Only 4 weeks, according to this system, since last I posted.  Today is the first Saturday of April, and its cool and gloomy outside.  My arm has been making pretty steady progress, although I still take pain pills at night, I can go all day without any.  I do notice that range of motion continues to improve, and I bet that if I were more diligent about my exercises and stretching that it would be even better.

Well being the weekend, Judi is doing homework and laundry, so I am about to head out the door and do the grocery shoping - whoopee how exciting.

I really should put more interesting, more philosophical stuff into this blog - and I really should do this more often if it is to be of any benefit to me, let alone any unfortunate person who happens to stumble upon my incoherent ramblings.

Monday

Here we are again, its only been 6 or so weeks since my last post, this is getting kind of frequent.  Anyway, 3 weeks ago I bought an Asus 10 inch tablet, with a keyboard, and just today I downloaded the Blogger app for use on this fine new machine.  Maybe if I have even easier access than via my google account, I will remember to use this more.  
I am now two weeks (tomorrow morning) post shoulder surgery.  The new shoulder seems to be working although there is still a fair amount of pain.  It is however, of a different nature than before the surgery.  It does not feel like the arthritis in my shoulder did.  Now I feel the incision, and I have pain in my biceps muscle, which I suspect is from not using it for  a couple of weeks, and now trying again.
Interesting learning to use this new application for typing, some things work just like in M$ windows, like ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy & paste, but try to find the spell checker !  I still have to figure that out.
Will be  leaving in a few minutes for physical therapy, more  later.
 

Now this is confusing.  The new format of blogger, that is.  So I have had this blog account for 3 or 4 years, and I post something a few times a year, then I forget that I have this, and don't come back for months.  But when the blogger folks converted my account to their new format, well they confused the dates of prior posts.  So every post from be fore this has the same date.  They all appear to be from about two months ago.  Makes a lot of sense don't it.
Anyway, I am posting this on Sunday Jan 27th 2013.
Spent a fairly quiet weekend at home, did very little, over slept, fed the birds in the back yard, watched YouTube videos, day dreamed about vacations.  Wouldn't it be nice to have either a cruising boat, maybe a "trawler tug" or if one stays on land, maybe a class A or C motor home.  Ahhhh dreams.

Thanksgiving day 2012.  A few things about this holiday that come to mind.  If Thanksgiving were on the last Thursday of November, as it was once celebrated, then this year it would have been on the fifth Thursday of the year, why is that important one might ask.  Well the answer is simple, if Thanksgiving were on the fifth Thursday of the year, then it would fall on my birthday, which would mean that I would get my birthday as a holiday from work without having to burn a day of vacation.  Other than that it is the one day of the year when I get to grind up raw cranberries, an orange, with a little bit of sugar, to make the simplest of cranberry relishes, but also my favorite way to eat the berries.  I must say that I don't think very much of turkey unless I can have it with this relish.

Ya know, I've had this silly blog for a few years, and I actually post once or twice a year - hardly much of a blog is it?

There is actually much more on my youtube channel than here.  But if I would regularly use this it might be worth while, now if only I could discipline myself to use this. . .

But that would then make this feel like work.

Double weave

I finally finished warping the double weave shawl today, getting the loom "tied up" and was able to begin the weaving of the two separate layers that will become the front sides of this shawl.  The colors look great!  Double weave takes a bit longer to do and I have to be careful, lest I inadvertently somehow lock the layers together at some point.  But I am being careful, and with about 6 to 8 inches woven so far, I'm off to a good start.

Warping Direction

Which direction should one warp their loom?
Front to Back or Back to Front!

Before I had my Louet loom, I always warped front to back. I know most people tend to go the other way, but I learned to warp a loom from Deborah Chandler's book, "Learning to Weave", and while she explains both methods, she covers FtB first and then does BtF. I just never learned the other way. And since it was about 6 or 7 years after I read that before I took my first weaving class, that didn't do anything to change my mind. Besides, the weaving instructor at Siever's, where I took that one class, did nothing to disabuse me from warping FtB. She was teaching Double weave, not basic setup.

Why am I even discussing this today? The Louet loom came with a DVD that I have studied carefully, it teaches BtF warping. I have now tried warping BtF a couple times and I have learned a few things about that method that I want to comment on.
The loom is designed to be warpped BtF. Once one follows the clear directions in the video then BtF is not the tangled mess that I had always previously thought it was. So I will use that method more often in the future.

But right now I am in the middle of warping up the loom to make a double weave L shaped shawl for my mohter-in-law. This will be made with Harrisville Design's Shetland weight wool. Which is a lovely looking, but very "sticky" yarn to work with. I have the sneaky suspicion, confirmed in the Louet video, that there are occasions when FtB wraping makes sence, and when I need double the threads per inch in the warp, and very sticky yarn, that FtB is the way to go with this.

In the past I sometimes skipped having a "cross" in my warp as I wound it onto the warping board, and often I ended up with tangles in the warp as I pulled it through the reed.  So now I am being more careful about using a cross to keep the threads in sequence as I warp.  This should keep the threads straighter and easier to work through the loom.

So here is the partly sleyed reed for this project.  I have about 2 more inches to sley and then the rest of the set up process before I can weave.  But I am really enjoying looking at the colors in this warp.  And I wanted to just make a few comments about this.