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Wrapping it up

Today I mailed the wraps to ZN & NZ.

ZN & NZ's wraps

From left to right, it’s navy tencel flowers, black cotton hearts, and black tencel hearts.

Since getting them off the loom, in addition to doing all the finish work, I’ve done the usual things like mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, yadda yadda yadda. Plus refilling that monster hole from the septic inspection (thankfully with help from my neighbor).

The way I approach big tasks is to break them down into bite-sized pieces. So for packing for the move, my method is pack at least 2-3 boxes a day. That way by the end of the month I’ll be mostly packed with a minimum of pain. I’ve got the upstairs done and most of the basement, plus some work on my main floor. I’m happy with the progress I’m making. Several friends, as well as family, have offered to help, but I’ve declined. If someone else packs those boxes, I won’t know what’s in which box. More importantly, as part of the packing process only I can decide what gets moved with me, what gets thrown out, what gets given to someone I know, and what gets donated to agencies.

Anyway, today I measured the warp for my next batch of baby wraps. This will be the last baby wrap warp done in Friendship. So I was really happy to be able to move my warping mill out onto the porch and wind all four bouts outside.

I only remembered to take a photo of one bout…it happened to be the 3rd one. The colors here are olive and limette pale.

RD bout 3

Tomorrow I’ll beam and start threading…plus finish packing & organizing the basement, and maybe another box or 2 on this floor.

Back to hearts

Wednesday I started the day by changing the tie up on my Macomber back to the hearts pattern and winding bobbins of black tencel for NZ. I wove a few inches and my septic guy arrived to scope out the job. He told me he’d be back in a few hours to do the work, and that I should go do my grocery shopping right then so I’d be here when he returned.

In addition to groceries, I did that forestalled garbage run, including some garbage I’d created in my packing process.

I came back and so did the septic guy. While he worked to complete all the needed steps so my system will get passed by the Department of Health, I wove NZ’s wrap.

All that’s left for the septic is backfilling that hole, which may happen with a small machine today…if we’re not deluged with rain. If we are and the ground’s too soft for a piece of equipment to do the job without making more of a mess, it’ll have to be backfilled by hand. Fortunately that can take place a bit at a time over several days instead of the several-hour marathon of digging the hole.

ZN to NZ

I managed to get 80″ woven for NZ — hearts weave, black tencel. I won’t get any weaving done at all today. I’m fully committed to my library’s major fundraiser, basically all day long.

Two Terrific Days

I have had 2 really terrific days in a row. Life is so good, it’s incredible. Let’s go chronologically.

Yesterday morning I managed to get about half of ZN’s second wrap — a short one for a ring sling — woven. Here’s where I went from a black Egyptian cotton weft in my common hearts weave to a navy tencel weft in what I call my flowers weave.

hearts weave to flowers

The tencel is a much lighter ‘hand’ – finer, softer, more drape – but the majority of the difference in look is the weave pattern itself. The structures are much different.

Although changing the tie up for this weave pattern was no fun at all, the weaving went smoothly and proceeded well.

Shortly before noon I left for Rochester and the engineer’s inspection on my new home. Both my son and my daughter joined us, providing more eyes, more helpful hands, more listening ears, and more support. I really do have wonderful kids!

Son & I had taken some rough measurements, and while the inspector was doing his thing and we were following him around, my daughter was carefully drawing the layout, including placement of doors & windows. She obviously couldn’t do it to scale, but it was really helpful. This morning I spent time with graph paper and did my best to translate the combination of her drawing and my rough measurements into a scale drawing. We didn’t measure windows & doors, just room sizes, so some things are approximations, but here’s the layout of my sweet, new house.

new house layout

I know some bloggers have figured out how to post a relatively small image so that when you click on the picture it gets bigger. One of these days I’ll have to figure that out; you can’t get great info with it at its current size. But you’ve probably guessed that the 2 room I didn’t label are the kitchen & living room. Didn’t notice that till just now.

The inspector was quite happy with what he saw. (And with my kids.) The house has been well taken care of since its 1948 creation. It will need some attention, as does every house, but it’s solid and sound, and he didn’t find anything that I didn’t already know about.

Just one more little house detail. Most of the interior doors, including closet doors — I think 9 all told — have those great old glass door knobs. I think they’re beautiful, and have loved them since I was a kid. My sweet hubby made me a hall tree many years ago with these door knobs as the ‘holders’ for your jackets.

Back to yesterday…I had only been in the house for about 20 minutes the day I saw it and made my offer. I had some real stomach butterflies, I can assure you! Did I make the right decision? Was this the right house for me? Did I act too quickly? Would I really like it?

With the inspector I got to spend about an hour and a half in the house, and the answer to all of those questions is a resounding YES! I am SOOOOO happy with my decision! It’s definitely downsizing from my current space, but that was what I had in mind. And it’s so bright, and cute, and has the best weaving studio ever!

Needless to say, after the 2 hour drive home, I had a hard time sleeping last night. Too much happy excitement!

This morning the inspector from the County Health Department came to inspect my septic system – a requirement when selling a house. Remember I told you what a bear the digging was? Here’s a view of the yard so you can get some concept of what it took to get the tank ready for the inspector.

septic inspector

For the past 18 months I knew this inspection was coming. We installed our system in 1978, so I was prepared having some problems arise and having to spend some real money. Like potentially several thousand dollars if it was real bad news.

But it wasn’t! I have to do a few small things, and I have someone coming tomorrow morning to look at the situation and give me pricing, but I’m sure it will be more like several hundred than several thousand. And part of what I’ll pay him to do is to re-cover that tank so I won’t have to do any more digging! YAY!!

Then I had to take my car to my mechanic this afternoon so he could replace a gasket on the exhaust system of my 2007 Yaris. He got it up on the lift and said, “It won’t take long…if these old bolts don’t break.” With complete confidence I replied, “They won’t.” And they didn’t. I was done in about 1/2 hour with a total bill of $47.

Does a day get any better than these two? I don’t think so!

It did end well. I got several boxes packed, which means more bags of garbage created as I continue to weed out. I also finished weaving the flower wrap for Z. Here’s a shot of the ‘other side’ as it passes over the cloth beam — navy tencel weft.

flowers on cloth beam

Just for kicks, here’s the hearts weave with black cotton weft.

hearts weave on cloth beam

Tomorrow I’ll change the tie up back to hearts and start on NZ’s black tencel wrap.

To Do & Undo

ZN's 1st wrap
Usually when I write about having to undo what I’ve done, it’s all about the weaving. Not today. Today I spent at least 4 hours doing things and then undoing them.

It started this morning. I spent well over an hour gathering my recyclables — plastic, paper, glass, & metal — as well as the regular garbage. I went through my closet and gathered up more things I haven’t worn and am unlikely to. Some only good enough for garbage, most in fine condition for donation.

I carried all this stuff downstairs and out to my car. I got in the car and drove about a mile before the little light bulb went off in my head. DOH!! It’s the 4th of July! The transfer station won’t be open!!

I drove into town to see if the volunteers were having a chicken barbecue for the holiday, but no, they weren’t.

I drove to my friend’s house, since she wanted me to install and show her how to use her scanner. That took about an hour and a half. At least while I was there I got several nice sized boxes and some newspaper for packing.

Drove home and unpacked all the stuff from my car that I’d spent time packing in the morning. Wednesday will be the next day I can go to the transfer station, and there’s no good reason to have my car full of garbage until then.

Then I decided I had waited long enough (actually probably 2 years too long) to make an important change to my website. Instead of having my actual email address with a link to send me email, I needed to have a contact form, and one with captcha code on it. I am getting SOOOOOOO much spam that this is one of several steps I simply can’t wait any longer to take.

So I spent time getting info on how to write the html code for a contact form. Got it, copied & pasted it onto the appropriate page of my website, made the needed modifications, saved it, and uploaded it. Felt pretty good.

But it didn’t include a captcha code, and I knew I really should have one. So I spent more time finding how to code that. Got that done, copied & pasted to the correct web page, saved, and uploaded to my website again.

Felt pretty good, again. Until I decided I’d better test it out. Sent myself an email via my new contact form, but I didn’t receive it. Wait a bit. Still didn’t receive it. Repeat a few more times.

Another light bulb went off. The coding puts the form on the web page, but it doesn’t have any commands to actually send me an email. Go back online to find some coding that’ll do that. The coding is now either in php, a language I don’t speak, or remarkably complex html. Get frustrated.

Suddenly the 3rd light bulb of the day goes off. I know how to do this simply! I’ve used an online service called Jotform to build & embed forms for my old employer, Pfeiffer Nature Center, many times. I have a personal Jotform account. I’ll do that! About 15 minutes later the task was done and done well. The prior 2+ hours researching & modifying code, saving & uploading a web page, and testing were all wasted. All I needed was a simple Jotform.

Finally in a reasonable head space, I sat down at the loom and got about 50″ of ZN’s first wrap woven. By then my little dog wanted his afternoon walk, and when we came back I decided to write this post. Now I’m going to make & eat dinner, then back to the loom.

I won’t miss this

My bad knee isn’t very happy right now. It got quite unhappy with all that digging on Monday. Tuesday was much better, and Wednesday was pretty good.

Then yesterday I mowed the half of my lawn that was relatively dry. Today I mowed the rest of it and wacked the weeds. This job takes 3.5-4 hours all together. This is most definitely something I will not miss after the move. Based on the size of the yard, I’m guessing the combination of mowing & weed wacking will take less than an hour. I could be surprised, but I know I’ll cut my time by way more than half. Plus the new yard is relatively flat, unlike the hillside I currently live on.

Of course, there will be many things I’ll miss, too. Like sitting on my large, wraparound porch and listening to the birds.

In between mowing and enjoying the porch, I did get the warp for ZN & NZ measured & beamed yesterday.

ZN & NZ on the back beam

Today I got it threaded in both heddles and reed.

ZN & NZ threaded in the reed

I’ve done a few motifs to make sure I don’t have any threading errors, but my knee wants to rest, so that’s what I’m doing. Tomorrow I’ll get some weaving done. After I take a load of stuff to the dump — garbage, recyclables, and donations of clothing and other items that won’t be moving with me.