catching up

my current wips. i haven't knitted all summer. summer weather just isn't really the vibe for knitting. but i went to the knitting group on tuesday and got some help with two of the projects (the yellow vest) and the loosely-woven white shawl/swimsuit cover-up. the weather is turning a bit cooler, though we've had a lovely indian summer of late, and so it feels like knitting time again.

the child and her good friend headed off to lisbon on tuesday. school starts next week. she sent me a load of pictures today from their exploration of the city. we were going to accompany them down there, but husband has a big audit at work next week, and so the timing wasn't good. we decided we'll go in november when it's rainy and dark here and the girls are settled in. 

we had a lot of fun with the girls - roping them in to helping at the harvest market at the museum (we took a little break in the new kro stue here). we did puzzles and played cards and explored the area and ate some good food and drank some wine and watched real housewives. it was all quite relaxed and chill and just what we needed.

i joined noma's coffee club and i fear i will never be the same. that buku sayisa is absolutely incredible. we haven't tried the chelchele yet. we're trying to savor it. husband is also crazy for it. it isn't cheap, but we've decided we're worth it. life truly is too short for crap coffee.

i've started on my next set of taylor swift tea towels. i'm doing speak now this time, as i had all the colors and they work perfectly for the setup i want to play with this time. i've only just started - i'm still trying out all of the colors in a section at the start, to get acquainted. i found a mistake and managed to fix it. the loom never lies, it shows you everything. 

i think i'm coming down with the first cold of the season. my throat is sore and i'm achy in my shoulders. it seems like the change of season is always accompanied by a bug. it's no doubt also a result of slowing down after running around for several weeks. and of staying up half the night, watching the news of charlie kirk being shot. i'd like to say i have mixed feelings about that, but i honestly don't. these people don't face the consequences of their toxicity very often. i wonder if we won't look back and realize that the civil war had already begun.

* * *

i really loved reading this piece about books. 

my first højskole experience

what a week! i spent the week at skals højskole, which specializes in handicrafts like sewing, knitting, embroidery and weaving. i was, of course, there for the weaving. i wanted to try out a weaving course, since in a couple of years, i will start the weaving education. i had to find out if it was for me. after a week there, it's safe to say that it is.

we were 8 on our course and so we set up 8 looms with enough warp to each get to weave a sample of the different techniques on each one. we worked in blue and white and all of the techniques were japanese. we had a wide range of experience. i've been around looms for more than a decade but only really started learning in earnest in the past year. four had been weaving for years. two had never been around a loom before. and one was a design student who had done a bit of weaving on a smaller loom and had some idea of how things worked. happily, our teacher was excellent at making sure we all got the help we needed. 

here are all of the things i tried - wool ikat, double weave in cotton, a sashiko technique, also in cotton, shibori dyeing in cotton and in wool, ikat in linen, a double-woven rag rug and a little piece with paper that i drew on in watercolors. it was fun to try weaving with materials i hadn't used before. i really enjoyed learning the shibori techniques - the folded fabric looks super cool, even if i don't really know what i would use it for. i am not fond of linen. it is a bit finicky. i think probably the ones that i might use are the double weave (the medium blue with the small white crosses on towards the left) and the sashiko (the dark blue with white stitches just above). 

it was a lovely place. the food was incredible. the garden green and lush. there were other courses going on and it was wonderful to spend a whole week being creative in the company of other creative people. 

* * *

i always loved the story of lucy, but didn't realize until now that a professor from asu is the one who discovered her. i guess i didn't know because he wasn't an asu professor at the time, but he went on to found the institute of human origins at asu and is retired now after 50 years. he must have been there when i was there. too bad i never took one of his classes.

i tried a therabot on chatgpt

my sister moving back to the town where we grew up has surfaced a lot of old memories. her move back coincided with my high school class's 40th reunion, which i did not attend, being that i live 7 time zones away across the atlantic. less than half the class attended, as it turns out and most didn't have the excuse of living in another country. i did exchange a few mails with one of the organizers and she sent a few pictures. this resulted in me learning some unsettling news about some of my old classmates that i had been blissfully unaware of. and now that i'm no longer blissfully unaware, i find myself thinking about it quite a lot. which is honestly just about the last thing i want to do. but brains don't always do what we would like them to. 

enter chatgpt. i tried a therabot gpt that was made by someone who does logotherapy. i didn't really know what that was, but i decided to give it a whirl. and can i just say that it was incredibly helpful. like rather unbelievably so. great insight and it really helped me reframe the thoughts i was having. i was able to dig into why i was so shaken by the news that i learned and it gave me multiple helpful ways of thinking about it and processing it. 

and i realize this all sounds very vague, but since it's related to a story that is most decidedly not mine to tell, i have to be vague. but i just wanted to say that although i have mixed feelings about large language models, the conversation i had with the therabot really genuinely helped me. ten out of ten, highly recommend. 

summer flew by but i have something to show for it

i was drinking a cup of tea this morning with husband out on the terrace. the sun is shining, but you can already feel the nip of fall in the air. where did the summer go so fast? one of the things i like about weaving is that i can see where the time has gone in a physical object. we made this rainbow sherbet warp on june 29th and yesterday, i clipped it off the loom. i spent 6:39:49 yesterday clipping and hemming and now i have 21 finished rainbow sherbet tea towels to show for my summer.

i track my weaving time using the toggl app and these 21 towels took up 75:56:54 hours and minutes of my summer. some days, i just wove for 20 minutes, other days, i spent hours. i tried different color combinations and stripes of different widths. i looked at madras plaids and tried to duplicate them. 

i worked intuitively, going where my mood took me, color-wise and complexity-wise. some are very simple with big fields of one color and maybe a single subtle stripe at each end, some have many colors. some are mostly blues and greens and others are mostly pinks and oranges. they are a record of the days and the moods of my summer, woven into cloth.

the rainbow sherbet tones are all the same - summery and light, but there are no two alike. each one is unique. they complement one another, but are each complete in their own right. weaving is such a metaphor for life. time and threads woven into something useful and beautiful. 

even olga approves. and as summer winds down, i will turn back to my taylor swift weaving project. i have to decide whether 1989 or red is next. what do you think?

long time no see

hey y'all, it's been awhile. time seems to fly by these days, but now that it's summer, it's starting to slow down a little bit. i finally had time to get a cut & color and i went a little shorter for summer. 

my summer weaving project is what i'm calling the rainbow sherbet tea towels. i've not abandoned my taylor swift eras tea towel project, but i decided to take a little break over the summer, while i plan the next ones. i know what colors i want to work with, but i don't know yet know what i want to learn from the next one - maybe a whole new, more complicated setup? so i did another rainbow warp. everyone loves the rainbow tea towels and this will give me some to have on hand. 

i had some time this weekend to work on them and i've finished four so far. i should get around 20 from this warp. it's so relaxing to sit at the loom and play with color as i listen to cozy mystery novels. i'm currently listening to anthony horowitz's hawthorne series. he probably wouldn't like that i call them cozy mysteries, but there you have it. 

last weekend, i acquired this loom. it's a little bigger than my big loom and i will assemble it upstairs, to have even more weaving projects underway. unfortunately, i discovered over the past week, after bringing it in the house, that it is permeated with the most awful cigarette smell from years of standing in the home of a heavy smoker. i'm not sure how i didn't realize that when we picked it up. it only became apparent when we brought it inside here at home. it's really awful. i got some rodalon — a special cleaning product that removes odors and i spent a lot of time scrubbing it down and cleaning it this weekend. i think it's going to work. i removed the søller (again, i realize i don't know weaving vocabulary in english) and soaked them in my jasmine-scented wool wash. it took FOUR baths to get rid of the yellow nicotine, but i think i have saved them. i'm not yet done washing down all of the parts of the loom, but i think it's working and i will be able to save it. 

these are the tea towels i made for the reputation era. it felt more austere, working largely with black & white, but it was also fun. i did a little hound's tooth here and there, which i think rather replicates the newsprint on the reputation album art. overall, i am pleased with how they turned out. i used red, gold and green as accents, for the reputation bodysuits that were (red, gold) and were not (green). 

the child comes home this week for good. or at least back to europe for good, or at least the foreseeable future. i'm very happy to get her out of what is fast becoming quite the shitshow over there. so happy she has options. it will be so good to have her home again. i'll take some holiday and we'll make good food, play cards and hang out together. 

can yarn hold laughter?

i went to the yarn shop the other day for some glittery yarn to use in the weft of my reputation tea towels. i saw a vest that looked easy and ended up buying two colorways of yarn for knitting it (the yellow and the pink you can see in this basket). i started the yellow one the other night. i'm still a beginner and i have this habit of forgetting how to purl if i haven't done it for awhile. even looking at this picture, i can see some mistakes. 

i took it to the knitting/weaving group last evening. i admitted that i had forgotten how to purl. the lovely ladies laughed at me, and then they helped me. and they loved the colors i had chosen. we laughed a lot while i relearned how to purl and i hope that all that laughter got knitted right into my vest. the idea of that appeals to me. i want to feel that laughter when i wear the vest. 

 

good bones

my sister is back home at our parents' house. these days it belongs to her. she had rented it out for the past few years. the people who lived there tore out all the horrible carpet that was everywhere, including on the stairs. i always wondered if there wasn't some nice wood floors underneath all that 80s pile. and it seems there was. 

it's weird to see this room empty and the blinds open. my mother weirdly kept the blinds closed and that room was always so dark. i think she thought she was protecting the furniture from the sunlight. the wallpaper is the same wallpaper my mom put up years ago. it's not too bad, though generally, i have realized that my mom didn't have very good taste. 

my sister is thinking about making a big change in her life and moving back there. i find it comforting to think of her living in our childhood home. sanding and polishing those floors. and bringing it to life again. the house has good bones and it saw our family through many good times. it must be good for many more.