Adventure Part 3

This week just flew by! For those of you who are interested in our progress framing, Erik really cranked it out this week. Since I have no framing skills, I spent the week drawing our plans and spinning. Yep, the wheel is together and functioning. And we ate home-cooked dinners. What a relief to be done with road food. Even good road food seems to include very little in the way of vegetables. Ever since we moved to our little apartment residence, we have had a salad every night. Our new neighbors have been wonderful and offered us so many kinds of support (including greens from their gardens)!

I’ve made progress on the spinning front as well. My spinning wheel is out of its box and set up in our little altar sitting area. In the afternoon, the sun streams in and tints the yarn I am spinning in golds and reds. This particular project is superwash merino and nylon mix with some pure nylon for one ply. My plan is to spin the braid in halves then make a 3 ply yarn with the nylon as a ply. If that doesn’t feel right, I’ll do an unbalanced two ply. I’ll have to sample, but don’t you love that shimmer of color to the nylon? from the church windows?

The other big news is that I took advantage of the trip to take a great lace weaving workshop with Laura Fry at the Gaelic College on Cape Breton. Great scenery, great company, and weaving – what’s not to like? I would have pictures but other people were taking them and I just didn’t. We laughed a lot; I met many new people who were warm, friendly, and shared my fiber passion; and we wove lots of samples. Laura shared her knowledge of fiber and wet finishing. She gave us lots of great tips on weaving ergonomically, an underrated but very important topic. My one big take-away: always do things with my thumb UP. It really made sense and I am converted. All in all, a perfect class – plus I brought home a rigid heddle loom. More progress on the weaving front.

Then it was a long drive back to our church and digging in again on construction. Erik accomplished a ton while I was gone – all the joists are in (that is the loft on the left) and we are putting down the loft underlayment tomorrow. We won’t get nearly done by the end of the trip but we have had a big impact so far. Pretty soon, the changes will be harder to see in pictures, but we are at it every day. Oh, and the body of the shawl is now 3/4 finished. Progress everywhere and still some play time. Toby thinks this is a great place and so do I.