Meet my shadow, Sloth...

...or honestly, perhaps...fatigue. 

I got home from work late yesterday afternoon, with the good intention of putting the little warp onto Millicent, but ended up couchpotato-ing through early evening, falling asleep on the couch early, waking up suddenly, and staggering down the hall to the bedroom, where I dropped back to sleep in less than a minute.  Lotsa work stress yesterday, including a fender-bender (or, more accurately put, a license plate-bender) caused by a distracted person driving rapidly in reverse down the up-ramp in the hospital parking garage, zooming around a blind corner and colliding with me (and then flooring the gas and driving away as fast as possible, leaving me behind with a squashed front license plate and a mouthful of un-uttered cuss words.  Happily I was not hurt.  And whoever it was, I saw by the great number of smashed places on his car, this was probably not the first time he had done something like this.

Fun news: I learned that Peter Dinklage, from Game of Thrones, is a Bennington College alumnus.  He's from the class of 1991, so I would not have encountered him while I was there, since I'm Bennington class of 1986.  Royalty recognizes royalty!

This weekend, though - in addition to us cleaning in preparation for my visiting mother-in-law and sister-in-law, I'm hoping to get the warp on the loom and at least threaded through the heddles and sleyed in the reed.  And it would be wonderful if I can also get the dobby chain prepared too - and then it's weaving time!!  My first sandpaper beam.  What I remember from weaving on Rosemary's dobby-run Schacht Baby Wolf twelve years ago, is that once everything is set up, the weaving goes madly fast.  It is a simple W-draft, and the treadling order (transposed into the order of the dobby bars) is also in the shape of a W.  The 'tie-up' is accomplished by adding a dobby peg in the hole on the dobby bar to correspond with each harness to be lifted.  I do anticipate some adjustments in the distance of the dobby chain cylinder from the dobby fingers, but there's usually a happy medium to that. 

I'm also having naughty thoughts about weaving true satin for the first time.  I certainly have enough harnesses to do so now - I could do a 5, 7, and 11-leaf satin.  I have the proper materials too, organzine and tram.  The only thing I wonder about is whether the sandpaper beam would degrade the fine silk thread, especially the glorious untwisted tram!!  I think I'll try it and then make adjustments as necessary, perhaps covering the sandpaper surface and tensioning the warp from the cloth storage beam in the back instead.  And since the untwisted tram is the glossier of the two kinds of thread, and is not really useable for warp, I'll do a weft satin.