Christmas Eve Eve

Today is Christmas Eve Eve. A wonderful preparatory day. I always feel good on this day. Any anxiety about the holidays is gone, all that’s left is happiness, looking forward to seeing my sister, son, daughter, son-in-law, and grandson over the next two days.

Yesterday the wind blew wildly and coldly all day long. It was very biting, so I cut my usual 2 mile walk quite short – I only did about 3/4 of a mile in the morning, and couldn’t make myself go back out later. There was some snow on the ground – probably 4-5″ although with so much blowing it was hard to know for sure.

This morning I decided to wait till the sun came out to take my walk. It was GORGEOUS! There were lots of ice diamonds on all the little branches of shrubs & tall weeds. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me, and when I came home and took some pictures none of them showed the real magic of it all — you’ll just have to trust me.

Then I decided to put the first warp on the Missouri loom. Although I have not given my other looms names (I’m not one of those people – I don’t name my cars, either), when I’m making myself notes about what I need to do or buy to get this loom functional I don’t write out the entire name, I abbreviate it MO, so I guess I need to just call the loom Mo for short.

Anyway, I wanted to see how she handled, if the reed or heddles would damage my warp threads. But I didn’t want to ruin any yarn that I really liked, so I chose some Bambu 7 – not my fav as it’s got such a low twist that it catches on everything in a finished garment. That feature, however, would be sure to show me if the reed or heddles had snags on them. I threaded the loom in a varied twill pattern & threaded the reed.

After that I went to tie on to the front apron.

DOH! I made the new strapping WAY too short! It struck me as odd on the back beam, but when I got to the front beam I realized why. That webbing should reach at least an inch or two over the breast beam. Since I don’t have enough of the webbing left I decided I’d just deal with it for this trial warp, but I’ll have to buy more webbing and redo both front & rear.

So I got tied on and started weaving.

This is so not my favorite color. It is less ugly than I thought it would be – maybe someone will like it. It’ll be priced to move, assuming the reed doesn’t eat it before I’m done.

Anyway, I learned quickly that the cord I’d used to tie up the levers was inappropriate. The knots slipped too easily, so as a result the levers couldn’t lift the harnesses high enough to give me a good shed.

I stopped the process early on and hooked up the lamms using Texsolv cord. In order to make this work, I’d already purchased eye hooks for the treadles and had to drill out holes larger to accommodate the smallest eye hooks I could find. So today hooking up lamms & treadles was pretty easy.

Once I did that, Mo gives me a nice, clean shed. The treadles are short-ish, and therefore I think they require more effort to lift the harnesses than my lovely counterbalance, and Mo sure makes more noise, but function is the most important thing, after all.

After I’d woven a bit I realized that I probably did have enough Texsolv left to replace the cords to the levers, so I did that and now the levers give me a good shed, too.

Mo will be quite useful, I can see that.

Now, sitting in my living room with just the Christmas lights, my laptop screen, and Melissa Etheridge giving a Christmas concert on my TV, life is sweet.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!