Well, it's been a jam-packed week over here. We've been on the go a lot, and lots of people have stopped by. I'm ready for some concentrated down-time, but I think I'll have to wait to get it . . .

Guests

It's been a very social week. Last Saturday, Emil and I went to an open house at a colleague's home in Fowlerville, then swung by Randy and Marty's house to get their truck, which they were loaning to us so we could move the last of the stuff out of the Ann Arbor house.

And so, on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, we did just that. We filled the truck three times, and still have about a box's worth of possessions in the house. (I'm hoping to fetch them tomorrow.) We're all set to close on Tuesday, and it does finally feel like we're moving forward now. Although we're not exactly making money on this deal, I feel immense relief to think we're out of the real estate market. It's hard to tell what's actually going on with the U.S. economy because the information is partial and conflicting, but it can't be good news, paying for the war . . . Sooner or later those chickens will come home to roost. I do get the feeling that there's massive creative accounting going on in the government, and the next president is going to get to clean up a tremendous mess. (But then, I would think that, wouldn't I?)

At any rate. As I was saying . . . on Wednesday Martin and Randy came over for a cookout and to pick up the truck. Then on Thursday, Susan (of Clarence and Susan) was here from Austin; she took her son (and his tuba! No mean feat!) to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp for a few weeks. She had lunch with us before heading off to the airport, and home.

Today Louise came over for a while, which was nice and low-key. This was good, because I finally got to give her her birthday socks (which she got to see in progress on her birthday, at least). That makes a nice transition to:

Fiber Arts

Here are those socks:







Aren't they just wonderfully blue? I really enjoyed working with that yarn; it was a treat for the eyes.

I've been at work on many fiber projects lately, actually. I've pulled out the Brio loom, tied it up (that takes way longer than I think it should) and I got started on the kitchen tablecloth. You may recall that one of my goals or dreams or what have you was to get tenure, buy a house, and then weave every piece of cloth needed for it? Well, that's a big project; one hardly knows where to begin. But as it happens, we moved our old dining room table and chairs up from Ann Arbor, and ended up putting two of those chairs around our current kitchen table (a small blond square thing we got at Meijers for $30 twenty or so years ago). And lo and behold, the table now needs dressing up, so it seemed a logical place to start.

So here's the beginning of the tablecloth:



Working with the Brio is a good way for me to learn, but it also imposes some interesting constraints on the whole process

For one thing, the Brio loom only makes fabric that's about five inches wide, so I'll need to weave this thing in strips and then join the strips together. The total cloth will need to be about 5'6" square. So, allowing for edging and joining of the strips of fabric somehow (maybe with a crochet border or something), and assuming I can weave a length of 5'6" (questionable at best), I would need about 10 or 11 of these strips.

I really can't think about or plan anything that elaborate at the moment. So I'm approaching this as if it were a quilt; first I'll see how big each section is going to be, then I'll decide which color palette to work with for each strip (and begin with some sense of how much of each color I want in that strip), and let them emerge one by one, until I see a pattern. I can live with that; it'll give me plenty of chance to experiment and learn, since there's no reason those strips have to be identical . . .

Another limitation with the Brio loom is that it is only set up to do plain weave (that's the familiar over-under-over-under pattern). At the moment that's quite enough for me; by the time I get this tablecloth together, I hope I'll be ready to master more, though. I'm really interested to see if I can improvise harnesses for the loom, so that I can experiment with more advanced techniques. (At the moment, dear reader, all that's important to know is that four harnesses would enable me to weave twill, so that's my goal.) Today I improvised additional shuttles (those things that carry the yarn that you weave with), which made me very happy; I'm looking forward to tackling the harnesses.

One limitation I can't overcome, though, is the sett (or number of threads per inch). This loom's sett is fixed; I'm constrained to using sport- or worsted-weight yarn, or the weave will be too loose.

I think eventually I would like to have a good-quality table loom. I thought I wanted a floor loom, but at least for the short term, a table loom would do everything I wanted and would be cheaper. Besides, it would be advantageous to be able to pick the thing up and move it from room to room, too. So now I'm going to have to put that on my Universal Gift List . . . more on that later.

Garden

The garden has been neglected in all the hubbub, but it seems to be doing well despite the neglect:



See the chair? I call it my Don Corleone chair, because whenever I sit in it I'm reminded of Don Corleone running around in the tomatoes . . . The big difference (well, okay, one of the big differences) between me and Don Corleone, though, is that I do not have heart problems . . . :)