From Tablet to Inkle

Yet more weaving. Yay, weaving. This one was in record time too. I warped it up at Thursday fighter practice (also talked to one of the marshals about learning to marshal next time). Then I stayed up late weaving the first bit. Then Friday I was having a bad day. I've had headaches and wonkiness more often than not the last week after months of being relatively headache free. Anyway, I was feeling irritable and obsessive. Any attempts to accomplish things on the computer just resulted in me wasting an hour or so on nothing. So finally I just decided to weave and pretty much wove up the whole 3+ yards that day.

Today Knights Errant came to Santa Cruz and we had a fantastic afternoon. Ron got in lots of great fighting and I warped up my loom for my second ever inkle project. I had to go back and fix things about a half dozen times (forgot where the "open" vs "heddle" threads went and reversed them, missed out some blue threads and had to add them belatedly, and so on). Nevertheless, even with mistakes, I think I had it fully warped in well less than 2 hours, in stark contrast to warping a tablet weaving project.

I wove the first few feet of the inkle project and I'm fairly happy with it. It doesn't look quite like I pictured, but it's a fun simple pattern. The nice thing about inkle weaving is that the pattern also shows up on the reverse side. Since this piece is destined to be a hair ribbon rather than sewn down as trim, I though that might be a good feature.

I learned a bit more about how to do complex stuff with inkle weaving recently and it sounds agonizingly slow. Nevertheless, I may try some at some point.

The Knights Errant practice was lots of fun and the food was fantastic. Garlic steak cooked on the BBQ pit. Yum. Sky got to run around with other kids, play in mud puddles, beep people's noses, etc. She even started to sing with me, or back and forth with me. That took the cake for cuteness for the day.

More String: Ram's Horn and Vines

I've finally got some pictures up to share the tablet weaving I've been doing. Both of these shots are of the bands still on the loom. The one in purple, red, white and gold was my first attempt at this kind of pattern, the one I mentioned earlier where the tension bar broke in the middle. I'd taken a whole sequence of shots during the stringing mishaps and the process of getting it going, but most of them are blurry so I'll spare you unless someone has a burning desire to see the before and after shots.

The black band with green and blue and cream is a variant on the pattern frequently called the "vine" or "flame" (depending primarily, it seems, on whether the weaver is using warm or cool colors...mine therefore being a vine pattern :P ). I was rather inordinately pleased that it came out just the way I wanted on the first try. I did spend most of a day stringing it up, as usual. I made one threading error I caught at once and fixed quickly. And one stringing miscalculation which has introduced an interesting "flaw" in the band. The last card of black has only three strands of string instead of the usual four. This means that that side is slightly more thin and loose than the other side, and it means that card tries to "fall" out of position quite routinely. That aside, it is hardly noticeable and I'm fairly pleased with the experiment. If I'd been more patient I could have added in some of the crochet yarn I bought for weft, but I was too excited about beginning to weave!

I've been getting lots of compliments about these recent bands and the last belt, and I think I am opening myself to paid commissions. Now I just have to figure out a fair asking price. They do take a lot of hours...but I can't charge the moon either. Bah!

Off now to weave some more... Bwahahaha! String!!!

Weaving and Twining and String, oh my!

Recently I have taken up again with fiber arts, learning twining (which I'd never heard of) and inkle weaving (which I've wanted to know how to do for years). And, having acquired an inkle loom at long last, I also tried out card weaving on the inkle loom (a common practice).

I have to say I have mixed reports about my inkle loom. At first I was quite happy with it. It wasn't perfectly balanced to weave in my lap but I could make it happen, and it worked great sitting at a table. And it was in fact quite a bit easier to warp a card weaving project on the loom as opposed to the various and sundry ways I'd tried over the years to warp up a backstrap project. The most finicky part of any inkle loom is inevitably the tension bar. The need for a good tension bar is, in fact, why I didn't attempt to get one of my more hardware-inclined friends (or husband) to simply make me an inkle loom. The rest of the design is straightforward enough. But the tension bar is tricky.

My tension bar broke yesterday.

I was about a 1/3 of the way into my second full project on the loom, having also finished a very short inkle project on it. My first full project, a belt for a friend, came out beautifully. I need to get a better picture than the one here, but all I had handy was my cell phone before I gave it away. It's a pattern of diamonds based on an Anglo-Saxon archaeological find. I used 100% wool due to a desire for authenticity and temporary insanity...but despite getting bogged down for weeks when I had to back-trace a mistake which is painfully difficult and slow and tedious when working with wool, it wasn't as bad as I remembered and I think I'd do it again with enough incentive. At the very least I think I want one for myself before I give up on wool for another eight years.

That turned out well enough that I got ambitious. The next pattern I tried is easily the hardest I've ever tried. It is closely related in concept to the next hardest pattern I'd ever attempted. That previous one is still half-finished in my mother's attic. I despaired of ever getting it going again after such a long gap--I'd already been working at it for over a year off and on when it got relegated to storage. But after the project I just did, I think I could pick up the other one.

This pattern, known as the ram's horn pattern, was a real pain. I didn't start with the best directions--I used a blurry printout of a blurry scan of one page of what I think was a longer set of instructions. I recopied it once in pencil to get a better look at it and then later on the computer with color to help with my threading. The biggest problem was that I misread the S/Z threading instructions for nearly half the cards, five on one half and five on the other of the 22 card pattern.

I entered what I had threaded into Guntram's Tablet Weaving Thingy (GTT) and then played with it until it made the pattern I had expected to get. If only I'd thought to do that before threading, it could have saved me a lot of grief. Realizing that it was the S/Z threading rather than a mis-aligning of cards was bad news. I had three options at that point: painstakingly untie and unthread the mis-threaded cards, and possibly some of their neighbors given that I'd done a semi-continuous warp, and then rethread them correctly; cut the knots off to rethread, reducing the time by about half but reducing the final length of the project by several inches; or see what I could do with the threading I had.

I chose the latter option, determining that the core of the design could be salvaged by flipping some of the cards and turning them so that the outline color--white--was still where it was supposed to be. My inside and outside colors became somewhat muddied, but still came out in fairly pleasing places. This was, thankfully, a test project in cotton since I was well aware there might be difficulties with so complex a pattern with such minimal instructions to go on, so I was willing to be slightly cavalier about the whole thing.

An acceptable compromise pattern determined, I began weaving. The right half of the pattern immediately looked just as expected, but the left was off. After tweaking it about, comparing it to the pattern and the opposite half, weaving and unweaving about 5 times, I finally got it all aligned properly and I was off.

During the first 1/3 of the project I still encountered problems frequently where I would get off the pattern one way or another. The turning pattern was a lot to hold in one's head. But I got the hang of it, in both directions, and then I was off.

And that was about when the tension bar broke. I don't really understand what's wrong with it, but the cap on one end has come off and the bar itself won't loosen. It'll turn, but it seems to tighten no matter which direction it's turned and is actually marking up the wood, it's so tight. Very frustrating.

At last I decided to treat the tension bar like one more fixed bar, removed the project from one and then two of the other pegs, using other objects--a bobbin of thread, a flat package, a ball of twine with a hole big enough to fit over one of the pegs--to increase the tension again, removing them as needed to ease the tension. It was very jury-rigged, but it worked, and I finished the project.

It's a fantastic size and weight for trim, in lovely rich colors, but I may keep it as a belt until I make a more belt-like belt for myself. That might be dangerous though. The longer I think of it as all of a piece, the harder it will be to cut it for trim.

Anyway, my success with multiple projects has inspired me weave more, yet the problems with the tension bar make me hesitate to start new projects until it's fixed or replaced. In any case, it's very good to be playing with string again.

Tired

Teaching is exhausting. And hard. And exhausting.

Get up. Go to work. Make last minute photocopies. Look over lesson plan. Teach. Supervise recess. Teach more. Supervise lunch. Teach. Supervise recess. Teach very restless kids. Greet parents as they come for their kids 7 hours later. Supervise afterschool kids for another hour and half. Have something go wrong so I have to go home even later. Ride home. Eat dinner in a haze. Realize it has become 7pm. Frantically prepare lesson plan and worksheets and handouts and activities for the next day. Fall into uneasy unconsciousness far later than is a good idea. Possibly wake in the middle of the night for more preparations.

Rinse. Repeat.

And that's without the minute by minute attempts to coax kids who would rather be swimming or playing to write hour after hour at writing camp.

A Teaching Job!!

Written Sunday...

I got a job!!

I'm going to be teaching Creative Writing at a summer day camp, probably to 6-8 year olds. I'll let you know next week when I know more--as in first hand knowledge. I plunge in feet first on Monday. I know it's full time work with a flexible end time because the teachers pitch in with day care afterward...so whenever the last kid goes home that's when we get to whether that's 5:15 or 6:00.

I'll have a set curriculum but I'm not sure yet how detailed it is. I hope I get it soon--I only have this weekend before I start!

Because it's a summer program, I'll probably only have a few weeks of work. But it will be good to be teaching again and I think it will be fun to teach Creative Writing for once, a subject near and dear to my heart (I snuck it into my college composition courses too). And of course it will be a welcome change of pace--and quite likely a shock to the system. Going from my amorphous schedule where sometimes I pull 12 hour days and sometimes take the day off and often work a few hours here and a few hours there to plunge into a 40-43hr regimented work week...We'll see how I do.

At any rate, I'm hopeful and I'm excited and I hope this works out well.

By the way, to sneak in the distressing news at the end, I was a passenger in a car accident earlier this week. We're all fine. It was one of those crazy ones where it sounds like it should be horrific and yet blessedly everyone walked away. A semi truck lost control on the down hill on the 17 just as we were all having to stop for construction ahead. It hit something on the order of eight cars and another (smaller but still big) truck. We were the very last car hit so it had slowed down quite a bit. We were jolted and I've been stiff and achy (and today had a weird experience with my arms while trying to swim that may or may not have been related, though I can't think what else it could be) but I'm very, very thankful it was as minor as it was.

Quick Update

2010 continues to be plagued by illness and injury. Stop.

2010 continues to be an intense & fun time for playing in the SCA. Stop.

Recently begun Viking wire weaving. Stop. Just learned inkle weaving at long last. Stop. Still trying to find time to spin and tablet weave. Stop. Taught a class on bardic music -- went well. Stop.

End of Transmission

Bios and Characters

I don't feel up to covering life tonight. So I'll cover two "problems" that are at a little more of remove.

One has to do with writing fiction. For once I find myself with a real conflict between world building and character building. Normally my stories tend to start with concept and people. The characters aren't all that hard--their names, yes, even the details of their backgrounds. But who they are, how they'll react in a given situation, that comes whole cloth as often as not.

But now I find myself with world building reasons to have certain characters conform to medieval humors. Specifically, I have two characters who should be more phlegmatic. Actually, one of them is decently phlegmatic to begin with (thank goodness). But our hero? A phlegmatic hero. Goodness. And it doesn't help that while sources seem pretty consistent about definitions for, say, choleric, they are all over the map for phlegmatic. Do I believe that they are "loyal, easygoing, quiet, witty, and a good listener. But they are also indecisive, not goal oriented, sarcastic, teasing and resist change." Or do I believe "Sluggish, pallid, cowardly" or perhaps "calm, unemotional."

I mean, it could be funny to try to have a hero who is "sluggish, pallid, and cowardly" but I just don't think that is this story. Ok, maybe pallid.

Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, claims, "Phlegmatics tend to be self-content and kind. They can be very accepting and affectionate. They may be very receptive and shy and often prefer stability to uncertainty and change. They are very consistent, relaxed, rational, curious, and observant, making them good administrators and diplomats. Unlike the Sanguine personality, they may be more dependable."

So are they loyal, kind and affectionate or unemotional and cowardly? Are they sluggish--one site even said lazy--and not goal oriented or are they curious and dependable?

And whatever they are, do I really want to change my hero to be that? Or do I want to rewrite my world some more instead?

The other problem on my mind this evening seems simple by comparison: how to write a biographical blurb about myself. It has to be a serious academic one, thus ruling out the lighthearted fiction author style ones I know best which enumerate the number of cats the author has and throw in a witty joke or two. But it's hard to write a serious academic bio when most would cover things like where I teach now (er, independent tutoring? not quite what they had in mind) or where I'm studying for my PhD (um, nope, not doing that either) or the cool internationally renowned awards I've gotten (uh un, none of those either. I have yet to undergo the painful nowning process, let alone become re-nowned, nor do I have any re-nowned awards).

So, I think to myself, I can talk about my "research interests." That's always a good one to go on about for a while. But my research interests are...disconcertingly diverse. I mean, I just spent a day doing research at Stanford. In fact, I was so excited and absorbed that I missed lunch. But was I researching a new article on Shakespeare? No. I was researching Pictish women. Pictish women. That's what? Only 7+ centuries earlier and the other end of the island. And the classes I taught? Science Fiction as Social Commentary. Changing Climate.

You have to admit that Renaissance literature (English with a splash of Scottish), medieval literature (especially Irish and Welsh), medieval material culture, Pictish history and material culture, science fiction and fantasy, mythology, writing on topics in environmental science, religion, and ancient Christianity are pretty darn diverse. But that's what I work on. Mostly.