Fabric finished
Tonight I finished warping my loom and created a piece of fabric. (Which I then promptly shrunk in the washing machine because I am a moron and forgot to set the machine to "delicate.") Here are the remaining steps to warping the loom.
Once the reed has been sleyed the heddles need to be threaded. This is like threading a needle, except on a much larger scale. Each heddle is attached to a shaft which goes up and down according to how the treadles (peddles) are pushed. The order of the threading and the order of the treadling will make a unique pattern in the fabric. I wanted to make a basic "tabby" pattern. (This is a simple under-over pattern.) This photo shows about half of the heddles threaded. You can see the reed in the middle of the photo with the yarn coming out of it. On the right hand side are the threaded heddles and on the left hand side are the empty heddles. I actually quite enjoyed this step (it's also a LOT faster than sleying the reed).
With the heddles threaded the next step is to tie up the ends of the warp to the front and back beam of the loom. This involves a bit of play to make sure the tension is right. In the first photo the warp is wound onto the front beam. In the second photo the warp has been wound onto the back beam and is ready for weaving:
As part of this process I also carefully examined each of the heddles to make sure I had threaded the warp in the correct order. I'd made two mistakes out of over 100 warp threads. I think this is pretty good for my first try! With the loom warped I was (finally!) able to start weaving.
It took me virtually no time before I had a finished piece of fabric:
The ends were tied and the extra loom waste was snipped off:
Technically the weaving isn't done until it's been set (washed). This is where I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to use the delicate setting. Fortunately this is "just" a practice piece and wasn't intended for anything specific. Overall I had about a 10% shrink rate. A little bit of shrinking is expected, but it's usually much less than this.
But there we have it! My first piece of fabric off my aunt's loom which is now my loom.
Sleying the reed
This afternoon I dropped by my local yarn shop (Riverside) and Colleen and I talked about how long it takes us to start "scary" steps in a project. With a lot of encouragement she convinced me to just go ahead and warp my loom. It's a 45" beast that comes to me via my aunt. Over the winter I did a little weaving because the loom came to me already warped. But with that fabric finished I need to learn how to warp the loom before I can start weaving again.
I know this is the time consuming part of the process. It's also sort of scary. Because it's time consuming. Or perhaps because it's the foundation for what will become fabric. And there are scissors involved and there's no "undo" when it comes to scissors. With Angelika and Mel's suggestion I got a copy of Learning to Weave, a glass of whiskey (ok, maybe that was my idea) and just started.
Three hours later I had sleyed the reed. (The best reason to weave is because you have a loom in your living room. The second best reason to weave is the really cool terminology.)
Here's what sleying the reed involves:
Measuring the warp (the vertical strands in the weaving process) on a warping reel:
The pegs help to separate each strand of warp and prevent them from getting tangled:
I did this for two different colours: blue and light brown. With the warp measured it was time to transfer it to the loom. I had to switch the reed that was on the loom. The reed is the part that keeps the yarn separated when you "beat" the weft into place (the weft is the strand of yarn that is passed, via a shuttle, through the warp to make the actual woven fabric). I switched the reed to a 12 dent reed (this means I have 12 strands of yarn per inch in the fabric, but +1 for terminology again because a dent is also an open source tweet). It took me a while to figure out how to set up the lease sticks, and ultimately I'm not sure I was doing it "right" but after a "long" amount of time I ended up with blue warp sleyed through the reed:
After a total of three hours I had all of my warp sleyed. This was cause for celebration:
The next step will be to thread the warp through the heddles which are attached to each of the shafts (I have a four shaft loom). The shafts are attached to the peddles which are used to treadle a pattern into the fabric by lifting up different warp threads:
You can see in this photo that the warp doesn't go anywhere... it's just tied up at the back of the reed:
It will need to be passed through the gray bit that looks like a screen on the right and then wrapped onto the back beam. (You can see the front beam in that last photo, that's where the finished fabric will end up.)
It's all very exciting, and very time consuming. I've also started to panic about the instructions: I think I've made a 2 yard warp (as instructed) but now I'm not convinced this will actually be long enough to wrap onto the front and back beams of the loom AND have enough length left to actually weave. I have a feeling I may end up with a very small square of fabric (with a lot of waste). But it's a start and that's more than I had at the beginning of the day.
Leftover veg
A friend of mine trucked off to Europe and came back with a masters degree in organic food chain management. This spring she told me she was starting a market garden with a weekly veg box. Seeing as my veg seem to feed the groundhog before I can get around to harvesting, it seemed like a good idea to order a box. This is the third week of getting veg from Persephone Market Garden. Once a week I get a box of whatever was in the garden that week.
This week it was zuchinni, parsley, swiss chard, beets lettuce and peas. This is a small box and it costs me $10. Each week I can choose the size I want and have tried all three of small, medium and large. I did a lot of sharing with the medium and large boxes and have settled on what I hope is a good size. With the box of food I also get a weekly newsletter that has recipes for some of the things in the box (radish salad, parsley potatoes, beet salad).
My goal each week is to actually eat all of the veg I get instead of wimping out and passing it to the rabbit to finish up for me. This is a LOT more leafy veg than I would normally eat. It's challenging, but I'm having fun with it. What's left at the end of the week goes into a leftover veg soup. I'd picked up asparagus at the market as well (because what you need when you have a veg box is more veg from the market). I saw Liz's photo of her asparagus soup I begged for the recipe and she sent it through. The asparagus ended up in the first leftover veg soup and the tradition was started. (The fact that I've yet to follow the recipe isn't really the point of the story.)
This week the leftover veg soup uses up leeks from the garden that were going to seed, beets from the box, spring onions, coriander, mustard seed, sesame seed, chickpeas, and stuff? After cooking the leeks in a bit of olive oil I dumped in the rest of the veg and the chicken stock (leftover from a roast) and when everything had softened I took it for a whiz with the hand blender. I topped the soup off with a couple of chunks of brie:
It's rather tasty.
Sauble at Sunset
I'm a sucker for sunsets. I suppose as far as addictions go this one is neither very serious nor very threatening. The only bad thing that's come of it is a very large number of photos of sunsets.
I don't go out of my way to find them, but when I happen upon a good one, and I've got my camera, I try to snap a few pictures. These three are from Sauble Beach on Saturday night.
It's always fun to put the sun to bed at the beach, but I also wanted to see the piping plover enclosures at the north end of the beach. These rare birds have spent the last three summers at Sauble and I've never managed to make the trek out. Although the birds had already gone to bed for the night, it was neat to see all the fenced areas and signs explaining what the fuss was all about. There are three breeding pairs and a total of nine chicks. Doesn't seem like a lot, until you find out there are fewer than 6,000 piping plovers world-wide. If you're in the area, be sure to walk (or drive) to the very north end of the beach and take the time to chat with the volunteers who watch the enclosures and make sure the endangered birds stay as safe as possible.
Playing with 960.gs
One thing always leads to another. I needed to do a security update for Drupal and decided to migrate this site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 while I was at it. This site runs very few modules and apart from a couple moments of ugly errors while I was waiting to run the update scripts, the whole thing went very smoothly. I haven't quite cleaned everything up yet, but things are essentially back to normal-ish.
In addition to doing the upgrade, I also took the opportunity to play with a new base theme, Nine Sixty. A number of respectable shops have been working with 960.gs (including Lullabot and Four Kitchens). Although I've used the grids for creating wireframes and general layouts, I'd never deployed a 960 site. After a bit of playing around I started to get the hang of how all the classes worked. I'm sure there will be a lot more tweaking as I get used to how to use everything efficiently, but in the mean time, it was an interesting exercise.
The biggest challenge that I ran into was dealing with the space between the columns. When I can "see" the grid it's all obvious of how I want the puzzle pieces to fit together. But as soon as I start relying on built-in CSS styles my brain starts to go a little wonky and common sense seems to fly out the window. It was an interesting challenge though.
The colours are from the gentle waves palate on Colour Lovers.
Portland Rose
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Wood Stove
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San Diego, Pacific Ocean
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Write Daily
For nearly three weeks I've had a tab open on my browser with the intention of writing something. Today. But for nearly three weeks I just haven't managed to collect my thoughts in ways that I wanted them to be consumed. It's been a whirlwind though.
Writing Open Source - the first ever (as far as we know) Open Source Documentation conference was held in Owen Sound. It was amazing. I am biased, but it was amazing. (I'm not being redundant, it really was amazing.) I am also intensely proud of how this conference has turned into a community. Please participate, or at least follow along, on the revamped WOS site. There's a planet feed, forums and amazing intiatives including a style guide, documentation personas and a best practices guide. And when I say initiatives I mean it in the exact definition of the word: the projects are initiated and looking for your input!
#woscon09: Day 2
Another incredible day has wrapped up with the Writing Open Source crew. We're not just conference participants anymore, we're a crew. (We know we're a crew because the Web site no longer has a conference schedule, but a forum for discussion after the conference has ended.) It's been incredible to watch the progression as people look both outward for support and best practices, and inward to apply new information to existing practices within a team project.
Today we had several sessions that came from yesterday's talks they included:
- Dru on the BSD certification project
- Janet on the FLOSS Manuals project
- Shaun on the new markup language he's created for GNOME docs: project mallard
- an adhoc discussion on the challenges of translation and the toolkit that we're currently struggling with in various projects
After stuffing ourselves with ideas, we headed up to Inglis Falls at the request of the mayor. (She felt it was inappropriate for people to come all this way and not see the falls. She was right.) After dinner talk was filled the commerce of open source, authoring books for main stream publishers and more. A whole lot of really funny jokes have been established. You know the kind that make no sense without context and are only referred to by their punchline? Y'know, like this:
[ ] F
I can assure you that is all kinds of hilarious. It was so hilarious that Milo translated it:
[ ] V
Awwww, yeah: there's nothing like a good documentation joke. Apologies to those of you who were following along in Identi.ca and Twitter tonight. The dip into senseless tweeting and denting was inevitable after two days of really awesome, and thought provoking, content.
Sunday (tomorrow) is a project sprint day so I expect the tweet feeds to be fairly quiet. In the mean time, check out some of the links above for projects that might not have otherwise been on your radar. There's some truly fantastic work happening in the world of open source documentation and I'm very excited to be a part of it.
