It's Just One Thing After Another

You might think I live carelessly, and I don't blame you if you do. I wonder about it myself. 

 

I damaged my eyeglasses; I went outside and got two night's worth of firewood as I usually do, came inside and opened the wood burner to feed a couple, and the sudden temperature change did something to the layers of the lenses. The world has been blurred for the couple of weeks; it's a little like how movies and music films portray psychedelia, especially from the 60s, if you know what those look like. First time in 50 years of glasses and 26 years in this house and wood burner. I tried some of the old pairs in the meantime, but the blurred new ones (one year old) fits best, and the trusted optometrist said I could keep wearing them, so here I am, popping paracetamols like candy. (Not really, just two a day.) 

 

I think my eyes and brain are on overdrive trying to cope with this new... psychedelic world. I can do things in the kitchen, but slower, and I have to take breaks to close my eyes often. I try an older pair now and then, but that's probably making things worse. I've tried to read up on tied (unit) weaves, but quickly ran out of patience the first couple of times. I haven't tried sample weaving, but I can't cope with the idea of handling 60/2 cottons. I haven't ventured out to weed yet, but if all I need to settle myself down in one place, look down and pull, I can manage, couldn't I? Pruning trees are out of question, as are tasks I have to look both far and near in quick succession. At the very least, I should get off the computer, but I haven't always managed that.

Life seems just one thing after another. The lenses come from China, and before Covid they took a couple of weeks to arrive, but this last pair didn't arrive and optometrist re-ordered either the lenses or frames from the US, and I had to wait two months. If your eyes are so bad you're legally blind without glasses in some jurisdictions, (yup, that's me,) that's a long time, and I feel entitled to be a little melodramatic. 

At the start of last week, for three days I had pretty bad hay fever symptoms, but it's been cold for a few days and it stopped, for now. I'm feeling terribly difficult to be happy or enthusiastic or not-that-old, folks. Do send me some good thoughts!

Another Loom Update

I posted almost exactly this on my FB page on Saturday:

"With the warp on the big loom currently not under tension, we threw an old bed sheet over it and continued our investigation. Ben first checked every connection beyond the foot pedal, and found nothing clogging the tubes and joints. He them bypassed the shaft-dropping piston, and the shafts lifted as usual but dropped with a big thump. I could have easily finished weaving the warp that way, but not satisfied, he took off the offending piston, and pumped it manually half a dozen times, loosened and tightened every screw on it, and voila, the air stopped leaking. 

 

"We don't know how it became clogged in the first place, and we don't know if this is a long-term fix, but it's back to normal for now, confirming our hunch the problem was something akin to my joints - move it a few times and it'll go back to "normal" operation.

"I admit, we'll be holding our breaths. There were a few things that happened in the 21 years we've had this loom, most/all of which I'd forgotten since Ben usually fixed them in a minute or an hour. He had fun learning about how each part operates in more detail, the food pedal in particular. But if it happens again, it's manual pumping first, then to have the piston serviced or replaced. Stay tuned! (He got a bottle of Highland Park 12 year old out of the operation.)"

 

So you'd think I'm jumping up and down with joy, sampling my heart out, but not just yet. Thinking about and creating sample drafts, (many of which I hope will be good enough to use in proper pieces later,) is taking a very long time, even though they were never a big deal on the table loom. I'm relearning the logic of what I did more instinctively/visually before. The one good thing I discovered is, I can use an "active pen" on Fiberworks with this laptop, (one of those pens you touch the screen with,) which speeds up the filling of the squares so much. (Undoing/deleting a square still has to be done the old way, though. :-D) Here's an example: 

None of the colors are accurate, as is the threading, (because both were done randomly,) and the thickness of green pattern weft is wrong. But I am entering every pattern shed by said spiffy pen, line by line. No wonder, eh.

 

I'm still working on the post about what I mean by tied weave, a little different from the normal tied weaves as far as I understand, but the tied weave jargon is making it confusing, and I keep changing the way I explain things. But I promise you, it is coming, if you are interested. So... more to come.