SpinnySpinny

Now I have almost all the photos online, there are only a few remaining. I have the images and I just need to get them ready to put up. Then maybe I can get back to articles? I have photos for one that have been sitting around for a while.

This morning I went off to the de Young Museum. I’m not normally a huge fan of art museums, but it was a big party for the new building and it was open free all weekend. (And I do mean all. I got there at sunrise, apparently the only time there wasn’t a huge line.) I didn’t know what they had because the old one closed before I moved here. I found the textile collection, with a good number of pieces currently on display. But also there is a textile library. It’s only open by appointment, but I could look in the glass door and see shelves of books. I will go back when it isn’t so much a zoo and see what it’s like.

I don’t know what it is, I try to sit down and update the website and it’s always something. I came home to find that The Boyfriend lost his keys and locked himself out of the apartment, and in the middle of working our network comes crashing down for a hardware failure. But, no, I’d rather not be in New Jersey. My sister’s place is far nicer than ours, but we have a better Internet connection.

I’m adding comments to the COE pages, both from the judges and my own. You can see how individual items were scored and what I thought about it. It’s amazing how much work you can get done trapped in a flying tin can with nothing else to do for five hours. (Many thanks to United for having a spiffy frequent flyer program that lets me get my butt out of Economy on a regular basis. Although we won’t talk about what happened to my vegan meal. It’s good I only need non-dairy.)

I’ve been trying to not obsessively check the package tracking, and I thought I was being fairly mellow about things. Then I realized I had a typo on one of my labels that made it incorrect. All my checking and checking again and reading over everything and making sure the right label with the right information got stuck on the right card and attached to the right object. I’m actually not all that surprised there was an error with all the different pieces involved. Each yarn had six printed stickers to go with it. And several times I stuck on the wrong one only to realize it seconds later. I tried to set up a system as much as possible so that I got everything together correctly, because this is a huge project to try to organize.

So, needless to say, I was in a panic. I calmed down enough to contemplate my possible options and then sent the mentor an email. It was still a little early here on the west coast to call her. But the registrar is in North Carolina, so I called her. She is the one who will be handling all the boxes anyway. She was exceedingly helpful and would be happy to attach a new label if I sent her the correct one. I was so nervous about it I even got which label it was confused. (I had the wrong number of plies, which is on the yarn index card, but the others are correct.) I immediately printed out a new label and stuck it in an envelope with a snippet of yarn for easier identification. I’ll run it over to the post office in a little bit and it will go out today. As much as the official instructions are intimidating, confusing and even occasionally conflicting, the people have been friendly and helpful and for this I am thankful.

Now, with that emergency resolved, I can continue on with my weekend. A bunch of local fiber folks are getting together for a retreat at someone’s home. I’m not bringing a spinning wheel and I even decided to not bring a spindle. I have some knitting to do, a gift project, that is about as close to mindless as you can get without it being a garter stitch rectangle. (It is basically a giant dishcloth, exactly the kind that aunts and grandmothers have been knitting of 4-ply cotton for decades.) Which is good, because I’m going to sit on my butt by the pool all weekend. I’m going to chat with friends and bake bread and knit and generally not do anything I don’t feel like. I might teach some weaving, I packed the frame loom and a bunch of assorted shuttles, shed sticks, weaving swords and rods.

I haven’t done much with updating the website, but I do have pictures of most things to put online. A few yarns went out without photos but I still have samples of most of those so I can at least have something up. I’m going to take it easy with that because I have a bunch of things to do, for this website and others. I have a ton of article ideas that have been on hold to get written, in addition to starting on my summary of the COE process. I’m not going to publish anything on that until I get the results back, but I’m starting to think about how this has gone and what I want to say about it. But right now there is a deck chair in Petaluma with my name on it.

I have so much to do that I’m probably not going to be saying much in the blog until I get this done. I’m making changes to the website, but only where it’s helping me organize my material. I still have some writing and a lot of spinning over the next four weeks. There are still those everyday nuisances like sleeping, eating and doing laundry too. Fortunately, The Boyfriend is being incredibly understanding and helpful as the various domestic tasks grind to a halt and the place is taken over with spinning. I wish I could say as much about the landlord, who has chosen this week to start renovating the upstairs apartment.

A little bit of spinning, a lot of paper today.

I did the Romney/mohair blend single, but I’m not happy about what the bamboo/tencel blend is doing so I scrapped that idea. I’m trying to come up with two more fibers to blend. I did my really sloppy punis from the Pima cotton, after taking out all the seeds and a pile of trash. I can see it isn’t going to all fit on the high speed bobbins, so I will have to do two. That’s ok, at least. I may just splice the ends anyway. I could use that for the cotton swatch, as weft. It’s textured, all right, but that also means it’s not very strong. I’d have to find something to use for warp and pull out the table loom, but it wouldn’t take much yarn.

I set up the printer, assembled a box and started dealing with packaging. I have to go get more file folders, but at least I can get going with the labels. It took hours to set up the templates because the ones I downloaded from Avery didn’t align correctly. And then I had to create all sorts of nested tables to get the layout right. But now I have them all ready. Even the two inch lines, one half inch from one short edge and one quarter inch from one long edge. What a pain. Still haven’t cut the cardboard tags that go with those, however. While I’m out getting file folders, I need to look at staplers and three hole punches. If they are cheap enough, I might get my own instead of trying to borrow them. I’ve been meaning to get new business cards just for the website, too. Three blocks away and I can’t manage to get the the office supply store.

After test printing a few things from the website, I was reminded how much I adore stylesheets. Since I have put things in a binder, I need a left margin on all the pages. So I changed one line in my stylesheet and there it was. I didn’t even have to mess with the website, I just created a custom version that I can tell my browser to use. The only other thing to do before I start printing for real is create a new blank page footer. I have to take out the SpinnySpinny part so nobody knows who I am. (As if.)