Fun Katazome Saturday and Half-Threaded Heddles

Saturday I took CalTrain down to Mountain View and Tien picked me up at the station.  We spent the day with her and her friend Carrie doing katazome (Japanese-technique rice paste resist stencil dyeing).  I'd never done it before, not really, and not successfully, but it turned out to be a great success.  It was the best indigo vat I've ever set, and it worked beautifully.  We got lovely blues!

Sunday, I finally completed winding the last two bouts of silk warp for the Ocean-Born Mary scarves, and beamed them.  Yesterday I was dreading getting started with the threading of the heddles - there's always that slight discomfort I have with putting the lease sticks through the cross, but it worked nicely and went MUCH faster than I had expected.  In no time I was threading the heddles.  We're going out this evening, but it took me two hours to thread about half of the heddles - in sequence too; this is the first time I've threaded heddles in anything other than a straight draw, so it took more concentration, and a certain kind of concentration, than I have needed before.  It's limited to eight harnesses this time, leaving the other eight fallow, and it seeeeeeeeems to have come out all right so far, though I am dreading the possibility of threading errors.  The threading sequence is only 63 units long, so it's not so bad.  I definitely kind of got into a nice rhythm with it, breaking it down into mini-units of four threads each, which is the number of threads I have in each bunch in the portee cross.

So hopefully I'll be able to finish the threading between tonight and tomorrow night, and have enough woven by Saturday so that it will show well.