It's Been A While...

Years.  It's been years, hasn't it?  Years and pages upon pages of a still unfinished book, three animals gone, two new cats, a girl growing up entirely too fast, an alcoholic father-in-law who gives curmudgeons a bad name, and a new obsession - weaving.

In terms of fictional time, I'm on the last twelve hours of the main plot.  Really, it's time to just write this bitch and be done with her, right?  I'm thinking probably so.

Tinker's gone, from God only knows how many things, but the pneumonia - and the underlying cancer that caused it - was the last straw.  After three days of feeding him with a syringe and sitting with him in the middle of the hall where he refused to move, I took him to the vet for one last visit.  We buried him in the backyard.

Sheba's gone.  She was blind and mostly deaf, and after Tinker died, I think she lost a sense of familiarity that made an enormous difference in the quality of her life.  She would still come up to the car when I came home every day - every single fucking day - stinky and adoring as always, but when I saw that she wasn't able to lay down to sleep anymore - and sleeping was one of her all-time favorite activities - I knew it was time.  So I gave her half of my dinner, which she scarfed down in her typically greedy fashion, and took her to the vet for one last visit.  We buried her in the backyard, next to Tinker.

Chloe's gone.  Her passing was the hardest.  Still is.  She's - had -  always been plagued by one health problem or another - gas (oh God, the flatulence was beyond toxic), skin problems, allergies, arthritis, spay incontinence.  We had her on I forget how many medications to manage all this craziness.  We really aren't sure what happened to her at the end.  We didn't get her to the vet in time to find out.  The night she died, she was listless and bloated, and wouldn't eat.  She was a hound dog with gas problems - lazy and bloated by nature - but the refusal to snap a piece of ham out of my hand was serious.  So we threatened her with the doctor the next morning, only she didn't wake up the next morning.  I don't know if the vet would have been able to do anything.  A stomach infection from something she ate?  Bloat?  I don't know.  We won't ever know.  We buried her in the backyard, next to Tinker and Sheba.

 

Aeryn, who is nine now, is understandably traumatized.  (I am, too, but I'm supposed to be the adult.)  Losing a pet is never easy - losing three in three years is horrible.  Now the fish - a magenta-colored male betta called Blueberry (it was blueberry season when she got him) -  is almost four years old, and every day I'm surprised to see he's not belly-up in the tank.  Aeryn's anxiety about his impending death is compounded by a flood of unwelcome growing-up mood swing hormones that are wreaking havoc on her emotions.

The new cats help, sometimes.  For Aeryn, most of it is knowing that they'll be around for a while, since we got them both before they were a year old.  They're getting friendlier, and they're certainly happier now that I'm playing with yarn.  Most times I let them play, too.

Speaking of yarn, weaving takes a lot of it, and quite a bit of setup time.  Once the loom is warped, though, the actual weaving itself goes fairly quickly.  I'll post some pictures later (once I can find the damned camera; I think Nicodemus may have eaten it).  It's ironic that I've worked in a textile mill for fifteen years and never shown the slightest interest in thread outside the plant until now.  An unexpected windfall made it possible for me to get my hands on a small lap loom, and a friend sent a ton of discontinued yarn my way - so much that it's hard for me to figure out what project to start first.

 

I am beginning to understand why the ideas and images of textile crafting - spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, et cetera - are so universal.  People have been playing around with fiber of one sort or another for quite some time - what strikes me particularly is the transformative aspect of the process.  A sheep grows a lot of wool, we shear it and harvest the wool.  The wool's just fluffy bits until you put a little spin on it and a very slight tug to straighten it out and then - what the fuck? - you've got YARN.  One of my friends spins, and the trick never fails to amaze me.

Of course it doesn't stop there.  You can spin other sorts of fibers and twist it together with the wool using any number of techniques.  You can dye the fiber or the yarn.  Or you can just pound the shit out of the wool and make felt out of it.  Or you... well.  I digress.

I can crochet.  A chain.  That's all.  I've never successfully made a hat or a scarf or anything worth gifting, and knitting is frankly beyond me.  Weaving, though, appeals to me on a number of levels, especially the one I've most recently discovered.

Any experienced weaver will tell you this, but I'm not an experienced weaver.  So two weeks ago when I put a lovely variegated yarn on my loom and paired it with a solid color, I expected to see something like a beachy sunset come off the loom, in a more or less placemat-shape.

It looks like Easter, actually, and it's way too big to be a placemat, and besides I don't decorate for Easter.  But it will become a tote bag for Aeryn to use gathering eggs this weekend, so it's not a total waste.  And I learned quite a few things, which allows me to impress my husband by throwing around words like "warp" and "weft" and "dropped ends" and "picks per inch" and stuff.

And there's one other thing I've learned about weaving, and I think it might apply to other things, too - you absolutely CANNOT RUSH the process.  You can take shortcuts, sometimes, and use whatever ingenious methods you can come up with to fabricate looms, splice ends, pull yarn ends through, but trying to do any of this when you're in a hurry is just not going to work.

So while I can weave without a beer in my hand, trying to set up and warp the loom sober is impossible.  Maybe I'll get there somewhere.  Until then, I've discovered a bad-ass hard cider that is just about perfect for warping.  Pictures later, provided I can extract the camera from the fat-ass's stomach.

 

~andi