Puzzles, old friend and another puzzle

 Today I had finished the truck o' flowers puzzle, very nice, handling color in bleak weather.

Found that the one piece I was sure was right was all that was holding up the show at the bottom there. Once I finally moved it along a place, everything worked.  There's a sermon there, folks.

Anyway I thought I'd get to the library and return it then borrow another before the forecast storms arrived.

After lunch, maybe. Then I noticed that the storm was about to start, oh. And a great happy surprise, a friend from down the street I haven't seen other than brief chats in the street since before the pandemic, showed up to visit with her little curly dog. 

She's been struggling with her health for ages, and I was impressed she made it down the block. Her dog went mad with joy at the reunion.

So we had a marvelous time getting caught up with the births, marriages, engagements, deaths, mostly deaths, sigh. Also the fake billing by the fence company - she too got a bill for $1000 for work her husband and son did. 

And other exciting news. We used to have an imaginary newsletter we wrote, called H----(development name) Happenings, in which we'd pretend to put all the gossip and running jokes. So we did the latest update!  Such a good time.  

I was glad I hadn't gone out, in the end It was hard to see her looking so frail and lame, trying to navigate the conversation,  struggling with a cane to climb the one step from the living room up to the front door, needing help opening it and getting safely on the path. 

She was so athletic years back, great golfer, gardener, did all her own home tasks, rewired the house, cleaned the chimney, nothing beyond her. 

She grew up on a farm where you did your own maintenance. She installed my dishwasher when the installers failed me. Taught herself to knit and sew, no stopping her. So the contrast is hard to see.

I offered to walk home with her, but she wanted to do it herself so I didn't push. Her husband's working at home today, so he'd probably help at her front door.

This is a friend nearly twenty years younger than I, not as lucky though. But she really enjoyed her visit and looked better going home than when she arrived, always a good thing.

So I finally attended to the puzzle, thinking I'd like to see the second side, this being a two sided puzzle. I managed to get some of it turned over, as you see

So I may as well work the second side, since it's already half done. Speed puzzling.

Speaking of which, the weather here is desperate. Sheets of icy rain, wind, grey and wet. Good for staying in and, in case you need a word puzzle to help with January, here's one.

Happy evening everyone, may all your life puzzles be speedily dispatched.

Textiles, tea and tuk-tuks

Today's Textiles and Tea featured Walter Turpening, originally a researcher in the oil industry, who moved into textiles later in life and now creates ergonomically designed seats with woven covers.

Largely for weavers, with a sliding mechanism to avoid leaning, and for knitters, they're designed using beautiful woods,  to the individual measurements of the user. He teaches the seat weaving, using cotton threads and braiding which he dyes.

 

Here's his book

Here's a braiding machine processing thread into braid, kumihimo style. I've done a hand version of kumihimo braiding, with modest (!) results.

This was a niche installment of the series, very useful to weavers using floor looms, and knitters..

And here's what I stumbled on in my mailbox earlier today

Tuk-tuks, originally rickshaws pulled by a person, 

later adapted to a bicycle, easier for the puller, then motor bike, and finally motorbike enclosed in the chassis, out of the sun, probably best of all.

What's interesting about them, too, are the designs, all kinds of images, often carefully painted to avoid religious taboos about representing people and various animals. 

The colors are brilliant, good in the tropical light where they operate.

And despite seeing statements that the drivers do their own artwork, maybe some are also artists, but it's a professional industry, as you see.

Colorful rush hour!

Happy evening everyone, enjoy the rest of your day

Monday, Monday, rain, quiet

 A peaceful day today. Rain all day. I did get to the store for urgent nonfood supplies I can't get from Misfits, dang it. 

I've lost track of how long it's been since I shopped in person. And they had plenty of eggs, got my usual brand, less than $5, not so bad. The most expensive, free range ones were about $7. A bit more than I spend on eggs, but not outrageous.

Home again by 10, before the rain got heavier.

And after it was just jigsaw, really liking fitting the flowers in

and reading Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence, what a ghastly woman Jane is, and how she makes her vicar husband's life harder. And the inappropriate questions she fires at Prudence.. and how devious Jessie is, but how hugely entertaining the whole cast is.

Bit of knitting, bit of resting, figuring out what to cook for supper, Misfits box not due till Thursday, when I'll have sn embarrassment of edible riches.

I was at a meeting of my nonprofit once, when one of the professional staff used that expression, without the edible bit, and a board member burst out "there's nothing to be embarrassed about! We're doing well!" Evidently unfamiliar with the expression. Oh well. 

Nobody was prepared to explain, though it was stunning that someone with an Ivy league degree didn't get it. And a lot of other things, too  Looking back, probably a legacy admission from a big donor family.  I know a lot more now about that family  than I did then, when I was a bit more naive. Moving right along..

So, on to food and one of my favorite kinds of meals, the kind you pick up and eat.

Pita bread filled with onions, mushrooms, potatoes, spinach. Everything that's lying around.

Enough for two more meals, bringing me to Thursday and Misfits delivery. Yogurt and blueberries for dessert.

All's very well around here, and I hope with you, too. Happy evening everyone! 

 

Happy Lunar New Year

It's the year of the rabbit, unless you're Vietnamese, then it's the year of the cat. For the Chinese, that figure in the moon is a rabbit. This year earth tiger, my birth sign, has given way to water rabbit, all about peace and prosperity. Sounds good.

Either way, cat or rabbit, good health, long life and good partying! Along with the many East Asian countries who celebrate.

Back home, I finished the pink mix gloves 

and did a bit more spinning. I decided that to satisfy my need to spin and to knit, I'd include the silk mix thread I've spun into the next gloves with some other yarn I found in the box under the roving. Blurry picture of same, dark rainy day.

It's a single, that's a single thread, not plied, so it works. I have no idea how much I need to spin, so I'll do it the way I did the vest of many colors. Just stop when I run out and spin a new supply! 

Serious spinners will be shocked that I've skipped the washing and weighting and drying and all the other approved steps before using the yarn. I did all that when I learned to spin, and when I was dyeing my yarn. 

But when the roving's already dyed, I don't see a downside up to now to skipping. I just knit sometimes right off the spindle. Gives a new meaning to just-in-time manufacturing.

About the terminology in this blog when I talk textiles. This is probably the downside to combining the two blogs, the art blog with this one. There the audience could be assumed to be was mostly familiar with the language if various arts, all of which are just everyday speech to me. In the combined blog perhaps not so much 

However I can't guess which terms are unfamiliar to readers. So I rely on you to alert me if you want an explainer, and I'll do my best. 

Just specify which words are obscure. I do try to guess, and often insert an explanatory phrase, but I'm open to hearing specific questions. 

Speaking of specific, the puzzle with all the ells is:

ILLEGALLY!  So you can now unfurrow your brow, very annoying when you've been assuming any puzzle answer is probably a noun. I did at first.

Happy evening everyone!  Celebrate if it's the start of your New Year and good health to all of us!

More textile arts and the New Misfits

 Yesterday's request about seeing a piece on the saw blade triggered a search in my still open art blog, Art The Beautiful Metaphor, and yielded this.

You can see the wires going around the teeth of the blade. This is the piece you saw finished yesterday, in progress.

And I neglected a couple of notes yesterday

On the left there is a box of cards I made for card weaving. I can't lay hands on a sample, so I probably gave them away. 

Card weaving involves passing four threads through cards, one through a hole in each corner,  in various configurations, then weaving snd turning some or all the cards to create designs, passing a weft thread after each turn. It gives the same range as four harnesses on a floor loom, I'm told. 

I made my own cards, though you can buy them. It's an ancient weaving art, stone cards found in old excavations, many hundreds of years old.

That dark grey piece of cardboard behind there is a bead weaving loom on which I made quite a bit of jewelry , and items like the seed bead decoration on the binding of this artist book I made from red onion paper. 

No, the onion smell doesn't linger long.

The other chunk of cardboard I used to weave these pieces

View of the cliffs at Saltburn, Yorkshire, looking from the beach.

And this more abstract Earth and Sky piece. Mostly I used my homespun yarn, which I'd processed from a raw whole fleece, dyed, combed, carded and spun, wonderful summer long adventure.

I don't use patterns or guidelines for weaving. It's like painting alla prima -- just plunge in, it will tell you how to go. Jump, and the net will appear!

Story of my life, come to think of it!

Last evening I spun more,  and wound off my output into a center pull ball, well more of a sausage, really, on the dibber repurposed as a nostepinne, sent me by Joanne, thank you.. 

That's a tool for winding center pull yarn balls in more skilled hands than mine. But it was the first time of trying.

And I realized ohemgee I have no banana bread. So I remedied that this afternoon, after the first walk since Virus Strike. It was lovely to be out smelling cold air, seeing flocks of mourning doves, currently populous, snd skeins of Canada geese shouting overhead pretending to migrate.

Then home to bake

Banana, cranberry, walnut bread. Minus the melted butter which I forgot and found later in the microwave. More famous cooks than I admit to doing this, too, including Melissa Clark. This makes me feel better.

Made my first order from Misfits since they changed. So excited about no minimum on cold pack items. After I splurged on chicken! Fish! Shrimp! Butter! I probably exceeded the minimum anyway. But I didn't have to over order. They had no eggs.  Let's hope delivery is good next Thursday. 

Happy evening everyone! Don't worry if you forget to add the butter of life, or the eggs are no-shows, all will still be well.

Spinning, weaving, resting

I never made it to my knitting group today.  Tired after a busy week, I was in the mood to spin a bit. Then I thought I'd rest a few minutes before going out to my group. Woke at four pm. Half an hour after the group ends.

Anyway here's what's up

A spindle sticking up from an assortment of roving, that's the fluff you spin. It's a mixture of fibers including silk. 

You haven't seen me plying the spindle for a while because my shoulder was not happy for a couple of months and the actions of spindle spinning need a shoulder that works. But it's better now so I'm doing a bit.

I was reminded of this by a passage in Golden Fleece where she discusses spinning and her mother's expertise. 

She mentions the spindle but learns on her mother's wheel. And she and her editor both missed a flub: you usually spin singles z twist, clockwise. Then ply s twist, counterclockwise. She gets the names reversed, oops.

Anyway I've been wanting to spin a bit, but one thing and another, and this spindle among the roving is my highest tech one: 3D printed. It's a good spinner, light but balanced.

Here are my others. Some spinners have tons of these, but my collection is modest.

Left to right, three sizes of Schacht spindles. I usually use the big one for plying. 

The ones with points at both ends are beautiful handmade supported spindles I have yet to learn, my shoulder having intervened. 

You rest one point in a dish, spin off the other tip. This is good for very fine fiber, maybe silk.  And it's a whole new skill. The button and the metal thing are my versions of dizzes, used to draw roving through to smooth out and draft. The name is ancient.

While I was pawing through the spindle collection, I found myself reviewing fiber prep and weaving gear.

Here are my hand carders, for drawing out the fibers to lie parallel and creating rolags, little sausages of fiber ready to spin. Those are fine wire teeth.

Then can weaving be far behind

Here's a handheld craftsman made and signed tapestry loom. Left is a set of weaving sticks. I've taught kids stick-weaving using drinking straws instead of sticks. Mine are handmade, beautiful to use.

At the top of the picture are lovely weaving shuttles, one a rough homemade one, the others  craftsman made, which I've used with my rigid heddle loom.

Under there a lot of people will recognize the potholder loom, green metal, family made, on which I've made some interesting things in addition to potholders.

Then there's the collection of paperclips I used to fashion a four selvedge loom on which I created this tapestry, which was awarded a purchase prize in a regional juried show. I used embroidery floss for the weft. 

Little did the juror know how simple was the loom.

And these scary things are circular saw blades from my handyman artist friend Mike, on which I've created circular weavings, now in various collections.

One still at home is this mixed media, woven wire and roving with beads, mounted on a monotype. It's part of my Planet Series.  This was a series I made in honor of the centenary of the first performance of Holst's Planet Suite in 1918, and exhibited and sold in 2018. I'm a better artist than a photographer, sorry about the reflection and wonky pic. But you get the gist.

These are not stray bits of cardboard, as you might think, but left is the loom I made to weave this seamless bag, the handle made on the weaving sticks you saw earlier.

On the right of the picture is the loom on which I made the yoke (top part of the bodice)  of this vest. 

The rest is knitted, corner to corner rectangles.

I wove the yoke to keep the shape better than knitting, since it's heavy yarn. I spun and plied the yarn, and longtime blogistas followed me through the endless adventure.

Well, that musing led me far afield. For anyone still reading:

Gary stopped over to visit and I showed him the DNR on the fridge, just in case. And we arranged that one day granddaughter K will come over and learn to emboss cards. I showed him some.

He said doesn't this need a machine? Surprised when I said nope, she can do it by hand. He's quite excited, too.  I expect I'll be showing him, along with K.

So now I need to fix supper once I decide what.

Happy evening everyone, make stuff, or just buy stuff you need from artisans, next best. You'll have observed I either make my tools or buy from craftspeople. I like to support good work.

 

Puzzles, soup, rain

Today I had nothing scheduled, luckily, because it's been drenching down all day.

Good day for soup. So I organized butternut squash, diced potatoes, red lentils snd barley. 

Here's the pre microwaved squash, insides ready to add to soup rinds for the stock bag, seeds for the squirrels.

Kosher salt, Old Bay, turmeric, garlic, onions 

Barley simmering back there while the potatoes and squash cook.

Then everything blended, drop of lemon juice and pinch more salt, after which the barley goes in to cook more.

And there's lunch, very filling, enough for six more meals.

The jigsaw puzzle is coming along, and I like how the muted and dark edges are ready to explode into flowers any minute, see the illustration in the middle. 

I like to assemble small areas then find where they go, modular fashion, one of my favorite approaches to making.

About containers: I used the barley partly because when I made the custard dessert the other day, I finished up the cornstarch, leaving me with a very nice container. 

I'd noticed the barley in a bag in the freezer, and hadn't used it because I kept forgetting it was there. 

In a container, relabeled, on the counter, it quickly got used. Same with the lentils. They can sit ages in the fridge but as soon as I pour them into a container on the counter, I use them. 

I never actually buy containers, since there are so many coming in with other products in them. Once empty, fine!

In between all this great excitement, i finished glove one and started glove two.

I've been continuing the massive This Golden Fleece, and she's a terrific researcher. She solved a mystery for me, from one of Barbara Pym's books, A Few Green Leaves. 

This is where the vicar goes on endlessly trying to establish if any locals had been "buried in woollen" meaning a wool shroud, in past times.

He's completely unsuccessful, locals all thinking he's a bit lacking, but they like him anyway. Turns out that there was a law passed in the seventeenth century mandating this. It was a way of supporting the wool trade, cornerstone of the economy. It was abolished after a century, largely because ignored, and hard to enforce anyway.

But it would have been a very good dating mechanism for his local history studies if he'd ever managed to find any evidence in church registers or other documents.

So my current reading threw light on what had seemed an obscure fancy of a Pym character. That probably makes Pym a pretty good historian herself, unless maybe it was drawn from a real life clerical acquaintance.

There's no end to her depth! Or my interest in following these niche ideas.

Happy evening everyone, and here's a puzzle for Friday, which is likely to be when you're reading.

And bear with me if your subtle clues fly over my head!