But the looms are safely in storage, and I've jettisoned something like 75% of my belongings.  I feel commensurately lighter.  Carlos, an angel, found us a place in no time, and so now, despite the fact that there is no room for the looms, and despite us being on the third floor of an apartment building (I don't know anyone who would want to live below a huge clankythumpy loom), I love our new place.


Friends have rushed to assist.  Tien has lent me an inkle loom and the fixings for tablet weaving; I bought a rigid heddle from Vavstuga; and Tien has also lent me a most precious Hansen E-Spinner for me to use.  I've been filling it with a soft Corriedale singles, intending to ply it into a lofty (hopefully) two-ply yarn for knitting.  I may dye some of it indigo blue.  I'm hoping it will become blue-and-white beanies!

Palimpsests of Dreams, and Scrubbing.

I woke up this morning when the alarm went off.  I had been dreaming that I was having a long conversation with an old man somewhere.  I can't remember anything of the dream conversation with the old man, except the emotional feeling-tone I woke up with, which was peaceful and optimistic.  I had the feeling I had known the old man somewhere and somewhen, and that he had either been my teacher or a male relative.  I seem to recall that he had been encouraging me about something.  Not sure what, but I'll remember to feel optimistic, and encouraged!


Saturday afternoon while Carlos was at rehearsal, I dived back into my indigo work and did the next step, which was to scrub all last weekend's indigo work in a strong soap solution and rinse and rinse until the water ran perfectly clear.  It took nine hot rinses and one cold one to really rinse the very dark skein of silk, and the result is a deep, deep navy blue but not the oversaturated blue-black that was showing; I knew that the soap wash and rinses would lighten it.  So I think that after the fermentation vat is ready, I will keep building up the very darkest blue-black on two of the skeins of the 30/2 silk I have been dyeing until I get the fabulously oversaturated shade again.  That's the color I want; it's the hardest color to get with indigo, but I've got a good start from the thiox vat, and the weaker fermentation vat will help build up the layers to make the legendary color.


Carlos and I went yesterday afternoon to the Castro Street Fair for a while.  It's nothing like it used to be - at least in the crafts department - there used to be so many real craftspeople, but mostly it was people selling cheap imported tchotchkes in their booths - they don't even make them themselves.  Used to be a few knitters, spinners, handweavers, potters, stained glass artists, leatherworkers, woodcarvers, and silversmiths.  The only person I saw who wasn't selling cheap knock-off 'crafts' that they hadn't made, but who instead was selling her own handmade things, was the lady making leather bags.  Beautiful work, but it made me sad to see how slim the pickings have become.


I remember when I applied to sell my handmade pottery at the CSF, back in the mid-1990's, and when the cost of renting booth-space became ridiculously expensive - thousands of dollars - and suddenly there were no craftspeople there anymore.  Like me, most artisans who used to be at the fair could no longer afford a booth.  I wonder what bright bulb came up with the idea of raising the cost of the booths to a level at which basically no one would pay it.

Ammoniac Blues

This past Saturday, I went on CalTrain down to see my friend Tien, and we spent the day dyeing fiber in her yard.  The hot South Bay sun made short work of drying our results, so I was able to bring perfectly dry skeins of yarn and a t-shirt with me on the train.


Nearly thirty years ago I started my first indigo fermentation vat.  I learned how to dye fiber blue with this old method from Cheryl Kolander of Aurora Silk in Portland, OR. 


I haven't been able to keep a fermentation vat for a few years because of lack of space and because of close by neighbors - the fermentation vat has a very distinctive smell to it - whose piquancy I have come to enjoy, over the years.  But not everyone is prepared for that smell.  Some people have told me that it smells like ammonia, which it does; others have described it as 'a fishing boat stranded in still waters on a hot day'.  Even in the England of Elizabeth I, a law was passed prohibiting any woad fermentation vats within a mile of any of Her Majesty's palaces.


There was one occasion on which I was shown an indigo vat that had been made with urine, and it was the only time I have smelled anything quite that horrible.  My fermentation vats do not contain any urine, so it doesn't smell that bad, though due to the chemistry of the process, all fermentation vats smell of ammonia.  But to me, the smell of the indigo fermentation vat is a heady, fecund, and promising perfume!


Since I don't have an active fermentation vat at the moment, my friend and I decided to do a thiox (thiorea dioxide) vat instead.  Fast to prepare and it only takes about an hour before it is ready for dyeing. 


First photo below is of the surface of the thiox vat after the indigo reduced.  You can see the bright, lovely blue of the 'ai no bana', the 'flower of indigo', on the surface, bubbling and oxidizing back to blue, and you can see the clear green of the reduced vat liquid below the surface. 

Life's Monkey Wrenches

So plans have altered radically.


Days before I was to receive the visiting 40-shaft AVL loom, our landlord contacted us to let us know that our building was being put on the market for sale.


Since at this point we don't know how quickly we might have to be out of there, I have had to decline the very fun offer to have the 40-shaft loom here.  There will be people tramping through the house for open houses, and so that will be too much risk with a very sophisticated and delicate loom that I don't own.  It's bad enough that people will be walking through our home with shoes on.


Stress has been very high, but we're trying to be positive.

Lull...

Dunno why, but I've been extra-tired for several weeks. 


Suddenly, this morning, I wake up feeling like a million bucks. 


I had also noticed that I had a slightly elevated body temp for about three weeks.  This morning my temp is normal, so I think that 'something' was going on with me for that time.


On Sunday, we had a wonderful time going over to Tiburon for a nice St. Valentine's Day lunch.  While we were there, we walked around Tiburon and I found a nice little spice shop selling bespoke spice preparations.  They also had the best saffron  I'd ever seen, so I bought a tiny precious amount of that as well as some of their other offerings.   Especially wonderful is their custom preparation called 'Dusk', which is touted as being wonderful for sprinkling on fruit.  That said, I cooked sliced Japanese yams last night, in ghee, and I used the 'Dusk' spice blend.  Wonderful, especially with cracked black pepper.


I also cooked using a French-style 'curry' spice known as Vadouvan, which I'd never used nor heard of before.  Very little heat in it, but a wonderfully cumin-y and fenugreek bouquet to it, and I used it with a vegetarian curry I made for a visiting friend yesterday, with cauliflower, fried tofu, and purple carrots.  Also wonderful. 


Our goat milk yoghurt has set up this morning, and is now in the fridge chilling.  I didn't taste it yet; should be interesting.  In any case, Carlos bought whole cow's milk yesterday, so I can use the other starter (I had set one aside to be used with goat's milk, keeping it apart from the starter used in regular cow's milk.). 


More warping to do.  One lonely little warp chain on in one section on the beam.  Four more to go!

Foot is Better! And Loom is Repaired!

I had something going on with my left heel last week- a combination of what felt like neuropathic sensations of electrical shocks emanating up my left leg from my heel, and just plain outright pain.  Bad pain.  Not kidney-stone bad, but enough to make me very grouchy for a couple of days.  Ibuprofen helped, but it was still hard to walk, so I put up my feet for Friday and Saturday and about half of Sunday, using ice and moist heat in alternating intervals.  It seems to have done the trick (add to that that I'm also avoiding the Bad Shoes with the Very Worn Soles). 


I had this a number of years ago and it came from wearing shoes with no cushioning in the heel part of the soles.  Once I got new shoes it went away gradually, but I also neglected to put my foot up and apply alternating ice and moist heat.  This time, I followed that regimen exactly, and it's almost totally better!  Walking with a fair amount of ease and balance today, with just a tiny kernel of intense pain. 


Also on Saturday, the package from AVL with the replacement pulley for the shaft-lifting treadle arrived.  It's so funny...it's solid while plastic, but exactly the same as the earlier wooden one.  Interesting to see how small the cylindrical bore is.   Yesterday afternoon, after my foot felt pretty good, I went back downstairs and put it back on the loom.  I also added wire ties to the axle in order to keep the pulley from playing up and down the axle as it had been before. 


It's working again.  I used the previous dobby chain that was still mounted in the mechanical dobby; it worked very well.  AND, without the odd play that the conical-ized bore had been causing with the old play is gone.  I hadn't realized how much of a difference it would make; now it's very smooth!


I also started winding bouts of cotton for the next project, which is something I'm calling a 'dôtaku-bag'.  More on that later!

The Pulley Cometh

Yay!  So AVL did have a replacement after all for the distressed wooden pulley on my 16-shaft AVL.


They make it from plastic now.  Hopefull it'll be here soon!  I'm going to keep the wooden one, in case I ever want to have another replacement turned out of wood.


I was looking at the diameter of the bore on the worn-out wooden one.  It'll be interesting to see how large the bore is on the plastic one, as the original bore on the wooden one just really isn't visible anymore.  The increasing cone-shape of the worn bore...when I look closely, I see that there is coning happening on the front side of the old wooden one, too, and they kind of meet in the middle; thus it's probably not really possible to know the exact original bore in relation to the size of the metal rod that functions as an axle. 


Also: to cut down on the movement of the pulley along the axle, I'm going to constrain the pulley with twist-ties.  I don't think all that play is necessary, and I don't think it'll be too rigid.  I wonder if originally this loom had some sort of constraining rings on the axles.


The long life of the old wooden pulley, now to be retired, is a testament of the quality of the materials used to build these looms.  I think that it's taken a very long time to develop the conical distortion of the original cylindrical bore, but once it started getting cone-shaped, it kind of accelerates the bore getting even more cone-shaped.  I've noticed that there was a direct correlation of how much wood powder I was finding on the floor below the pulley and how much the cone-shape was increasing.  As in: the more cone-shaped it gets, the more wood is removed via the ordinary motion of the shaft-lifting cable just doing its thing; the more wood is removed, the more cone-shaped it becomes, and the more cone-shaped it becomes, the more wood is removed.  So there's sort of a scary geometric progression.  Better minds than mine could explain it precisely, but let's just frame this by saying that it was really time to get the new pulley. 


I checked the other wooden pulley (again, original to this loom), the pulley in relay to the treadle that advances the dobby, and it is *not* developing a cone-shape in its cylindrical bore.  Pretty sure that it's because the amount of stress on that pulley is vastly less than the stress placed on the one that relays to the shaft lift.