Dress Journal #7/
Weaving Journal #3:
Babysitting & Other Mindless Tasks

     It is after 9:00 at night and I'm doing one of the three most boring tasks in the fiber arts world: babysitting my biggest dyepots full of yarn. Watching the temperature on the thermometer slowly climb toward 185 degrees is right up there with watching grass grow or bridges rust. It's pretty dull.
     It's been a day of not terribly exciting tasks. I started this morning with reskeining (and measuring) the 11/2 Shetland that I dyed blue last year, then skeining enough additional gray 11/2 Shetland to make 6,000 yards. Each skein is about 600 yards, and all together it accounts for just under two of the four pounds of 11/2 Shetland I have for weaving the dress fabric.
     My mind wanders a lot when I'm doing something as mindless as skeining. It is a pretty mindless task: just remember to stop when the counter hits 600. At some point around the 3,000-yard mark, I suddenly realized that there was a solution to my very limited supply of 11/2 Shetland: switch the colors. Doh! I felt like a complete idiot for not seeing it earlier. I originally looked at the draft with the idea that the warp would be black and the weft would be gray. If woven that way, more than 600 yards of black "warp" would be loom waste. I was angsting over whether or not I'd have enough, and what would happen if I didn't dye enough yarn when I suddenly remembered--this is a balanced twill draft. It doesn't matter if I swap the colors around. I can measure and chain the warp out of the gray, then if I still have yarn left, I can dump the rest of the yarn into a black dye pot so I'll have more than enough weft. I finished skeining the 6,000 yards so most of the weft is dyed; I'll dye more if I need it once the warp is on the loom.
     That little problem solved, I turned to my next task: measuring and winding a warp for linen towels. I'm planning to weave a couple "sample" towels out of the same line flax I have set aside for another set of towels, so I measured a 2 1/2 yard warp and began winding it. Warp winding is another pretty mindless task--all I need to do is remember the sequence for the cross: over and under going out, under and over coming back. I need 280 ends for towels, so it's 140 trips out and 140 trips back--I keep count by tying a piece of string around every 10 ends. Once the warp is chained, I can begin dressing the loom, but I can't do anything until the warp is wound, so I stand there in front of my warping board, wrapping yarn in a pattern around pegs.
     I end up listening to podcasts as I'm doing many of these mindless tasks. Today it was NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour--a 45-minute podcast of silliness having to do with what's going on the the world of popular culture (movies, music, comic books, etc.). Once I run out of podcasts, it's on to audiobooks; I need to check with the local library to see what's available, preferably for download. At any rate, I need something to keep my mind occupied while I do these mindless tasks.