Clean air and walking while the walking's good

Today's bouquet, more susans, daisies, zinnias 

That sounds like the cast of a southern novel.

Good time to walk to the pond, after a few days of not managing because of weather.

There were frogs leaping everywhere, and the hot, then wet, weather has brought on the invasive phragmites grass, ready to choke the waterway. See it there, advancing on the water?

And all the way home I could hear this Carolina wren shouting jerkee jerkee jerkee wheeee 

There were dragonflies, mostly darners, who stay dead still, posing, right up to when I lift my phone, then outta here, so you need to take my word for them.

Today's reading is 

I must say Max Daniels' readers have presented me with a variety of reading, all good. This one's a murder mystery, clean summer fun.

It's a Sydney, Oz, based narrator writing in first person about a Boston based cast of characters with an on-site adviser who becomes a character in the novel the Boston narrator character is writing on an  Australian literary scholarship. With me so far? Hang in.

Real locations, main characters meet in the reading room of the famous library, hear a scream, later established as a murder happening, and they form a detection gang. 

So far, so interesting. Definitely recommended as a layered work with sliding effects thrown in.

In other breaking news, I'm thinking of ditching the current Tunisian sock, which is developing into a scratchy fabric, but looking for other yarn to keep on with the concept.

It has to be easy care, for the recipients, so I may steal back some yarn from the weighted warp experiment, and substitute other yarn.

The weighted warp is still going to happen. I can't let Penelope down. Or the Scandinavian women who wove the linen sails for Viking ships this way. 

Thus enabling the men to invade my ancestral land, rape and pillage and generally act like really bad visitors, but nevermind.

Happy day everyone, live now not thousands of years ago.

Hot, but new ideas anyway

Today the cleaners came but it was too hot for me to go out, and I stayed home but out of their way. They're like a tornado, rapid movement in all directions, no chat, they know the house so well. In an hour and a half they were done, and the house is shining.

Meanwhile I finished that woven belt, with the slot to thread the end through and modeled it. 

And I'm planning on the next adventure. This was a good day to work indoors, and I'm going to try out a thing I've been interested in for ages and why not now.

It's a warp weighted loom. This is the way weaving was done before the horizontal loom was introduced. It's a vertical setup where the warp threads are hung with weights to create the tension.

Penelope wove on this loom when she was unweaving daily. The Bayeux Tapestry, actually an embroidery, was worked on fabric woven on the warp weighted loom.

I love simpler ancient techniques relying on a lot of common sense and ingenuity before engineers started complicating the issues in order to simplify the process for the worker.

Anyway here's what I'm thinking.

Here's my yarns, and I checked to make sure the yarns could be threaded on the heddle. I'm using the rigid heddle rather than the string heddles you see in the reenactment pictures.

I need a plan and this is the back of the envelope idea as of now, sketchy as you see.

Since I need to set it up vertically, i think I'll use this rod across the door of my supply closet.  First I'll remove the curtain, which is an Indonesian handwoven piece. Then I'll set the rod up firmly enough to withstand the weights.

I'll attach 120 warp threads 60 double lengths with larks head knots, to the rod, reaching the floor, thread them through the heddle,  then attach weights to bundles of the threads near the floor.  The weights will be the one pound soft weights from my leg weight set.

So far so good. I fact if it works, I'll just leave it in place as a new curtain across the doorway.   I'm studying a lot of videos to make sure I've got the gist before I get on. There's a heddle issue to figure out.

Meanwhile one of the friends who now has a piece of my art, this one an embroidery, sent me a picture of it in its new home. Her kitty Sesame helped, but Pumpernickel jumped out of frame at the last second.

And there's an updated bouquet 

Added to the usual suspects are baby's breath and dayflowers.

Happy day everyone, remember your yoga