It has been an unusually dry summer. It is normal for us to have a couple weeks of scorchingly hot July, but usually we have a lot of warm, humid, rainy weather. This year, we got scorching for ALL of July and good bit of August, too, and very very little rain. I live in the swamps. It is very normal to walk my land and run into squishy places. In September, we dug a hole 2 feet down and were still in dry sand.

This week, the weather is making up for that. I’m not sure how much has fallen, but we had 2 inches in the guage the other day (one single day),and there has been more rain than sun this week. Rain and rain and rain and wind. No hurricanes, which I am grateful for, but much blustery, rainy autumn weather.

Given the weather, outdoor work is not desirable, although we have much to do (the years’ firewood was delivered on Friday, we have the kiddos’ playstructure to build, I still have a few plants to get in the ground, the new garden bed needs built…)

We had indoor projects today. Finally got the hook bar up in the wardrobe

Also have the mirror up on the back side of it, but didn’t get a photo of that.

We had hoped to get the woodstove cleaned out and ready for the season, but that didn’t end up happening. It took many many hours to chivvy the children through their schooling today. And the baby wouldn’t settle at all.

All the same, I stole a couple hours to start my big scary project:

A number of months ago, I purchased for myself a children’s educational toy. Melissa and Doug is a line of really good-quality, often wooden, no-battery, use-your-imagination toys. This particular one is, obviously, a loom. It is extremely well-made for a frame loom in the pricerange, although the notch spacing is quite wide. Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I pulled it out, got it assembled and gave it a try. I used only the yarn it came with – a colourful but quite stretchy acrylic yarn – to make a practice placemat. It turned out okay and I learned some stuff

I learned, for one thing, that the big wooden needle it comes with is clunky and awkward. I dont like it. It is meant for small children, after all. But, I am not a small child, so I need a better bodkin

I also learned that the spacing on the notches is too wide for my uses. If I double-warped it, it was better (I did the placemat in double warp), but it was still only about 4 warps per inch. I needed to make that narrower.

A couple hours with a ruler, a drill and a pack of brad nails will hopefully remedy that.

I had a specific reason for all of this. I wasnt simply messing around with a new toy (although that would be okay, too). I have some loved ones getting married next month. I can’t attend the wedding – it’s too far away – and I don’t really like gift registries – they feel kind of impersonal and sterile to me, so I decided in my usual leap-before-you-look sort of way to make them some placemats. Linen ones, no less, having never woven anything larger than a dishcloth in my life. I ordered in some horrendously expensive French linen yarn, modified my loom, and jumped off the cliff of manaiacal, relentless diletantism.

Since today is a rainy day, with another adult present to share the baby-minding, I decided to get started. Warping took forever. I am warping in cotton, mostly because I am not certain how much yarn each mat will take and I only have so much of the linen. Cotton is far cheaper and more accesible. I had to rescue the warp threads from the cat a couple times, but with time, some practice in patience and a few sotto voce salty words, I got it strung.

Getting started is often the slowest, hardest part of a project, especially when you 1) have no idea what you’re doing, and 2) want the finished product to be worth gifting. Slowly, carefully, painstakingly, I got the anchor lines of weft woven and then about 5 rows of actual weaving. Here is the fruit of my afternoon:

I am hoping the rest of it goes considerably faster or else they’ll have been married a couple years by the time I finish their wedding present….