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Oops!, Doh! & Cowboy Magic

I have a variety of great, good, weird and bad news.  I will try to present it all in a cohesive way, but I might have to come up with some creative segues.  Great news (for my fam) is that everyone is safely back in the US from their summer adventures across the globe (Germany, New Zealand and Mexico) – back in school and at work, happy and excited about the year ahead.

Good news is that I am well on my way to a new site on WordPress that will have a couple of new features including a COMMENTS option . . . speaking of which . . . I have had a couple of interesting comments (through email) lately.  One from a long-time reader and Convergence pal, Kim from Santa Barbara, is a great tip that she got through Weavolution.  It is a product called “Cowboy Magic” and is used to detangle the manes and tails of horses.  Kim used it to create a shed in a very sticky mohair warp and reported that it worked likemagic!  Kim also used it on her bobbin so that the mohair would release from the bobbin more smoothly, and again, magic.  Thanks for the tip Kim, maybe it will allow me to use my 16-shaft loom with mohair which I haven’t been able to do because of the sticky shed problem.

Another comment from Sandy was in response to my recent explorations of doubleweave, gauzy tubes.  She suggested that I look on page 39 of  Ursina Arn-Grischott’s book “Doubleweave on Four to  Eight Shafts.”  I was very excited to dig my Grischott out and see what she had on this structure. OMG! as the youngsters are wont to say.  If you read my post on “Rainbow” and you have Grishott’s book you will see what Sandy commented on.  There is a doubleweave gauze tube with, yes, RAINBOW unwoven fill.  There are a few differences and yes, sadly for me, they make her project more interesting.  Her fill is spaced in the reed, the layer exchanges are closer together, her gauze is gauzy-er (cotton) and she has more colors of the rainbow. Plus it was published 13 years ago. Doh!

Speaking of “Doh!”, we recently had to have a beloved, old maple removed because of its poor health.  As you can see in the above pic, the promise of a “surgical removal” was a little optimistic.  My husband’s major concern is the breached roof and the big hole in the side of the garage.  My   frustration is over my collection of many, lovely terra cotta pots stored on a shelf in the garage that fell and broke when the tree hit the roof.  I guess I should be glad that we got away with some broken pots, but doh!!