Fresh Starts

Summer is here, both seasonally and by the school calendar.  We (hahahahaha--that would be the royal 'we,' since the majority of the collective we just stayed out of my way while I was indulging this recent compulsion) kicked off this splendid season by cleaning out the mudroom.  This, it turns out, was long overdue; I found school papers under the carpet from two years ago and was forced to admit that my "Annual Mudroom Cleaning Extravaganza" was misnamed.

We started off looking like this:

Shoes, boots, winter coats, gloves, scarves, and school gack were everywhere.

One corner, which I had been unable to see since last November, was filled with last season's hockey jerseys, which were patiently waiting for me to repair them (how did this get to be my job?),

and an assortment of truck parts that had so far failed to pack themselves up and leave my house.





The first  challenge was to figure out what these things were so I could fill out the return form.  I thought about writing  "big black tubey things" and "short silver cups with no bottoms," but that seemed kind of girly.  Instead, I spent a solid half hour poking through the catalog and trying to find pictures of these things so that I could match the numbers on the forms with the actual auto parts and hopefully not look like a complete lemonhead.

Part two of the "Survivor--Mudroom" challenge was fitting the two big black tubey things back into their box.

I remember doing these kinds of puzzles in school so they could assess our 'spatial relations' aptitude.  I thought I had done pretty well on those tests, but it must have been a fluke because these little buggers had me stumped. I flipped them and turned them, arranged and rearranged.  Finally, after I had the pair of them interlocked in the box with only a teeny bulge poking through the top of the cardboard, I decided to apply an extra measure of packing tape and hope for the best.

Presumably they will not escape on their return journey to the auto parts place, but there's no need to worry about that yet because El Husbando still has not taken them out of the garage to ship them back.  The jerseys are waiting there too, so they'll have some familiar company while they wait.

The mudroom purge yielded a few forgotten treasures.  This is some rusty antique-y thing that El Husbando picked up at an auction back in the days before his purchases were properly supervised.  We don't really know what it is, but it migrates around the house and every once in a while one of the kids picks it up and cranks it until we all yell at him to stop. We think it is meant to scare the crows away from the crops, although I have some doubts about that because it has to be hand cranked, and once someone is outside cranking it, wouldn't that person's presence be enough to scare the birds away without bothering with this headache inducing crank thing?

Here is a large quantity of duct tape, useful for fixing vacuum hoses that have suffered dog bites and also, according to an old colleague of mine, for securing prisoners of war, although we have not yet had occasion to test this theory.

Hiding behind the boxes of jerseys and auto parts were Mr. Potato Head's right arm, some Guatemalan worry dolls, a wandering snack container and, inexplicably, the letter C.

These boots remain a sore spot for me.  They are completely worn through at the sole, making them both a bad purchase and useless for out door wear, but the uppers are in excellent shape and I keep thinking I should be able to make something clever out of them.  Until that time, they are retained as doorstops to keep the French doors from slamming shut.

And now the mudroom looks like this:

 It's so clean and neat that I'm tempted to hold a party in there,  although that kind of thinking probably goes a long way to explaining why I don't entertain much.

The new weaving gig proceeds with mixed results.  The colors of this scarf are pretty, but it was a nightmare to weave because the yarn began to shred part way through, which you can see in the upper right corner of the photo.  Life is too short to have to deal with that kind of stuff, so I ended the scarf early and stuck the extra yarn in a jar to be used for knitting.

I'm much happier with this next project.  Isabel and I stuck it on the big loom so we could start weaving right away. It was easy to set up and the pattern was easy to follow and the weaving was entirely trouble free and the scarf turned out way cool, if a little wide for my taste.

Plus, after I ran out of the blue yarn for the scarf, there was enough warp left over for me to make this little bonus hoozit from some other scrap yarn.  It's the same pattern as the scarf, but I love the way the yarns interact.

And now we come to the Project that Must Not be Named.  This is the yarn that showed up on the box mentioned in the last post.  I measured the warp and got it all sorted out on the loom.




Or so I thought.




 A few repeats after this picture was taken, I advanced the warp and watched in horror as the middle strings sagged a half inch below the rest of the warp.  This is what is known in the weaving universe as A Bad Thing.  I kept weaving for a while longer (one-fifth of the way through the project, to be precise), and the problem got worse.  So then I got the bonehead rookie weaver idea of winding the warp forward and tightening everything up from the back.  Only when you do that, the cloth you've already woven gets all wiggly and icky and instead of solving any problems, you create about one hundred more.  And so I unwove the entire project and retied the warp from the front, which pretty much erased all the warm and happy feelings I was having about how quickly this project was going.

Now the loom looks like this:



Want a close-up?



There's no weaving there yet; the white stuff is just some T.P., which is very useful for getting your strings all lined up and ready for the actual weaving.

I thought I would really hate undoing my project and then having to weave it again, but It turns out I'm enjoying the sight of the warp waiting for me to get back to work on it.  Weaving, it would seem,  lends itself well to do-overs.  The biggest parts of the project are planning and setting up the warp, and as long as you don't have to trash your warp, it's not a debilitating hardship to have to do more of the fun stuff.  At least that's how I feel now.  I might not be so relaxed if  it happens again.

Below is our nature shot of the week.  El Husbando came tearing into the house the other day and demanded that we all run outside to see this turtle (tortoise?  I feel obligated to call the ones I see on land tortoises, but that doesn't explain the snapping turtles we find on the roads).



Here's the picture of the whole turtle, including the dinosaur-like spikes on his tail.



And, just so you can have a true sense of his size, here he is with my foot for reference.  I wear a size 8 shoe.

And that's about all for now. July promises to be a month of self-imposed knitting, spinning, and weaving deadlines, hopefully with pictures to go along, and maybe even some summer adventures with the kids.