Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Why do we torture ourselves?


Chuck and I are both paying a heavy price for spending the weekend lounging. After Friday's escapade at the Summer Circle performance, we spent Saturday attending Festival of the Sun in Old Town. The event was okay and had one of my wine tasting pet peeves -- not all of the booths were listed in the brochure received at the entrance. Okay, so that sounds like a little flaw to nag over, and I usually overlook it if it's a single table; but we're talking about half of the tables were NOT on the list I received. That's an issue for me because I usually mark up these lists with notes on what I did/didn't like for the wines sampled. For my knit-ins, I usually buy 3 to 4 bottles of wine, and probably go through another 3 bottles during the rest of the month. I really do enjoy serving new and interesting wines, especially if I knew they could be purchased locally. Usually at these tastings, the tables are too crowded to afford anything but a quick glance between the bottle being sampled and the list -- just enough of a peek for me to remember the name and make it to a table to write notes. Sure, I could probably write down the vintner and variety also, but more likely I'd write it wrong as opposed to circling the wrong wine if it were already on the list for me.

To round out our lazy weekend, Sunday was spent at charity knitting, receiving help from Nancy on my weaving, and picking up Sylvain after a weekend visit with his dad; which brings me back to my original subject line -- we're heading out for a holiday camping trip tomorrow after work. It's after midnight; Chuck's in the kitchen making granola and packing up our food; and I just finished cleaning the house and am waiting for the last bit of laundry to finish so that it can be packed to take with us or put away. All of these chores could easily have been accomplished this weekend, if we had the proper motivation.


Enough of me complaining -- we're getting just what we deserve with this. Let's talk weaving! In early May, I had warped my rigid heddle loom with a 6-napkin project. I'm only a pretend weaver, so don't really know the yarn lingo for weaving. The warp is a thin, green, 1/29, double-stranded cotton and the weft is a thicker, green 1/24 cotton that can be best described as boucle, but that just doesn't sound right to me.




This napkin project ended up being held up because I've been super busy, but I also had tension problems early on and only weaved a few inches before knowing that something was truly wrong. So, like I mentioned in the Sunday run-down, Nancy was patient enough to show me where things went wrong and how to fix 'em. In the process, the few inches I had needed to be torn out, so even with starting the project over, I had about 9-inches of weaving accomplished by Sunday night.



The napkins are going to be just plain weave, which is where I'm hoping the boucle-wannabe yarn will help by adding just the right amount of texture to the fabric. Sorry the photo to the left is so washed out, but hopefully you'll be able to see what I mean. Now, if only I could have a few nights of uninterrupted weaving time, maybe a full set would be done before my August knit-in. My July knit-in is next week, so there's no hope of being done by then. When I mentioned the possibility of bringing the loom camping, Chuck groaned, rolled his eyes, and reminded me how stuffed to the gills the Jeep will already be. So, I have to settle for Lisa's shawl and my Flat Feet socks (formerly Chuck's Flat Feet socks).

UPDATE: I just realized that next week's knit-in will be at Jane's, so maybe I'll have time to weave up a stack of napkins afterall. Hmmmmm.....

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