A Queen of Shreds and Patches

Can you guess what I’m making with this? If you’ve been reading Dot’s Fibre to Fabric blog, you probably can.

Last year Granny was cleaning out her sewing drawers and found yet another stash of sewing/knitting notions that had belonged to her mother. Great Granny was such a pack rat, it took Granny about a year to clean out her small house after she died, and she’s still finding pockets of Great Granny’s stuff that she hasn’t had time to sort and disperse–things that weren’t valuable, but were somehow so infused with Great Granny that she couldn’t bring herself to throw them out. I have happily taken some of them, like the collection of bobby pins and various kinds of toothed 1920’s-1940’s metal clips that Great Granny used to set her hair for pin-curls and marcel waves every morning. It was amazing to watch how nimbly she did this; it was her signature hairstyle most of her life. The way it fell in place when she combed it out was sheer magic. Now I use the clips to hold back the layers when I cut Der Mann’s hair. For a long time they smelled of her.

This particular stash had some knitting markers and gauges, a celluloid tracing wheel that belonged to my Granny’s granny, Nanny, and this handmade copper letter opener. Granny didn’t know anything about it except that her mother had always kept it in her desk. It seemed the sort of thing someone might have made for her when she was a girl in rural Idaho, but Granny couldn’t say for sure that her mother had been its first owner. As Granny was telling me this I was turning it around in my hands, and found the initial at the end of the handle.

Great Granny’s name was Kathleen, so it was definitely hers. In normal light the embedded copper is nearly the same color as the wood. I’m not surprised no one spotted it. I can imagine one of the old coots who came to her father’s general store making it, or her mother sending it to her at boarding school, or picking it out for her in a souvenir shop someplace like Yellowstone in the 1910’s. I’ll never know.

I love this tool. Aside from loving the look of it and the way it’s put together, with the little copper wedges holding the blade into the handle and the braided copper wires binding it, it is almost perfectly balanced, and I like the way it fits in my hand. As soon as I held it I knew immediately what I was going to do with it.

But that’s not the only project I’ve got going. I’ve also warped up the Spear’s rigid heddle loom for another scarf out of scraps of Great Granny yarn, padded with a bit of Goodwill yarn from the same era. Perhaps you remember the three scarves I made last year for my aunts and mom? I’m not sure who this one is for. Maybe one of my sisters. The urge just came on me to use up ridiculously small scraps of yarn. Maybe because it’s autumn. Waste not, want not. The past. Family. Dissolution. Time.

When I had the warp on I the loom I remembered something about weaving on the Spear’s. It turns me into a moaning hunchback. If your rigid heddle loom doesn’t have blocks, that means you will be holding up the heddle with either your left or right hand, at arm’s length, against the tensioned threads, for every other pass of the shuttle.

I knew I would regret it if I put off making heddle blocks any longer. Milled 1×2s are the wrong size to make proper attached blocks, which need to be a true 1/2 inch thick for this loom, so I made some free-standing ones. (Again the scraps!) They don’t hold the “down” shed in place as attached blocks would, but that doesn’t really matter: the Spear’s heddle holds the down shed by itself if you just let it dangle. It is heavy enough for that because you can’t weave at very tight tension anyway on a Spears, due to the bolt-and-wingnut mechanism it uses for advancing and securing the warp.

I was going to tell you about the hellish spring-summer-fall that accounts for my blog silence, but it isn’t over and I’m not in the mood. Maybe later? I’ll leave you with a genuine out-the-window picture. Yes, that is is a Fisher Price McDonald’s playset circa 1978. It was buried four feet underground. If plastic could talk…

Season of Shreds and Patches

Aw, Kitty is All Growed up!

We interrupt this blog silence to bring you the following fast-breaking news story:

This is what I saw when came downstairs this morning. If you are an indoor-cats-only person or a squirrel lover, set aside your disgust for a moment and marvel with me at a tenderfoot kitty whose first kill is a grey squirrel. Which he then drags through a cat flap set in a basement window over a counter, holds while he leaps 3′ down from the counter, carries clear through the basement, up the stairs, and deposits on the breakfast room carpet.

First I simply turned around and left the room. I needed a minute to decide: should I give Howl positive reinforcement for hunting, or negative reinforcement for bringing the thing in the house? Positive, I decided. Delight and pettings. Until we moved to this area where they are a filthy, fearless, overpopulous menace and a gardener’s nightmare, I never minded grey squirrels. Now I would say that the difference between a dead squirrel on the porch a dead squirrel on the carpet is mere quibbling.

My next thought was, “Shoot. Der Mann took the bus to work today. I’m going to have to pick it up myself.”

Cats usually preen at you over their kills. Ours was clearly thinking, “What the hell just happened?!” He was all big eyes and nervy mincing when I praised him. He wanted it to move again. Once he even crouched under the rocking chair and gave it a half-pounce before sidling away. It must have been bigger project that he expected. It didn’t occur to him that he could eat it.

Howl spent the first 15 months of his life as an indoor cat. (The fact that he had never seen dirt before was a tip-off.) With three months outdoor experience, he still gives a bit of the impression of Marie Antoinette playing at rustic life. He picks his way over rocks and clods then shakes off each of his feet as if to say, “Oh dear. I really must get some boots for this sort of thing.” Gawps at stuff out in the open. Is scared (thankfully) of cars, but stalks a full grown dog. Races up trees for no reason like a kitten. Courts the local cats with interest, then faces off with them and loses.

The squirrel was a first for me too. First big-ish dead thing. I called my step dad to find out whether I should put it in the garbage, or what. I didn’t want to bury it in the yard because I am still planting everywhere, and it would be gross to dig it up by mistake in the spring. I was informed that garbage can or interment is a matter of choice.

Would you like to hear the gory details? Yes? I went to the garbage and fished out some of the burlap trimmed from a nursery tree. I folded this over itself a couple of times and threw it over the squirrel, followed by the big spongy plastic bag our computer monitor came packed in. Then after a false start the first time I touched the dead meatiness of the bulge in the center of the pile, sort of rolled it all up and stuffed it in the nice thick plastic bag my husband got from the art supply store last night. Then I twisted it up and put a twist-tie on it, and tied it shut with a knot for good measure. That way, I figured if the squirrel was just in a coma it would at least expire painlessly instead of trying to get out of the garbage can. It was still warm.

I e-mailed Der Mann a picture, and he sent back these:

How Do You Tell a Bergman Loom Bench?

Elsewhere on my site, Susan Berlin asked the question, “How can you tell a bench that was made by Mr. Bergman?” I thought the answer deserved a post of its own.

First of all, there were at least two Mr. Bergmans making looms, Margaret Bergman’s husband John and her son Arthur, who eventually took over the family business. Other family members may have worked in their shop at other times, and the Bergmans may have had employees, so I can’t tell you anything about whether a bench was actually made by a Mr Bergman himself, or made in his workshop by someone else. If you know something about the Bergman workshop drop me a line; I would love to hear about it.

I realize this amount of detail sounds ponderous. As if I were discussing real Hepplewhite chairs or something. When in fact The Bench is just a very nice, sturdy little wooden bench with a hinged lid. Mine is from 1936. I know the Bergman looms started to be made out of different woods and had some alterations in design over the next 40 years they were made, so it could be that the later benches were different too. I suspect the basic proportions stayed the same, because the basic proportions of the looms stayed the same. The main feature of my own Bergman Loom bench is that it was made to straddle the 3″x3″ bar to which the treadles hinged at the front of the loom, and that it will also fit completely inside the loom when you’re not weaving (between the two wooden storage boxes for shuttles on the insides of the front “wings”).

So, I can’t tell you how to tell a bench made by Mr. Bergman in general, but I can tell you about mine. It is made of straight-grained fir, with an old looking brown-honey colored varnish, and the measurements in inches are as follows:

22 5/8 tall
35 wide x 11 1/4 deep seat
32 wide x 11 1/4 footprint

The mousehole cutouts in the side panels that form the legs:
5 1/2 wide x 9 5/8 tall

The compartment inside the bench:
30 3/8 x 9 1/4 x 3 1/2 deep

I’m showing the underside so you can see how it’s put together. Prism-shaped pieces of wood reinforce the construction at either end of the bench, as you can see next to the cat’s head.

Bendable Chocolate

I have about enough time for a weather whine before the house gets too hot to do anything but lie on the couch and groan.  Even with my newly bulging biceps–the result of a solid week-and-a-half of shoveling dirt, compost, and gravel to complete the drainage system for our yard–it is too much effort to hold up a book.  104 degrees in this non-air-conditioned part of the northwest is as shocking as much hotter weather elsewhere.  So far we have been to the movies three nights in a row. Dumb movies. True, if I lie on the couch the cat will come lie on my stomach, but since the ambient indoor temperature is already higher than feline body temperature I haven’t been bothering to push him off when he does this. He gets down on his own after about 15 minutes anyway, and stretches out on the floor flat as road-kill. Heat triumphs over bottomless need!

Okay, it’s too hot to type already, but at least I’m distracted.

The kitty is acclimated to our house. He didn’t die–he almost died, but he didn’t. At the end of his week spent squeezed into a hidey-hole in the basement, he emerged very ill on the Friday afternoon before Independence Day. I’d noticed he was congested the night before, but now he was rasping, sneezing, and burning with fever. I took him to the veterinary hospital. The vet confirmed a dangerous fever–possibly brain damaging if got any higher–and took x-rays to look for pneumonia. With such a sick cat they’d usually have wanted to keep him there, but since it was the start of a holiday weekend they’d have had to leave him without supervision over the 4th, and they didn’t want to do that. Instead they gave him antibiotics, a fever reducer, a water injection for dehydration, and sent him home.

According to the vet this happens all the time with shelter cats. Something like one in four locally! I had wondered why the shelter gave out a flyer on Feline Upper Respiratory Infection with the adoption packet. It seems the disease is almost impossible to get rid of once it infests a shelter, and a very large number of animals get sick. Naturally the shelters don’t play this up to potential cat adopters. It makes me wonder what they do with the ones that start showing symptoms IN the shelter. Cats sneezing gobs (pardon my bluntness) of green snot are not good PR. I suspect they put them down immediately. Rule of thumb: don’t abandon your pet to a shelter thinking it’ll get adopted because it’s so cute. Cuteness doesn’t cut it. It’s chances are even worse than you think. It makes me glad we got our cat when it had only been in the shelter a couple of days before it had a chance to get sick and get euthanized.

After that we nursed him for a week, poor critter. In order to keep him on hand for dosing we had to block off his access to the basement with boxes, which turned out to be a good thing. His trauma was the kind that required firmness. He didn’t really want to be in the hidey-hole; it was more of a compulsion. What he really wanted was for us to spend all our time coaxing him out, reassuring him of our devotion. During the hidey-hole week we had a strange ritual: every evening at about six he would start meowing faintly from his hole; we would answer back to him down the stairwell, he would meow, and after about 15 minutes of this–during which we advanced down the stairs and into the hidey-hole room–he would finally worm his way out of the 3″ crevice behind the seats taken from our minivan and lavish us with desperate affection. Then he would follow us upstairs. I’m pretty sure he would have liked to perform this ritual all day long, not just in the evenings, because occasionally I would catch a meow or two just on the edge of my hearing when I was working in the kitchen. There were probably a lot of other times I didn’t hear him. I would always answer encouragingly, but I couldn’t devote the requisite 15 minutes to begging outside his hidey-hole. The adjustment process went much better when the basement was off limits, and he was able to follow us around the house during the day. Exploring by himself at night had just been too overwhelming.

Dot was so right that he is a people cat. I am beginning to think that we made a mistake getting just one cat, because the two of us are not enough to relieve his ennui. Even the out-of-doors hasn’t helped. He is so easygoing that I think he would do well with another animal. He is not so much possessive of us as he is our groupie–our bored groupie, because as cat entertainment goes we are hardly rock-stars. He follows us around starting conversations that go something like this:
“Hello. Hello. Sit still. Sit down.”
“Mm hm. You’re a pretty cat.”
“Hello. Hello. I’m coming up. I’m coming up as soon as you sit down, you know. So you should sit down.”
“Yes, you’re beautiful.”
“Hello.”
“Mm.”
“Hello.”
“Mm.”
“That’s right. Now devote all your energy to my happiness. Though I have no idea what I want.”
“Yes, you’re sweet. You’re lovely. Such a soft kitty.”
“Not like that! One stroke on the head is just an insult!”
“Mm hm.”
“Sit down. Sit down. Make a lap now.”

We named him Howl. For this novel by one of our favorite authors:

Not for this movie by one of our favorite directors, which really has nothing to do with the book:

Our cat has a lot in common with the Wizard Howl in the book (or Howell, as he is known in his home dimension of modern Wales), being young, vain, lazy, prone to loud complaints and elaborate baths.

One other wizardly thing about Howl is that he changes size. You remember I called him huge? Well, sometimes he is and sometimes he isn’t. He was close to thirteen pounds when we got him (if they weighed him right), and seemed bigger. He has lost a lot of weight since then, but he is absurdly long-bodied. When he sits down he looks normal. When he stands up on his hind legs or stretches out on the floor he looks like a boa constrictor or a sinuous dragon. He could honestly tie himself in knots. I’ve noticed he’s also a bit clumsy with his back legs which, after watching him closely, I credit to the fact that they are so far away he tends to forget what they’re up to! I’ve never seen a cat like this; everything else is normally proportioned, there’s just extra length in the middle. Before we settled on Howl, Serpent or Wurm or Slinky were the obvious choices, but those seemed a little undignified.

 

Dignity is my middle name

More Boring Cat Stuff, But Interesting To Us

It’s like having a Christmas tree with a particular (you hope) longed-for present underneath, and you are lying in bed at 4AM on Christmas morning unable to sleep.

That is: having an enormous grey-brown tabby crouching in misery under the wardrobe while it gets used to your house.

Sorry for another animal post. I like to keep on with with a thing once I’ve started it. As I said, the pregnant kitten has moved on to greener pastures, literally or figuratively. I have been spending every waking moment doing chores connected with the dirt around our house. In the midst of my zombie-like adrenaline push, I found myself looking at the cat profiles on craigslist and the local shelters. Der Mann was just as bad; he got me to the Petsmart for visiting hours with some shelter cats. You know, for fun–we thought. As Pooh says, it was terrible and sad. We are too empathetic with animals in cages.

So we got serious about craigslist kitties. By day I was putting in full days of standing in the sun with our new excavator, hauling around concrete post footings, filling bags with unearthed drainage rock, uncovering the sewer line with a shovel. By night I was all about search terms. “Big cat -lost” “brothers cats” “large cat” “litter mates.”

On craigslist I found a grey mother-daughter pair. The people who own them live an hour away. After a couple of odd reschedulings (one time they called and asked if we could let them keep the cats another two weeks “because the kitten was just at that really fun stage,” then called back and allowed that we could take them immediately if we wanted), we went to see them.

It was an old country neighborhood, the kind with 60’s ranch houses and pet goats and little vineyards on 1 and 2 acre lots. The family gave off an air of ruddy Elizabethan prosperity. The mama cat was only a year and a half old, this kitten was the whole of her third litter. “We meant to get her spayed, but kittens are just so much fun,” the father explained, jolly and unapologetic. He showed us his backyard chicken coop. It slowly became clear that they were disposing of their kitten factory because she had exiled their older male cats from the house. She was a tiny, reserved cat, totally wrapped up in her kitten. But we like reserved cats, and what can be better than a kitten? We couldn’t figure out why we weren’t more excited about them.

I believe the problem was that it was hard to visualize them being our cats because they were so clearly someone else’s. It felt like trespassing to offer a home to cats who so clearly HAD one they liked very well, thank you. More like cat theft than adoption. Certainly from the cats’ perspective.

Before we said yes or no to the grey ones, we thought we ought to look at the shelter cats. When Der Mann got off work last night, we went to the small local one.   The cats were in an even smaller cement block room with cages three high. We were allowed to open the cages and take the cats out as we pleased, but it was impossible to focus (much less compare and choose!) in that atmosphere, and we didn’t like to add to the creatures’ misery by invading their space. I was attracted to a year old male they were calling Kajiji, for his large head and stillness. The shelter volunteer said he was new, opened his cage, and gave him some head rubbing, which the cat warily accepted without leaving his corner. He took a sniff of our hands, stood up, looked us over, allowed us to pet his head purely out of politeness. Then he was done with us and with the stress of having his cage open, and said so by going back to his corner and lying down.

We hurried off to the big, new fancy shelter across the river. It has “play rooms” where attendants will bring you the cats, some of which are displayed in big shop-window cases with perches and stage-set suggestions of furniture. To our surprise, it was hard to find any cats that attracted us there.

But we managed to pick out two. The play rooms are claustrophobic triangular booths with cold floors and a bench. Either they are a very bad idea, or we have an eye for neurotic cats. The first cat ignored us and spent the entire time trying to get out of the room, scrabbling up the walls. The second cat peed all over the attendant as soon as she was brought in, then proceeded to jump five feet straight up in the air, over and over, trying to get a hold of the blind-cord and presumably out the window. I have never seen such terror.

Scratching a mutual itch, we shot back to the smaller shelter for a last look at Kajiji, even though it was too close to closing time to adopt him. Der Mann has an obligation that requires the car this weekend, so we asked if they would hold him until Monday. They said they couldn’t. I tried to think of a way to get back without a car (no bus runs on the weekend), and I think that made them take pity on us. “Just fill out an application and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

So, the nice shelter employee squeezed us in before quitting time on a Friday night. The huffy one gave us dirty looks and pointedly started turning off lights and drawing blinds as we waited for our cat to be brought out.

Here’s the funny thing. The cat seems to be more scared of our house than he is of us. We set him up in the guest room/office and left him alone to come out in his own time like the books say. At the end of the evening he started crying for us. We went in and sat down, he marked us with crazy head rubbings, purred, collapsed, and was petted–all while staying extremely wary. This went on until Der Mann (I warned him!) committed the venal sins of Standing Up and Transporting Wicker Objects. The cat hissed and was back under the wardrobe until we went to bed. Then more crying. He even worked up his nerve to come into our bedroom and jump up on the bed, which because of Der Mann’s allergies is going to have to be off limits. Plus, it was kind of scary to have a huge cat we don’t know twining around our bed in the dark; we don’t have a headboard at the moment, and our bed is pushed into an alcove under the slope of the roof. There are a few feet of dead space between the knee-wall and our heads there, and the cat seemed to want to occupy that area, crying, and standing up on his hind legs to with his nose at a level with our faces. Extremely unnerving. In the end I got him to follow me out of the bedroom. I petted him a little more in the hall, went back in the bedroom, shut the door, and went to bed–too exhausted for any more cat therapy. I could still hear him crying on and off through the night.

I wonder what his old family was like. They say he was left behind after a move, and is used to children and other animals. He was only at the shelter for two days. Maybe he is looking for the rest of the people and pets who should be here.

By this morning he had disappeared. He is probably under the basement stairs behind a stack of boxes. I am letting him alone, so no picture.  Do you think that is an okay strategy?  Should I try to draw him out?

We think his name may be Owen (or Ulf, or Knut), though we are not sure, not knowing his character. If things go badly we can name him Owen Mistake.

Any name ideas? How did you name your pets?

No Man’s Land

I owe you good people an update. I’m not sure how to go about it. I’d like to blog about cheerful things, but the cheerful things are thin on the ground right now. In fact I’d have to crawl around our wilderness of gouged clay with a magnifying glass to find them, and I am too tired. My granny has a habit of saying, sonorously and self-mockingly, “This too shall pass…” Which is the frame of mind I’m in. In my better moments.

First, we do not have a cat. We had a cat (officially) for three days then she left and didn’t come back. It’s been two weeks. We think she went looking for a more secluded hidey-hole to have her kittens in and didn’t survive the birth.

Second, the yard is now a mess far, far beyond our ability to fix ourselves. After his two men on bobcats were here for 4 1/2 days doing terrible work slowly, the contractor left. By then we were happy be rid of him before he did more damage. Der Mann missed a day and a half of work to supervise the tail end job and try to get him to fulfill the most important terms of his contract. When final check-writing time rolled around and Der Mann refused to pay more than the contract specified, this contractor, who’d been jollying him along all this time (taking Der mild-mannered Mann for the Good Cop) accused of him of being a shyster and, basically, evil. “You just wanted to get me over a barrel,” were among his choice words.

This was more disturbing than all the rest of the mess, crushed gutter and all. The last thing we wanted to do was to make an enemy in the small town we just moved to! My aunt’s take is, “He was a skunk, and when he was cornered, he did what a skunk does: he sprayed.” If you can believe it, until that moment we were still going to get his bid to complete the unfinished work we’d hired him to complete in the first place, treating it as a second job–provided he drove the bobcat himself instead of having his balky crew do it. The horror show was making us that crazy!

Yesterday I found 3 negative Angie’s List reviews by someone who’d had pretty much the same experience with this guy as we did, only worse. I was so embarrassed. We subscribed to Angie’s List specifically to help us choose an excavator; I hadn’t figured out that you had to look up each contractor by each separate category of work he does, in order to see all his reviews.

So, now we have to find another excavator. The ones who’ve come so far look around with big, round eyes and estimate another 4 days of work. It’s kind of funny. We can see them making an effort not to badmouth the colleague who put us in this fix. They scratch their heads and ask things like, “And what kind of machine was he using?” Before we had anyone out Der Mann and I spent about 11 hours (collectively) digging trenches with a pick and a mattock to show where the final soil levels are supposed to be on various slopes. It’s impossible to dig through the pure clay with a shovel alone. In the back, where the really bad fill from the previous owners is still in place, even the mattock bounces.

I also made a point-by-point typed list of every place we want dirt taken away, and put out a forest of beribboned stakes to show them exactly what areas we are talking about. I gave a copy of the list to each excavator “to use when you’re making up your bid.” I went out to see one of their job sites, and talked with the woman who was having the work done. If I’m going to play the fussy bitch, I figure I might as well play it to the hilt. I also watch to see if they talk to me or Der Mann or both of us, and when they talk to me, whether they do it in fatuous way or a businesslike way. I am fed up with the Male Pattern Deafness, and Der Mann can’t take more days off work.

My dad and mom and made a special trip to see the mess. My dad wants to be here when we have the rest of the work done, which is probably just as well. Then we hosted my aunt for the weekend.

Actually I am thinking of starting a business. I’m going to call it “Rent-a-Male.” That way, women whose spouses, fathers, sons, or male friends can’t make it to the job site will always have someone on hand to stand on the porch with his arms folded and spit in the dirt, menacingly.

The Blur of a Rushing Fool

It’s official as of last night.  We are the proud owners of a pregnant cat.  I keep wanting say, “Pregnant-but-it’s-not-our-fault!”

Since we realized she was pregnant, Der Mann and I had been hashing out the issue of cat ownership in constant, exhausting little conversations that went nowhere.  The decision was wearing us out even more than a strong-willed cat could have done, and I suspected part of not being able to decide was not wanting the finality of saying no.

We tend to be excessively responsible when it comes to animals.  That’s why we are so careful about acquiring them.  Finding out the cat is pregnant makes everything so much harder and yet we both had the response: “Well, now she needs a good place to have her kittens. And at least we would get them all neutered and farm them out sensibly, unlike some people.”  Suddenly we are running a home for unwed teenage mother cats.

In fact, it all seemed like such a bizarre project and such horrible timing, I guess we couldn’t resist making our insanity complete with a basket of kittens–like the banana-covered turban on the exotic dancer.  Our yard looks like No Man’s Land.   In about a month, my dad and sundry family members will come tear the basement apart.  They will need the basement workroom with the outside access door.  They will be sleeping in all the rooms and clomping around with heavy shoes.

Nonetheless, we are going to steer the cat toward having her kittens in the workroom.  She’s already appropriated a basket.  We’re going to install a cat door and start feeding her and making much over her down there.  I’m hoping the kittens will be old enough to move by the time my family comes to start the demolition.

Most cats I have known hate upheaval more than anything and would have disappeared for the full duration of the mess.  This one was gone during the day, but in the evenings she would come right back and settle on her canvas chair, unworried by the changed landscape and the rotten boards, rusty deck nails, and rescued plants cluttering up the porch.  Last night I was walking around the piles of dirt to show Der Mann all the places the excavator ignored the markers his boss set out.  (Der Mann is going to stay home from work this morning to have a word with the boss.  The digging his crew does today it is our last chance to save ourselves days of  backbreaking labor with a shovel to clean up the places they went wrong.)  I was not in a happy mood.  Suddenly the cat trotted up to me as if to say.  ”Well, here I am.”  Expecting me to be pleased.  And I sort of was.  We let her in the house and went over to tell our neighbor that we’d take her.

Note to Self

Note to self:

Next time a misbehaving half-grown cat tries to adopt you, get her spayed immediately, even though you’re not sure you want her and she is far to young to have kittens.  She may turn out to be one of those, “but in some cases as young as 4 months” cats you’d never heard about.

I’m Traumatized

Reading is not enough to keep my mind off the destruction outside. They started it yesterday.

One thing I noticed as I was taking the “before” pictures is that it is almost impossible to capture topography with a camera. The flattening effect of photography. I think painting and drawing do a lot better.

Anyway, they are digging great honking mountains of dirt out of our yard with Big Machines. Pretty much no area of our lot will be untouched.  They are going to dig deeper than what you see now, too. My front yard will be a pit when they’re done. I’m thinking a drawbridge and a crocodile moat would be about right.

A long series of events led to this. At first we thought the “slight negative grading” around the foundation that the inspector mentioned could be corrected with shovels and wheelbarrows and our own muscle. Then we discovered what a mess the soil was. Beyond awful. The house is 96 years old, but most of the dirt is much newer. Generations of yahoos thought the answer to the fact that it was built on a slope was to haul in truckloads cheap fill and gravel and at various times, allowing them more places to park their cars. The fill caused water to flow toward the basement. In one place, right under a mis-laid pipe from the downspout, a non-draining cinder block retaining wall held it against the foundation like a dam.

We only discovered the extent of the water problem when we started taking down the raw, cheap tongue-and-groove that had been nailed to the basement ceiling and the 1/4 inch unfinished plywood that had been nailed to the sheet rock walls as wainscotting. We knew about the small moldy wall by the cinder-block dam, but we thought the rest of the basement was okay. They had done such horrible things to the rest of the house for no apparent reason–except possibly laziness–that we were willing to believe they had gone crazy with the rough wood in the basement both because they had no taste and found it easier to use a nail gun than to sand and paint the sheet rock. We called it The Man Cave and laughed, thinking it would be an easy fix–at least compared to the rest of the house.

But no. The basement had only been finished recently, and it turns out the former owners didn’t use any kind of a moisture barrier–the studs were in direct contact with the foundation and floor. Naturally, the walls were soon infested with mold. What to do? Cut the sheetrock away to a height of two feet off the floor in a laughable attempt at mold abatement, then cover the gaping holes holes in the sheet rock and moldy studs with plywood to fool prospective buyers.

Then didn’t we feel dumb! We were even looking for mold when we first came to look at the house.  I thought my bloodhound-nose for mold was infallible.  Because of the moldy farmhouse we lived in, and my resulting allergies and first-hand knowledge of the near impossibility of eradicating mold, it was our deal-breaker.  Only it didn’t.

My dad is going to help us re-frame the whole basement. Or rather, help Der Mann do it, because my allergy is really bad. Just the one patch we uncovered has made it hard for me to spend time there. I try to run up and downstairs with my loads of laundry before I start to cough.

We reasoned that it wouldn’t to do any good to re-frame the basement if ground- and roof-water was still being directed toward the foundation. That’s where the big machines come in.  I would have liked a cheaper and less intrusive fix, but once I started looking at the lay of the land, I could see it just wasn’t possible. In order to take away as much dirt as you need to take here, you have to take even more there. Which is basically what the experts said.

Also, we have to unbury the porch to keep it from rotting, which meant removing the cement walkway that led to the buried porch.

The only good part about this mess is that there was no remainder of the original landscaping to worry about, after the depredations of the former owners. I love old gardens. It would have been hard for me to make the decision to grade properly if it had involved tearing out antique snowball bushes, bridal wreath, lilacs, or the decendents of flowers and herbs planted back when the house was new. (Actually, I should correct myself. There is one old Rose of Sharon and one lilac. Luckily, they are in places where the machines can word around them (knock on wood).

I am learning that it is hard to communicate with equipment operators. I’m having the opposite problem from what I expected: it’s hard to get them to take away as much dirt as needs to go, as much as they agreed to (I thought.) I say 4 inches, they take 2. I’m afraid this is because we chose to pay a set price, rather than hourly plus dump fees–and they had already underbid the job in their eagerness to get work. The more dirt they take away, the less profit. Politeness plus directness seems not to be effective. It’s like I’m talking to the air, if the air could get annoyed. Maybe they are so used to bullying and cajoling, that unless I bully and cajole, they think I’m not serious?

One, maybe two more days of this.

The Wrong Way to Buy a Loom

or, Pound Foolish at Pop-Henge

Ever since I got it home, the saying “Penny wise, pound foolish” has been running through my head. More like a couple hundred dollars foolish. By couple, I mean several. And by several, I mean four, if you count the $60 for heddles.

What I should have done was to get myself a buying agent. Someone like SpinningLizzy, say, who has a genius for finding used equipment bargains and is the author of delightful weaving-related reading material beside. Check out her rigid heddle shibori article in Weavezine!

What I did do was spot an ad for an 8-shaft, 25 1/2″ weaving width table loom for sale on craigslist for a third the cost of a new one.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that not only am I not weaving at the moment because I am teetering and sweating like a substitute Atlas under the weight of the fixer-upper we are renting from my parents. . . but also because I can’t treadle. Long story short, my left SI joint seems to be permanently compromised. It flares up regularly even when I’m not weaving. This is on top of a lot of other physical problems. I used my little Spears rigid heddle loom this winter, but, lacking blocks, it was hard my arms–and I really wanted to do multi-shaft weaves.

All the same, I wasn’t looking for a table loom. It is rare to find one with more than four shafts and even rarer to find one as wide as I wanted. They cost too much, even used. I was so surprised by this craigslist loom that I pulled out the stops on the oughts and shoulds and woulds and coulds and mays. The monologue went something like this: “I ought to be weaving. Some day, although I can’t really imagine it, I may have the strength to weave again. If I don’t have a workable loom on hand when the time comes, I could miss the boat. So I should probably buy another loom. But it would be foolish to look for a lighter-treadling countermarche. Big countermarches cost a lot, and considering that everything downstairs will have to be trundled from room to room when I re-surface the other broken walls and replace the floors, where would I put it? Therefore, if I buy another loom it ought to be a table loom. I may never see another big 8-shaft table loom for sale this cheaply. If it is in decent shape, I shouldn’t pass it up. I could always sell it for a profit.”

Even with all the shoulding and oughting, I was too tired to really think about buying a loom. I was going to let it slide, which is what I usually do with craigslist finds, but on Memorial Day I showed the ad to Der Mann. He encouraged me to call, and we drove the hour and a half to see it.

Our final turning took us into a small property covered with pop machines. These were more or less evenly spaced, like standing stones and yet not, because there was no intentionality in their placement. And I can’t say they were surreal (though they were), because there was no artistry or irony about them, either. There must have been at least fifty broken pop machines sitting in the mud as if they had grown there. Even stranger, though some of them had parts loosened or coming off, the machines were all fairly new, with identical picture panels on the front. It didn’t look like a collection. It looked as if someone had bid on a huge lot of identical used pop machines at an auction and then said to the delivery man, “Oh, just put them down anywhere.” Wherever there weren’t pop machines there were sheds and barns for recreational farm animals. Goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and probably others I couldn’t see. The largest pole barn had an awning made from some of the glow-through plastic panels with photos of giant dewy pop cans.

On the phone I had gained confidence from the fact that the seller was a weaver, and had bought the loom to use for her complex weavers group. In person she was perfectly nice, if a little rattled with the effort of managing both us and her granddaughter who has just learned to crawl. But her house was a hoarder’s house. She apologized for the mess as soon as we came in and her toy poodle(s?) had calmed down, explaining she’d moved from a big house to a small one, but I know moving mess (boy do I ever) and I know hoarders’ houses, and this was a hoarder’s house with a hoarder’s moving mess. I’m talking about the actual psychological disorder, not mere packrattery. It was plugged with chest-high stacks of boxes. Most of the furniture was inaccessible. There was no way all that stuff could have been unpacked into that house ever; for that matter, there was no way it could have been unpacked in her her old house, unless her old house was a mansion. I had a feeling the move wasn’t all that recent. The top boxes looked like they were arranged for regular access.

So, okay, nothing wrong with hoarders. Hoarders are people too. They have hopes and dreams and looms. Maybe the house was so dirty under the hoard-boxes and layered counter clutter because it had been dirty when she moved in. Anyway, as long as the loom was okay, no skin off my nose if her carpets smelled doggy and she had to keep her grandaughter in the playpen or in her arms because there was nowhere else to put her.

The lady took Der Mann and me to a back room where the loom was resting in a little carved-out chunk of floorspace. She really was quite pleasant and well spoken, and the loom looked okay. She had already explained that it was made on the plans of a Mountain Loom (a manufacturer of reliable looms until they retired from the business a few years ago), and it looked to me like the pictures of Mountain Looms I had studied online. I was a little surprised at the roughness of the wood, but it was hardwood and sturdy. Everything was square and symmetrical.

There wasn’t much space to get around the loom on the floor, but I did the best I could. I checked to make sure the teeth of the ratchets were evenly spaced and intact. Der Mann and I lifted it a few inches to get a sense of the weight. I checked the seating of both reeds in the beater. (The Gowdey-made replacement reed didn’t sit quite straight.) I raised each shaft by its lever. I noticed that the last shaft was catching on the underlip of the castle, but it would be an easy fix with a wooden guide.

That’s when I should have sat down, caught my breath and said, “wait a minute,” but the baby was fussing in her grandma’s lap, the small talk was rolling on (it takes at least 3/4 of my brain to make even the most fumbling small talk), and there were three televisions playing in the background. Der Mann told me about the televisions afterward. At the time I only had a sense of blocking out noise and confusion; when I am focused I am not good at perceiving extrinsic details; I am too busy tuning them out.

The heddles on the loom were fraying, hand-tied polyester, and only on the first two shafts. Again I should have said “wait a minute.” Now I understood that the lady had been saying she bought the table loom intending to use it for multiple shaft weaving, before she got her floor loom. She had never actually used more than the first two shafts.

Wasn’t it a good sign that it had been sold to her by a more experienced weaver in her weaving group for $500, though? (You don’t charge someone $500 for a faulty loom if you have to socialize with her afterward!) I could see for myself it was built by someone with decent carpentry skills. Because the loom was a copy of a Mountain Loom, I wasn’t critiquing the design, just checking that everything worked.

I am bad at quick decisions, but I honestly thought I had all the information I needed. I came all this way with the intention of buying an eight shaft table loom, right? The rest was just dithering. I was tired of crawling around on the floor and I could feel the woman getting anxious about how long I was taking, especially when I asked for a ruler to measure the height of the shafts. I said I’d take the loom and the 800 extra heddles as well. The heddles were new and uncut; she’d never used them because she was waiting for her friend to show her how to get them on the shafts (another warning sign; putting on heddles is not that hard). I bought the heddles partly because she seemed desperate to unload them, and partly because they were the same size to fit my Bergman if they didn’t fit the table loom.

I felt sorry for this lady in her dark hoarder house, daily babysitter for a fussy grandbaby who couldn’t be put down on the floor for fear of disturbing her hoards, beseiged by toy poodles and labor-intensive livestock and eerie pop machines. She said she was getting rid of it because she didn’t need two looms. When a hoarder makes a healthy decision like that, shouldn’t you support them? Wasn’t it convenient I wanted a loom and she wanted to sell one?

Five minutes and a lot of cash later Der Mann and I were waddling out with an extremely heavy loom. After having ducks, we tend to gauge the weight of things against the fifty pound bags of duck feed we used to unload from the car. The loom is more than fifty pounds.

You can guess how the story goes from here. An imitation Mountain Loom is not a Mountain Loom. When I got it home and got it up on a table, I immediately saw what was wrong: the lifting mechanism. Back at the seller’s house I had lifted each shaft by itself. I should have lifted them in combinations. The shafts drag and catch at each other as they go up and down.

The first problem should have been obvious even crawling around on the floor. Every time a lever is brought forward to lift a shaft, the lift cord catches on the nut that secures the bolt on which the lever pivots. The cord hitches and twangs like a bowstring as it is forced past the nut.

I could drill shallow holes in the levers to recess the nuts into the wood, but I would need a drill press for that. It would be very delicate work, and how would I get a wrench in the recesses to tighten the nuts, anyway? Or I could look for a different fastener entirely, one with round heads on both ends, though I’ve never heard of such a thing. Or I could totally rebuild the top panel of the loom, which I have no desire to do.

The other problem can’t be diagnosed until you look at the underside of the castle:

Here it is. The metal eyes guide the lift cords up to the levers and down to the shafts. You can see how two of the cords on the right cross over and rub each other, and the the one on the left catches the outer edge of the next eye? You can also see here

how the top eye in the vertical row has been repositioned a couple of times, trying to fix the sticky first shaft. I don’t think this loom has ever worked properly, because I don’t think the person who built it actually got a good look at this part of the loom they were trying to copy.

There is another error in construction. The ratchet on the cloth beam is on the right side. The ratchet on the warp beam is on the left. The loom is 30+ inches wide and 29 deep. The pawls have to be lifted by hand, and I will have to stand up and stretch diagonally over the top of the loom every time I advance the warp. I can’t simply flip the warp beam, because then the teeth of the ratchet will be going the wrong way.

On top of all that, it’s just not that great a piece of woodworking. The person who made it was a carpenter, not a cabinetmaker. The rough boards and unevenly sunk screws don’t show up in the picture. It is mostly maple. The shaft-ends are oak, the cloth and warp beams are fir, and there is a piece of messy mahogany in the beater.  It’s not the kind of loom you want to stroke or name or feed little tidbits to.  I can’t lift it by myself. I can move the Bergman by myself when it’s folded by dragging it carefully across the floor, but the table loom will be stuck wherever it’s resting until I get help lifting it: by a weird twist of fate, I own a table loom that is less portable than my floor loom!

I don’t know why I’m not upset. Der Mann was certainly surprised at the way I switched over immediately into trouble-shooting mode rather than raging against the wasted money or collapsing in despair and banishing the loom to the basement. The best explanation I can offer is that even a substandard loom has some dignity simply by being a loom at all. I don’t think it’s possible to make this one work well, but I can make it work a lot better than it does. As distasteful I find the task, it does have the lip-smacking aftertaste of a crusade. If I can transform this into a decent tool before I pass it on, I’ll have brought something useful into the world.