Thankful

I am so thankful that the curtains are woven. However, there's alot of finish work to do on them later today which , once done, will make them finished and ready to go!

So it's on to the next project. I need to weave a bunch of rugs before the end of February. So far, I haven't woven one yet. I do have the warp on for the first 8 of them. I'm not sure what I'll use for all of them as weft but the first few will have loopers. I spent a day chaining loopers. We were able to find a source for these. They are natural, light grey and black. Of course, they were nasty when we got them so last summer I sat outside and shook them to remove the majority of the lint and divided them by color. I think LouAnn still has a huge box of loopers at her place. I guess once all of these are woven, I should relieve her of a few more of them, as in several huge bags of them. Once it's nice in spring, it's kind of fun to listen to a book on my mp3 player and sit outside shacking loopers. Kind of mindless but you know you're using something that's considered waste to make something that will be enjoyed and appreciated by people for a long time.

 I decided to chain them in groups of 20 for now. Not having decided a pattern to weave yet in stripes, this seemed to be the easiest way to go about it. The black loopers still had a fair amount of white lint on them. With a black warp, the lint would show, so I put them into the dryer in 3 groups. Boy, did the lint come off but also some of the loopers undid themselves from the chains so that took time again, to recount chains and be sure there were 20 on them. They're all ready to weave now!

I'm also thankful that we have that new bookcase at the center. That's because I can get rid of a whole shelf of notebooks. A couple of my friends had to quit weaving in the last few years so I became the keeper of notebooks. I've gone to conferences and weaving classes with these friends and I have some of the same notebooks although I know that they're not as organized as half of these. But, I have the information that's in most of these so there's no need for me to keep them. I held onto them until we had room for more at the center.

Now we do, so they're packed in the van ready to go up to Norris  for everyone to look at and get ideas from. I looked at them again as I stacked them on top of my loom. There are so many wonderful ideas. We took classes from so many different weavers. Anita Mayer, Barbara Miller, Sallie Guy to name a few. Each teacher specialized in a different style of weaving and we all benefit from their knowledge and ideas.
I'm hoping that these notebooks will inspire new ideas for us to use in our weaving. I love it that so many of the Tuesday Weavers are finding their niche in the weaving world, figuring out what kind of things they like to weave and going for it! That's what makes me thankful and happy!

So, it's off to hemming curtains for me before I can weave a rug but it promises to be a busy week in my studio for me!
Until next week, keep weaving!
Carol