One year ago...

I made the biggest mistake I can remember making.

My father was dying. We knew this. Over the last few days he had nearly stopped eating. The lung cancer that had metastasized and taken up residence in his bones was winning. We knew it would, he knew it would - but we thought he had a few months to live. They told us at the end of July that he had two to nine months to live.

The 31st was a Friday. Wednesday of that week my mother had called and said she thought he wasn't going to be with us much longer. I called the girls in Vegas right after that phone call and told them they needed to get to Indiana if they wanted to see their grandfather before he died. Nova had been there in July. Aluna had taken a new job that summer and did not feel that she could take time off. When I told her she needed to get to Indiana now, she went to her new boss and got the time off and made plans to fly herself, Nova and Tay out the following Tuesday.

What was my mistake you ask? The mistake I made was putting my job and my normal life ahead of my father and my family. In all honesty, none of us expected him to pass that day. So I went to work in the morning with plans to leave around noon.

It's a 10-hour drive from Winona to my parent's home in Linton Indiana. If I had piled everyone in the car and left early in the day we would have made it in time.

Instead, leaving at noon meant that we were somewhere between Bloomington/Normal and Danville, Illinois when my brother called to tell us that my father had passed away. They told me that he knew - as much as one can know in the final hours of life - that we were coming, but he just could not wait for us to be there. He died at 8:45pm.

I wasn't there. Forever I will know that my decision to work those 4 or 5 hours meant that I was racing down a highway in a futile attempt to be there when my father died.

I hate it sometimes, that my family is so spread out over the country. I know something like this will happen again.

A New Budget

September always brings new budgets in our house. Every year, at this time of year, at least one person in the household (and probably more) is retooling, rethinking and reassessing wants, needs and how far a dollar (or $20) can be stretched.

It's the time of year when school shopping has been my love-to-do/hate-to-do task (one I no longer face since everyone is out of high school and either done with college, or paying for their own stuff). Love the "organizational" shopping that notebooks, pens & pencils & markers, post-it notes, binders and those nifty zipper pockets for them, implies. Hate the list of "must-have-on-first-day-of-school" that the public school sent out every year (divided by grade level). Hate the fact that kids can be so cruel and if daughters and son came in less-than-stylish clothing they would be tortured, cut to the bone with a glance and a snicker.

For the last 20 years or so, I have had to postpone a birthday celebration for myself (d.o.b. 9/13) because school shopping would so blow the budget. We would finally recover in time to do the Christmas shopping sometime late-October or early-November. Not a bad thing, since I have way too much stuff anyway. But some years there wasn't even enough left to have a cake and ice cream.

*************
Thinking about McCain's $5-million-dollar-is-rich jokey response to the discussion of class and wealth...
NY Times Op-Ed by economist Paul Krugman

Endangered Species Act - Part II

A few days ago I posted a link to a NY Times article about the Endangered Species Act and some upcoming changes the Bush administration wants to push through. I also included the link to the information on public comments.

The proposed changes are on the government website where you can submit comments. This evening I plan to read through the change document and make some comments.

Tire Pressure

This weekend I got a very dramatic lesson in how tire pressure affects gas mileage - from my bicycle.

Abelisto and I usually ride our bikes to the Farmer's Market in Winona on Saturday mornings. We have panniers on our bikes that can hold the equivalent of 2 brown paper grocery bags each. Together we can get over a week's groceries in the panniers.

Anyway, over the last couple weeks I had been having more and more trouble riding the bike. I was cursing poor Adventure Cycle, thinking that they were at fault (had a recent tune up and one of the problems following it was this difficulty/trouble with riding - the other problem, erratic shifting issues still is going on). On Saturday morning Abelisto noticed that my rear tire was extremely low on air. We quickly went to the service station and added quite a bit of air pressure to both my tires.

Getting back on the bike was amazing - it now rolled so freely, so effortlessly... The difference in energy expenditure was unbelievable. It must be much the same with a car, except we do not notice it since we aren't doing the pedaling...

Now I have got to check the tires on all the vehicles in the household.

Now I need to check the tire pressures on all the vehicles.

Mead Update

Got some advice from Jon (a veteran mead & wine maker) concerning the mead. He said to date it and put it in a dark, cool place for 12 months to mellow the taste.


So on the 16th of August in 2009 we will open a bottle and test it.

Mead Making

Tonight Eli and I bottled the first batch of mead. This mead was made with honey from a local beekeeper that we got at the Farmer's Market in Winona. I do not drink alcohol so I do not really know myself, but others in my household think it tastes good.

This batch was made sort of willy-nilly. I did read the meadmaker book, but I did not have any special equipment for doing it other than the carboy and the fermentation lock. I did not even have a thermometer. I guess I was really lucky that it made at all. It took DAYS for it to start fermenting, and it was not very vigorous when it did start. There was maybe a bubble every 15 seconds. We worried that we were going to end up with honey vinegar, or something like that.

A week or so ago I stopped by the Wine & Beer Making Supply store just north of Rochester on Hwy 52. I bought a polycarbonate carboy, another fermentation lock, a racking tube and hose, a floating thermometer, a hydrometer and testing tube, some stabilizer, and some yeast energizer (or maybe it was nutrient - don't remember and the box is in the other room).

Abelisto and I picked up 12 pounds raw honey at the food co-op. I started a second batch of mead with part of it last weekend when I moved the first batch to the secondary fermentation carboy (the rest of the honey went to the roofers in appreciation of taking such good care not to drop old shingles on the bee hives). I really did not need to move the first batch into a secondary fermentation carboy, it was absolutely done with the fermenting, but it did help clarify it. Anyway, the second batch of mead was bubbling away about 4 hours after I mixed it up. The bubbles were rising through the fermentation lock at about 1 bubble every 2.5 to 3 seconds this time. I took specific gravity and temperature measurements and am keeping better records with this batch. 

It will be interesting to see how it comes out.

Endangered Species Act

Normally I do not regurgitate content from other websites. However this is something I think needs to be passed along:

NY Times Editorial - An Endangered Act
Published: August 13, 2008
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s latest assault on the Endangered Species Act deserves to be struck down.

Information on commenting during the 30-day Public Comment period.

I would suggest that we all think about commenting after the proposed changes have been posted (sometime tomorrow - 8/15/2008).

• Online, at Regulations.gov
• By mail, to:
  

  Public Comment Processing,
  Attention: 1018-AT50
  Division of Policy and Directives Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service
  4401 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 222,
  Arlington, VA 22203

When the proposed rule changes get posted I will try to put them up here - it is confusing to find them on the gov site.

Leclerc Tissart Tapestry Loom

I have not posted on here for a few days - mostly because I was busy getting some things done. There is this thing about doing and/or writing about doing that I sometimes struggle with. It is the residue from graduate school. I want to do the work. I do not always want to document it. However I realize that I can get pretty lazy intellectually if I do not work at documenting the work.

However, that was not the reason I have not posted lately. The reason was that I have been all wrapped up in the new tapestry loom. It is a 60" Leclerc Tissart loom, probably made in the 70s or 80s (still need to do more research).

We drove to Chicago in the new car (2007 Pontiac Vibe - more about that later) on August 1st to spend the weekend with Eileen at her new place, go to some museums, visit Loyola where Abelisto went to grad school and just hang out. On the way back we drove to Krakow Wisconsin (an hour or so north of Green Bay) to pick up the loom.

We took it apart and put it in the Vibe. We had to fold down the wider section of the back seat and the front passenger seat to get it all in there. Some of the pieces are around 6' long. Abelisto ended up sitting behind me in the narrower section of the back seat.

When we got it home late Sunday night we piled the loom in the front room and went to bed. Monday night I cleaned and oiled the wooden parts and steel-wooled the brake assembly and the harnesses (slight surface rust). The heddles are wire with inset eyes (maybe stainless steel - I did not look that closely at them) and are in really good condition considering the loom sat out in a barn for a few years.

Then Abelisto and I put it back together.

Step one: Side pieces and bottom piece with treddles.


Step two: Added the front and middle back beams and the beater assembly (which is backwards in this photo - we discovered that pretty quickly and turned it around).


Step three: Added the cloth beam (or whatever it is called on a tapestry loom) and tension arm.


Step four: Here we turned the harness assembly around the right way and added the warp beam. All that is left is the top back beam.

Once the loom was together we decided to move Sheba's desk and put the loom in front of the big window.

Tonight I plan to start dressing the loom.

New Loom

Usually I stay away from Ebay. For a number of reasons - mainly I like to see and touch what I buy before I do so, However this week I found a Leclerc tapestry loom on Ebay that was too good to pass up.

(Seller photograph)

It came with some other items.

(Seller photograph)

It is a 60" loom, and hopefully Abelisto and I can pick it up on the way back from Chicago this weekend...

Tapestry Finishing - II

Tonight I took the tapestry off of the loom. Once the piece was relaxed, once the tension was normalized, the selvedge issue became much less obvious. That is good to see.

I tied each pair of warp threads together in square knots. Then I started weaving the loose ends back in. I used the threaders I mentioned before with mixed results. I snapped one right off. Then I tried a twisted beading needle, then a large gauge bead threader. I ended up going back to the punch embroidery needle threader and just being careful, careful, careful as I pull the yarns back through the weft.


I managed to get maybe a third of the ends woven in before I got tired of doing it. I will probably finish weaving them in tomorrow. Then I will have to figure out what to do with the warp ends. Now I am going to finish building the smaller loom and maybe warp it.

Winona County DFL Website

I did not work on the tapestry last night. I had wanted to go to the DFL Tech committee meeting, get lots of work done and then come home and work on the tapestry.

Instead of doing that, I ended up having only one other member of my committee attend the meeting and then staying an extra hour at the DFL to teach someone how to use Google Groups.

Frustrated by the lack of progress and the lack of response to my requests for help with the website content, I decided to do it myself and then bring it back to a few key people who I know will get me the information that I need. When I got home (around 7 pm) I started working on the site. Shortly before midnight I posted the redesign to a temporary location and am now waiting on more information and feedback.

Tapestry Finishing

Last night I started taking the tapestry off of the loom. Thought I should stop at one point and refresh my memory of how this would best be done. I have decided to weave the loose ends that are sticking out of the back into the weft before going any farther with the cutting down the tapestry. If that works out to be too difficult (given the tension on the piece) I will continue cutting it loose and tying it off and then tuck in the loose ends once it is off the loom. I think the best tool for that would be the threaders for punch embroidery needles that I have. They look like giant sewing needle threading aids. I can easily slip them between the weft yarns, catch the loose ends, and pull them up between the weft yarns in order to bind them in and hide them.

I did run across some encouraging information - since this tapestry is woven with wool it may be possible to somewhat correct the draw-in/selvedge issue by steaming and blocking the piece.

It is worth a try.

Made a New Loom Today

I did not finish the tapestry this weekend. Instead I did some weaving on it, but I spent much of today building a new tapestry frame loom. I had an idea come to mind for raising and lowering the threads with a frame loom.


I made a rigid heddle that is slightly longer than the loom is wide. If it works I should be able to weave on the frames faster.


This loom has a 24x36" weaving area. It measures 36x47.5" and is built using the same model as the larger frame that I have been working on.

Once the glue dries I will put in the nails, thread this one up and test my idea for using a rigid heddle with it.

Canon PowerShot SD1100

I have been trying to do a daily photo blog but I am constantly falling behind because of a camera issue that I keep trying to deal with. I have a Canon digital SLR, but sometimes its just too damn big and heavy to take with me. Plus it was fairly expensive to buy (good old student loans!) and I have a couple really expensive lenses. I really have to be motivated to take it out with me, and often when I do, it gets left in the car.

I decided to get a pocketable camera. Abelisto & I went to Best Buy to see what was available. I ended up getting a brown Canon PowerShot. I like my big Canon, it had good specs, good reputation and it was reasonably priced. I am really into brown right now and the fact that they had the brown one in stock clinched the deal. It is actually a rich dark brown, like expensive cocoa, not the muddy taupe color of this image...


When we got home with it I discovered that that Mike & Nova have the same camera (theirs isn't brown though...).

The battery is charging. In a little while I will go out and test it.

New Blog Design

I just did a major redesign of this blog. I wanted it to more closely match my website. The redesign involved hacking the Blogger template.

I need to be able to do this for the various blogs that my co-workers create for the university. I had tried before but was not too successful at actually modifying the template (instead of just changing colors and fonts) until I found some excellent guidelines provided by Amanda Fazani of BloggerBuster. Now I need to take a look at all the blogs I manage and assist with for the university.

This is the fun part of my job.

Over my lunch hour I might play with different colors for borders and text. Or maybe not...

Tapestry Weaving - II

Most, if not all of the yarn for the current tapestry project came from Christa's Yarn Shop. Christa's is located in the village of Beaches Corner, or Beach Corners - signs on the highway claim both names. Beaches Corner is near Ettrick, Wisconsin, about 30 minutes drive on county highways that wind through areas sculpted by glacial melt.

I learned about Christa's Yarn Shop from a co-worker whose description of the store fell a bit short of reality. She said "There is an awful lot of yarn there..."
Read more...

Awful lot. There IS an awful lot of yarn at Christa's. In fact, you have difficulty walking through the store without knocking over a box or two of skeins, or stepping on someone else's spill. Basically there are two narrow hallways between mountains of yarn. It is all very wonderfully chaotic and quite beautiful. And Christa is the most beautiful thing there.

Christa is Christa Berg, originally from Germany. My guess - and I will hazard one, although guessing ages is something I am terrible at - is that Christa is in her mid-to-late 70s. Her store is what appears to be an old general store, or perhaps an old hardware store. It has high shelves running down the longer sides of the building, with an abundance of smallish bins - bins that are full to overflowing with brightly colored yarns. There is a narrow walkway between these walls of bins and the old-fashioned glass-front counters that also hold an abundance of yarns and yarn accessories (needlework tools, embellishments for yarn projects and some other really strange items that you might find at a flea market sale). Running down the center of the building is a wide, two-sided shelf area - where the eye-catching consumer goods might have resided in an old-time hardware store. It too is full to overflowing with skein after skein of lovely yarn.

As you stand in the doorway the right-side wall is full of the inexpensive synthetics (acrylics & orlons - discount store yarns) that you could find anywhere. They are all neatly stacked in the bins on the wall and you can tell that no one gets into them very often.

Not so the rest of the store.

The left-hand wall full of exciting special yarns (my last find was a skein of thick, thick singles that resembled dreadlocks - perfect for a sculpture project that I have banging around inside my head). There are jewel-toned handspuns, Italian designer yarns, silks, cashmeres, trendy-or-just-past-trendy eyelash and loop yarns, and buttery-soft wools. Then there are my favorites - the itchy, scratchy wools that are strong and lustrous and perfect for tapestries and sculptural work.

The center aisle of the store is heaped with boxes and crates of mostly wools. Wools for knitting socks, sweaters, hats, mittens, scarves. Wools for tapestry and other weaving projects. Wools blended with silks, wools blended with cashmeres. Handspun wools and wools from woolen mills I have heard of all my life.

You can tell that people come for the yarn in the center aisle and left wall. It's a jumbled visual cacophony as delightful as it is bewildering. Just the thought of pawing through it all makes me happy, giddy, fluttery - and I am by no means a fluttery person. That much yarn to peruse just makes my pulse race.

I have been to Christa's four times. The first time was a few days after a huge snow storm. When we got there Christa was still struggling to get the door open against a foot or more of snow that had blown in under the porch roof and up against the door. Abelisto and I helped her get the snow cleared. Christa reciprocated - I got really good deals that day, and every time since.

Usually when you arrive at Christa's you'll find her sitting in the back of the store knitting or crocheting something - her hands constantly in motion. As she says "It's what I do." She's always more than willing to stop "doing it" and dig through the piles and piles of yarn with you when you arrive.

Christa can (and does) tell you the story behind most of the yarn in her shop. Somehow amid the sumptuous chaos, she always knows exactly where every skein resides. If you say "I'm looking for a bit of burnt umber-colored yarn, perhaps a heavy singles, or two-ply..." she will say "Oh, ya, I got some of that over here" and lead you off on a treasure hunt for that perfect skein of yarn that you "gotta" have.

Tapestry Weaving

Photo of the tapestry (12:14a.m., July 17th) as it is being woven
on a homemade frame loom. You can see the saw-horse leg
brackets at the bottom corners of the photograph. The image
is a bit distorted from the wide-angle lens I used. You can see
several skeins and balls of yarn as well as a basket of yarn on top
of the AVL 8-harness loom behind the homemade frame loom.

Wanted to post a current photo of the tapestry before going to bed. It is late - after midnight here, but I am pretty much fully awake (due to coming home early from work, not feeling well, and making the mistake of laying down for 20 minutes to see if I could get to feeling better. Woke up 2 hours later... so no sleep for me for a while yet. Oh well, I have a good book I would like to finish.)
Read more...

You can see the shapes and shape-shifts that I am working on, as well as the color combinations (although as always with photographs, the colors are not exactly right, and even if I fix them to match closely on my computer, they won't look the same on any other computer...). The loom is working well. Tonight I put longer 2x4s in the leg brackets and now the loom is at standing-weaving height. Much better for my back, although my feet do not like it much. When they get too fatigued I can perch on the adjustable height stool from the physics lab.

Anyway, as I mentioned the loom is working well and the weaving generally goes fast considering it's all finger controlled. One shed (the space between the "up" warp and the "down" warp threads) is held open with a 5/8" fiberglass rod, the other I use a pick up stick - actually a long crochet hook - to select the opposite up & down threads. Not as fast as weaving a tapestry on a real tapestry loom - one with treddles and harnesses to lift the alternating warp threads - but still enjoyable to work on. Especially with the saw-horse legs! I was truly amazed to discover the difference that made. So much more workable than laying the frame on the dining room table and trying to weave with it, dealing with it scooting around like crazy, with bad ergonomics in bending over it for any length of time, and with the dark warp strings blending in with the dark color of the table top.

Back to this piece. I think I will stop weaving it very soon - striking a line about 1" taller than the tallest part and weaving up to that point. If everything were perfect with it I would fill the available weaving height (around 30"), but I was not as careful with the tension of the warp threads as I should have been. There are sections that are ever-so-slightly looser than other sections and it especially shows on the selvedges. I have too much draw-in at both sides. I should be able to finish what I am planning to weave on this piece over the weekend.

I will probably start another tapestry right away - one with better, more uniform, tension. I want to work from a plan/drawing on the next one. This tapestry has been woven randomly, or perhaps I should say it has been woven as mood and fancy took me, no real plan except to play with color and sinuous shapes.

If I do not do another tapestry right away I will probably work on the fabric-armor sculptures.

Not quite perfect

Last night I did more work on the tapestry. I have decided that I need to raise the height of the loom so that I can weave standing up. I should have known I would. I do all the weaving at the AVL loom standing up. I started stand-up weaving back when I was weaving fleece rugs.

Fleece rug, woven circa 1998, 3'x5'

I had to weave them standing up because it took a great deal of force to pack the unspun wool tightly enough to form a structurally sound rug. I wove them on an older loom that I did not mind modifying by added 50 lbs. to the beater to add more swinging force.

All the extra weight meant I needed more leverage than was possible sitting down. It also meant that unless I leaned with all my weight against the loom, the act of swinging the beater to pack the wool in would "walk" the loom across the floor.

Tonight I will be modifying the legs of the tapestry loom. I wish I could get better looking 2x4s to use. I bought finished dimensional lumber to make the loom - it seems incongruous to use framing lumber for the legs of it. Oh, well... it's not like there are no other incongruous parts of my art-studio-house-life.

Working in an organized studio

After Nova and I cleaned and organized my downstairs studio I moved the tapestry from the front room (I hesitate to call it a living room - there is not much in the way of traditional living room furniture in it - three desks, five bookcases, a stereo on an end table, and a printer stand...)


In these photos you can see the progress as of tonight. I will be weaving more as soon as I finish the website work I need to do. You can see the AVL loom that Abelisto bought for me a few years ago. Later in the summer I will be setting it up and teaching a couple people to weave.


It is really nice to have the studio organized and cleaned up. I will need to learn where we put everything. Most of it went into the tall cabinet you can see in the photo below. We got some crates at Target (plastic unfortunately - bad for sustainable living, but the price and availability were right) and sorted things into categories - sculpture-plaster, sculpture-clay, sculpture-found object, fiber work, tablet weaving, adhesives, beeswax & torches, pencils-pens-scissors-paints (non-encaustic),and general/miscellaneous.

Repaired the Sag

Although I did not take a before photograph, I think anyone looking at our back porch project now that it is almost finished would agree that a few inches make quite a difference - especially in curb (or backyard) appeal.

On Saturday Abelisto, Nova, Mike & I replaced the old, rotted-at-the-bottom post holding up (or not holding up) the corner of the porch roof. It was quite a process and involved adding sound wood at the bottom of the old post (after we removed it) and using it as the fulcrum for raising the roof (with a pry-bar) the necessary 3 inches to get the new post up under the roof.

Nova is scraping the old paint today and we will possibly paint it all this weekend - if we don't decide to clean the basement instead. It's scary down there...