Prodigals

I made two discoveries soon after we moved. First, that I had lost my laundry stick and second, that I now had only five handwoven napkins where I used to have six. This bothered me. I could make a new laundry stick, but it wouldn’t be the one my granny gave me, twin to her own. I could make another handwoven napkin, but it wouldn’t be part of the set. I kept the napkins rolled up in the top kitchen drawer, so I was pretty sure one must have rolled out the back of the drawer and was sitting in the bottom of the cabinet with the sawdust and spider webs.

What really bothered me, though, was the thought of it staying with my former raw-vegan-musician-nudist landlord.

This individual was such a trial there was no question of going back to ask if we could fish the napkin out of the cabinet or the laundry stick out of the laundry room. The goal was never to see him again. At all. The only thing more upsetting than the thought of my napkin remaining in his toxic (though unwitting) clutches was the thought of having to wake him up in the middle of the day in his white rajneeshi pyjamas and hear how the universe was ordering itself for his convenience because of how wonderful he was–a deeply held truth he inserted into most conversations–except when the universe wasn’t doing it’s part, which made him scared and mad.

Der Mann and I bore up by joking about him. Der Mann more than me, because I was around him more and tended to find him more scary than funny. Scary and pitiable. With an emphasis on the scary. Because a) he was very big and tall, and b) he was one of those guys who always has a toothsome groupie-girlfriend, and oozes a preening sexuality, and c) I grew up around mental illness and therefore have a very low tolerance for crazy people.

It’s interesting. The same situation that gave me a very low tolerance for crazy people gave me a very high tolerance for eccentricity. I tend to take what people say at face value, then analyze. When you are a kid in the care of a crazy person you can’t just get away from the craziness, so you become an expert at sorting it. Not everything a crazy person says is crazy. You have to assess situations individually. For instance, when an adult tells you that if a stranger ever tries to drag you off, you should yell “You’re not mommy!” as loudly as you can, because if you just kick and scream people will think you’re throwing a fit with one of your parents–that is actually pretty good advice. But when that same adult tells you that no, you can’t have any gum this time because Bad People might have replaced all the white chicklets in the gum machine at Sears with Ex-Lax, followed by an explanation of what Ex-Lax is and what it does–that is not really something you need to worry about at the age of five. (And I did not worry, but I did spend several years marveling over all the Ex-Lax f@tishists who went through the world scattering digestive mayhem. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!)

So, I often find myself nodding earnestly as people tell me completely crazy things–like my landlord telling me about the apocryphal Gospel of Andrew, which is where he got his nudism–while I weigh the merits of their ideas. When I have collected enough opinions and soaked up enough vibrations, my intuition processes it all. It says either something like, “Huh. This guy has arrived at some uncommon beliefs in a fashion consistent with his personality and values. I wonder if he first encountered the Gospel of Andrew when he was a Hotshot Evangelical Youth or a Fundamentalist Christian Dad, or when he chucked his family and started hanging out with the Humorously Out-of-Date New Agers. His dome tent sounds cool, although I wish he would stop referring to it as a yurt.” Or my intuition says: “Something is very wrong here. Internal inconsistencies. Grandiosity. Strong whiffs of narcissism. I still feel unsettled days after talking with him. Yep. It’s the old allergic reaction. Once a bedbug-crazy zealot, always a bedbug-crazy zealot.”

The irony is that I attract crazy people. Since I am noncommittal, polite, and take their ideas seriously, they are on me like flies on honey. (See my allergic reaction in my metaphor!) I know a clinical psychologist would be more inclined to see craziness as a continuum rather than a yes / no thing. They would also have a lot more interest in someone like my landlord. I can only plead that what I mean by crazy is someone who is not in treatment and who actively indulges their craziness to the detriment of others, and that I am aware the line I draw between crazy and not crazy is subjective.

If only my intuition worked faster! See, what happens is I am still smiling and nodding, collecting information, when someone else would have already said to themselves, “Oh my god. My new landlord has just told me that in the near future no one will wear clothes. And I have affably pointed out that I like clothes, handmade clothes can be an art form, and that I would like to make handwoven garments. In reply to which he has smugly informed me that come Nirvana-on-earth I can still weave blankets. This guy is so full of shit!“

Or more likely, someone else would have just skipped the whole hour-long conversation that led up to the blanket exchange, in favor of an immediate, “This guy is so full of shit!”

(The upside to my attractiveness to crazy people is that I also attract eccentrics–although they tend to be shyer than the crazies, and so not as many. This has studded my life with fascinating LONG conversations and a few very interesting friendships.)

To proceed.

Not long ago, Der Mann and I set out for our evening walk and discovered that our tiny town’s “First Friday” event was in progress, with an art-and-craft show set up in the community center. We wandered in. It was crowded and noisy and there was loud, re-verbed droning New Age music in the background. I figured we’d make a full circuit of the booths in a spirit of community support. Suddenly Der Mann stopped in his tracks and whispered, “I think that’s K___!”

“Where?” I said.

“The live music,” he said.

Like spies in a spy movie we had ducked behind a partition and were whispering. Der Mann ducked out, trying to get a sight line through the crowd without the man who was possibly K___ noticing him staring. The music swelled and droned in majestic digital excess. I said I was going back to wait in the other room where the naughty art was. I was really taken with the brash oils of sports cars and shiny gold human figures (a painting of a statue?) engaged in an act with a name which will not appear on this blog. They put that one at ceiling level. As if kids don’t look up.

Der Mann rejoined me after some reconnaissance. “I still couldn’t see, but it’s the hair. And the pyjamas.” We were both very giggly. We skittered outside feeling more like teenagers than we had in a while.

“And the car,” Der Mann added, pointing. At first I was willing to believe that someone else with a Volvo of that vintage and color was attending the art show, but it had the bumper stickers: Simplify. Begin Within.

We joked about our near miss all the way home. That awful music made me feel quite light about the whole messy business of extracting ourselves from the duplex. (I haven’t told you about the problem with the check he wrote us to refund our deposit.) Our former landlord is a skilled acoustic musician who could play anything he liked, and yet that is what he composes. That is what sounds good to him, and what he plays at paid gigs. Amazing. Those white pyjamas lost some of their sinister brilliance out in the fresh air, amid the pet-themed stained glass and homemade soap.

Further closure came with the napkin. A few days ago it fell out of Der Mann’s Homesar T-shirt. It had been in there since the last time it was washed, before we moved. I sang, I danced, I killed the fatted calf.

And when my granny told my grandpa I lost my laundry stick, he made me a new one.

Moral Dilemma With Cat

I only seem to write when I want something. Washing machine advice, exclamations of horror. You’re so nice about giving them to me! However, you’ve probably given up on checking my blog by now, and I know bloglines doesn’t register my new entries until a month or two after I post them.

If you do come across this, maybe you will have something to say. Remember the gamboling wild kittens I mentioned in my pros and cons post a while back? Well, one of them is making a pitiful effort to socialize itself and has decided that we belong to it.

(Dog exclusivists will be bored by what follows. There’s no weaving in it. I’m warning you so you can stop reading and avoid that uncomfortable annoyed-by-the-stupidity-of-a-stranger-on-the-internet feeling.)

I once read a sort of natural history of domesticated cats by a vet, which did a lot to explain why cats relate to humans in a way unlike dogs. A happy, properly-trained dog thinks you’re its alpha pack mate. Cats don’t have packs. A cat (animal behaviorists speculate) thinks you’re its mommy. The kneading, the purring, the seeking of comfort, the lap sitting, the fixation on food when you’re around: infant behavior. Also the playing; you’re it’s teacher. I wouldn’t wonder if the wheedling and manipulating and leaving you in the dust when there’s something more interesting to do isn’t also a part of the metaphorical parent-offspring relationship–rebellious teenaged cat behavior as it leaves the nest and stakes out its own territory.

Well, I’m thinking that if a cat is going to enter into a successful social contract of protracted mama-cathood/kittenhood with its owners, it has to know what the relationship is about. It either has to have had a mama-cat, or a human who stood in for one.

Hence the problem with adopting feral cats, and the really weird behavior we noticed in the local kittens. I am used to kittens that interact with humans, that notice what you’re doing, what you want them to do, and so on; then they court you or evade you. The kittens around our house raised each other, so that while they had no fear of humans, they treated Der Mann and me as walking hurricanes–a collection of natural phenomena–rather than creatures. They would come right up to us to see what was going on, but they wouldn’t let us touch them. They would chase string without ever realizing we were pulling it. They would come in our house to explore if we accidentally left the door open without any sense of wrongdoing or any effort to be sneaky–just curious, as they were about everything else in their territory. We were weather to them because we were not cats.

In the last month or so the three black kittens have taken to making fewer and fewer appearances right by the house as they stake out their adult territories, while the Siamese-looking one seems to have made it’s territory here. Right here. Central command is our front porch, which it defends against full-grown neighborhood cats. Recently it started meowing and scratching at the back door, peeping in the windows. When we go outside it makes a beeline for us. It has learned about petting, though not well and not about laps. It seems to want something we can’t give it. Instead of sitting down and allowing itself to be petted, it frantically rubs its head against our hands while standing on our knees and gets more and more agitated. If we stop, it starts climbing our chests, kneading us, and sticking its nose in our faces.

It’s well fed, so that’s not the problem–more that it’s little kitty wires are crossed. My unscientific theory is that its sociable Siamese genes are struggling with it’s lack of upbringing. Instinctively it knows that humans are good for something, it knows that the door into the house is a portal to delights, but it can’t figure out what they are beside food, which we never give it.

Several days ago, Der Mann talked to the neighbor we thought these kittens belonged to and found out that they had been abandoned in a box in the vacant lot between our houses. The neighbor fed them but didn’t let them in her house or interact with them, except for the one she adopted. She hasn’t gotten around to taking the others to the pound. I guess she wanted to find homes for them, although she doesn’t seem to have been trying very hard because they are about 7 months old. Now it’s not likely to happen. Their kitten appeal is gone, and they haven’t been taught any of the things they need to know, like not to scratch the furniture or jump up on counters. Worst of all–like most of the pets in this town–they haven’t been fixed.

When we heard about the impending impoundment, we had already (shame on us) let the needy Siamese it in a few more times to see what it would do. Each time we were forced to put it out–immediate, unrepentant claws to the new sumak rug, etc. If (we concluded) it’s possible to train this particular cat for indoor behavior (which I doubt), it will take someone (not us) weeks and weeks of lifting it down from the counter every fifteen minutes, by which time all their furniture will be in tatters (not ours).

And yet the first thing we said to each other when we heard about the pound was, well, should we save the Siamese?

It’s not that we don’t want a cat. We do, especially Der Mann, but Der Mann is allergic. Not severely allergic, but the kind of allergy that has to do with those numbered enzyme thingies most cats make (too lazy to look it up), but which a few fancy breeds or mutants make less or none of. Basically, second hand cat-spit makes him itch. If he doesn’t have any cuts on his hands, and doesn’t touch his face, and washes his hands right afterward, he can handle a cat without too many ill effects. But living in the same house with a cat would be a different matter.

If we took responsibility for the Siamese, it would have to have a cat door and bed down in the basement workroom, and not be allowed in the house. It would be an outside-only cat–not only because of it’s allergens, but because of it’s wildness and naughtiness.

Here are the elements of our dilemma:

Cat is going to the pound where it will probably be put down.

Cat is pretty. Cat is unusually smart. Cat has worked its evil wiles on us. We like the cat.

Cat is dysfunctional. Cat claws everything in sight. Cat is high energy. Cat sheds copious amounts of whitish fur. Cat is bossy. Cat is probably untrainable. It is not a desirable house cat.

Husband is allergic to cats. Even a desirable house cat is a bad idea.

Because a house cat is a bad idea, we’re not likely to go looking for one.

But one found us.

Only, it can’t be a house cat, it can only be a basement workroom and porch cat.

Our question is: is it right to take responsibility for an animal without really giving it the home it wants?

To put it another way: is it better to let the Siamese take its chances at the pound, or to give it food and outdoor companionship without taking it into our lives?

Several things muddy the issue. Since the pretty Siamese has better chances of being adopted than its long-haired, flat-faced, rusty black siblings, shouldn’t we save one of the ugly ones? And if we are only concerned about rescuing cats from death, why not fix and start feeding all four? And if we did let it in the basement workroom, can we absolutely promise ourselves we would not let it in the house, which would be terrible for Der Mann’s health and my sanity?

Aesthetically, I’m gaga for this cat. Stubby legged, small, and sausage shaped, she is not my usual favorite flavor of kitty–but that just makes her look all the more like a panda. The sharp contrast of her dark brown ears and legs and face and tail are incredibly expressive, like a mime in whiteface. I often want to laugh at the transparency of her gestures.

But cuteness can’t make up for a bad personality. The cats I knew growing up were the easy layabout kind. They never clawed the furniture. I couldn’t stand the kind of cat that jumps on your keyboard, bothers you, nags you, demands constant interaction, is deaf to the word, “no.”

I want this cat, but I don’t want this cat. We can have this cat, but we can’t have this cat. It’s very confusing.

Central Command

First Time For Everything

So.  Not.

You’re Brave New World!

by Aldous Huxley

With an uncanny ability for predicting the future, you are a true psychic. You can see how the world will change and illuminate the fears of future generations. In the world to come, you see the influence of the media, genetic science, drugs, and class warfare. And while all this might make you happy, you claim the right to be unhappy. While pregnancy might seem painful, test tube babies scare you most. You are obsessed with the word “pneumatic”.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

 

At least I’ve read it.  Or rather listened to it.  Michael York did a recording that had me laughing every time he said “zippy cami-knicks.” 

Cally’s to blame.

Junque

Der Mann and I have been watching The Avengers on netflix with Great Relish.  We just saw the one where Mrs Peel goes on a fox hunt with the aristocratic baddies, and either she or Steed repeats that jab about fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”  It sounded like Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw to me; I looked it up: Wilde.  I had already been thinking about class, and hearing a good aphorism tends to get me thinking in aphorisms.  After a weekend spent in antique and junk stores, this one came to me:

The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich aren’t ashamed of their ignorance.

You heard it first here.

Through a series of college jobs I had a lot of experience with very rich people–enough for several lifetimes–but not so much in antique stores.  The last time I went around to antique and junk stores on a regular basis was in my early teens with my grandmother.  Since then I’ve been mostly either too busy or too bitter to enjoy them the same way.  I loved getting a feel for what people thought was beautiful at different times–what sort of teapot they might have saved up to buy at the corner drugstore in 1939, what colors they liked in 1880.  I didn’t have the collector mentality and still don’t; anything well-designed made my little heart go pitterpat regardless of value.  Though I did learn a special weakness for the workmanlike: pegs, hand-sawn dovetails joints, little asymmetries, the expert quickness of a hand-painted line.  I fantasized about owning primitive chairs at an age when other girls fantasize about having a boyfriend.  I bought chipped Czech pottery instead of make-up.  The first summer I was made to work on my dad’s farm for more than a couple weeks (money made a horrible trade for freedom!), I spent my entire earnings on an antique English cherry wardrobe.  I was fourteen, I think.  At the time I just loved the wardrobe; now I suspect an unconscious element of protest.  Of course what I really wanted wasn’t just the wardrobe, but to be grown up and living far away from my parents, surrounded by my own things.

The wardrobe is sitting across the room from me.  I’m still very fond of it, thought it’s been kind of an albatross through all the moves.  I’ve never seen another like.

Wow, I should stop to be thankful for adulthood more often.  It’s great living far away from my parents, with my own stuff!

Now that I have the space to buy some non-throwaway furniture, I can’t find anything I want to buy.  Twenty years ago, as long as a person didn’t mind some serious patina (I don’t) or need things to match (no thank-you!), there were all kinds of pretty, sturdy, ideosyncratic late 19th and early 20th century furnishings to be had for not much money.  Now everything is a lot uglier and more broken-down.  Have certain types of antiques simply stopped circulating, enthroned for eternity in someone’s twee-ly restored “Craftsman” bungalow like grave goods in an Egyptian tomb?  Has anyone else noticed this?  It would make sense.  The middle class keeps growing, boomers are living longer, and there is a limited supply.  I’m positing a cut-off point of about 85 years ago, because waterfall veneer bedroom sets are just this side of the cut-off.  (If you like waterfall veneer, now’s the time to get it.  As soon as it’s all been left out in the rain and dumped because the veneer is peeling, it’s going to get wildly popular!)

Aside from being in bad shape, most of what I saw in Portland and Aurora (with the exception of one store in each, which had much higher prices) was very alike.  Dime-a-dozen Empire side-tables.  Wobbly walnut-stained chairs.  Pressback chairs.  Pine wash stands.  Imitation Queen Anne footstools.  Waterfall vanities and warped Deco wardrobes.

And that’s just the actual old stuff.  A lot of it wasn’t even old.  More than ever antique dealers are making up for the lack of merchandise by mixing it with country crap: new cupboards and stools from China and India made to look like old stuff from Somewhere Vaguely European, or The American Heartland.  Candles.  Silk Flowers.  Bath salts.  I guess people are buying it or they wouldn’t be selling it.  But why aren’t they just buying it at the mall?

The apogee of this trend is Shabby Shite I mean Chic.  Come on!  This is SO DONE now.  Or, I thought it was until I started looking on Craigslist for a cupboard.  Shabby Chic, for the blessedly uninitiated, is the process whereby dealers take perfectly functional (if pedestrian) 1920’s, 30’s, or 40’s cupboards, tables, dressers, chairs, and beds; slather them with pink, white or black latex paint; distress the edges (not too hard to do when you paint latex paint directly atop oil-based varnish, as the edges basically distress themselves as soon as you look at them); drape them with doilies and 1950’s hats; and violá!  Add $300 to the price tag.

Slathering paint on antiques used to be something people did at home.  I have no objection to painting antiques.  I just think it ought to be purposeful.  And done behind closed doors.  With a mask on so God can’t see your face.

Seriously, I don’t object to paint.

So, I was people-watching in the antique stores.  Like grocery stores, antique stores are levelers.  I wasn’t going to the high end ones, and the low and mid range and upper-mid range ones attract everyone.  There’s always the possibility of a hidden treasure in the junky places, and the really rich love getting a bargain as much as anyone else.  And as long as the atmosphere isn’t too intimidating, Normal Joe will go into stores where he couldn’t hope to afford anything, just to look around.  Someplace like Aurora, the expensive stores look just like the cheap ones from the outside.  There’s a strange dynamic, and the overheard conversations can be really interesting.  What one learns from these conversations is that nobody–rich or poor–knows Shabby Shite about the past.  And nobody really cares about it, except insofar as they don’t want to look stupid.  But Normal Josephine cares a little more, because she can remember how her mom really treasured her pyrex storage dishes when she finally got them.  And then Josephine will buy some herself for sentiment’s sake, even though she prefers plastic.

So, my aphorism could have been something about how rich people are less worried about whether or not they appear stupid than poor people are.  Which also makes sense.

 

Social Class Brain Twister

Clean Clothes

My adrenals say I have some explaining to do after last month.  I picture them standing in a nipped-waist floral house dress, tapping their high-heeled foot.

I am almost too tired to write a post, but not quite.  The momentum will keep me going once I start.

One weird thing about this move is that it leaves me very uneasy in a way that goes beyond the boxes and the construction-zone-ness of the space.  Uneasy and guilty.  It’s as if I am waiting for the gods to send a lightning bolt.  The hubris of living in a house three times as big as our tiny apartment!  It’s weird, but consistent with my character.

Likewise, as I was shopping for a washer I felt I was doing something wrong.  Decadent.  (Roman aristocrats, not chocolate.)  As I searched for the ideal washing machine to coddle the products of my expensive, intellectual, upper-middle-class hobby,* I thought of the women all over the world who wash their clothes in rivers, on rocks.

Actually, my parents made us a gift of the washer, which was lovely.  But then I felt guilty for parents who could afford to make a present of a washing machine.  Isn’t it dumb of me to have combined the over-sensitive perceptions of an aesthete with Evangelical guilt?  It’s a recipe for discontent; the trappings of Pietism are too ugly to bear, but Epicureanism has no moral rigor.  Ah lack-a-day.

Nice things about the house:

• small town
• central heat (We had individually controlled electric wall heaters in the duplex, some of which didn’t work properly.)
• the space (lots of it)
• happier husband (eventually)
• the yard (large enough to plant big plants and even select a tree or two–my most favorite game!)
• no always-at-home creepy landlord stealing my shovel ‘n stuff

Not so nice things about the house:

• small town (Der Mann’s very apt comment when we were walking around it after first seeing the house was, “R___  looks like it has a Hell Mouth.”
• central heat (improperly installed, it sends all the heat upstairs to make the bedrooms sweltering, while the downstairs is cold)
• the space (ugly and inconvenient new placement of walls and fixtures from a no-permits, down-to-the-studs remodel, ruined/lost woodwork)
• the yard, which I’m trying not to think about.  Literal tons of mostly-gravel fill dirt which discourages plant life and causes drainage toward the scary basement, topped with egg-sized river rocks.
• radon (not uncommon around here, but I sort of wish I hadn’t got the test since there is no way to reduce it when it is just barely within “acceptable” limits.)
• costs more to live here
• all the work we will have to do
• long bus commute for Der Mann

Best things about the house:

• troupe of half-grown wild kittens which provide constant entertainment when we look outside
• my new washing machine

The washer guilt faded as I had my first gigantic laundry day.  Thank you, thank you, and thank you again for your comments!  They gave me good things to think about.  After we returned the first washer, I realized that I am a clothes-washing anomaly.  You could call me an “active launderer.”  Or maybe a laundry witch?  I own a laundry stick*, for heaven’s sake!  I like access and control at every stage of the process.  This is because learned my textile-care habits from my grandmother, who learned them in wringer-washer days from her grandmother.

Granny loves clothes and fabrics, and she taught me to wash them in a case-by-case intuitive way, like cooking.  She grew up in the depression, and has never had much money since, so she is very attuned to making things last. . .  Pre-treating with Fels Naptha and other strange preparations, checking the water temperature to see if it feels right and adjusting the taps, stopping the machine mid-cycle to check on things.  Repeating cycles.  Manual extra rinses.  Always machine drying on low heat and hovering over the dryer to snatch things out at just the right moment.  Drip drying.  Flat drying.  Blocking.  In fact, she still has her grandmother’s copper wash boiler, and I have seen her use it!  So, I ended up with a top loader.

Older, more primitive machines are better match for “active launderers.”  Their faults are just the same as modern washers–some of them are too harsh or too wimpy with everyday loads–but you can get more customized results with fewer settings.  It’s pretty clear what your machine is doing at any one time, and you can step in to alter the process without much trouble.

That’s what I wanted: a durable machine that would allow me to make my own combinations of temperature, agitation speed, spin speed, and cycle length; though I also liked the idea of useful pre-sets, like the alternating agitate-and-soak of a handwash cycle.

I would have liked a water and energy efficient machine, but it appears (unless you have a front loader) that these things are in direct conflict with having brilliantly clean clothes.  I took the Epicure’s route.

It turns out one U.S. company still makes old-style washers.  My Sad Washer with the “automatic temperature control” was a top-loading Maytag Centennial.  My Happy Washer is a Speed Queen.  It’s dreamy.  My only objection is that the higher of the two spin speeds, though it is more RPMs than a standard washer, seems to leave the clothes damper than I’m used to.  Unless that is in illusion propagated by the fact that they aren’t twisted around each other and plastered to the outside of the tub.  Perhaps the spin cycle is shorter?  Anyway, they dry quickly in the dryer I bought off Thistledown-who-was-kicked-out-of-the-duplex, and the fact that they come out less wrinkled means that when I get a clothes line I can line-dry a lot of things without having to iron.

I washed a handwoven gauze shawl (not my own weaving) in the handwash cycle, and it came out fine.

 

*Sorry for the stereotyping.  Most of us don’t totally fit, but I was thinking how weaving looks from the outside, and to my guilty conscience.

*Dyers probably already know this, but a laundry stick is a roughly 1″ x 1″ by 20″ piece of milled hardwood with the sharp edges sanded down.  In wash-boiler days you’d use it to lift the wash from the boiler.  Now it is useful when you want to open up the washer after agitation starts to stir in laundry spells I mean soap preparations and prod down things like wool shirts that have just enough water resistance to balloon or float partly out of the water instead of immersing.  Last time Grandpa made her a new one, Granny asked me if I wanted one too, and I said, “Yes!”  I’m afraid I lost it in the move though.  Maybe to the landlord’s lumber pile.

Egg Sauced

Sorry for the lack of pictures.  We are on dial-up internet at the moment.  I now look forward to catching up on your blogs very s-l-o-w-l-y, unless (until?) we should make our pact with the devil, i.e. Comcast, i.e. the only fast internet in our new town.

But we are moved in.  All our possessions are out of the rain.  We left the apartment far cleaner than than our raw vegan musician nudist landlord left it for us.  He remarked as much, in his white tunic, when we woke him up from an afternoon nap to come do the walk-through.  “Here’s my old room!” he said fondly, turning to me for the indulgent approval he is accustomed to receive from women.  I smiled fixedly at him in my wet, filthy floor-scrubbing clothes.  Then he found the lavender bundles in the closet and wanted to know if we were leaving them.  I said we put them there because the closets smelled of cigarette smoke so we figured we’d leave them.  He perked up.  “So, do you burn them?”  (He definitely moves in the sweetgrass set.)

“No, they just sit in there and make it smell nice,” I explained.  (Does that mean I move in the lavender-in-the-closet set?)

I think he’d got a sudden poetical vision of lighting smudges and chanting our meat-eating, milk-drinking, vegetable-scorching spirits out of the empty apartment when we were gone.

Over the years I have thought a lot about the fact that a quarter (an eighth?) of the renters in the world do all of the cleaning.  Every time we’ve moved, Der Mann and I have cleaned the place we were leaving, then had to turn around and scrape somebody else’s thick layer of gunge out of the new one.  We move into dirty rentals and leave them clean: I can only assume some lucky few have the luxurious experience of moving into clean rentals and leaving them dirty.  Virtue is not its own reward, so what motivated me to clean house for these people?

For one thing, money was so tight we were always terrified of not getting our deposit back.  Yet I know for a fact that most landlords will settle for what I call “symbolic cleaning.”  Over the years I’ve observed, again and again, a bizarre landlord-obsession with burner pans.  Replace the burner pans, dump a gallon of bleach in the toilet, knock the crumbs out of the kitchen drawers, and you’re golden: no need to worry about the blobs of jam or crock pot full of moldy leftovers in the fridge, the 9 burnt-out lightbulbs, The gravy smears on the woodwork, the wall you’ve been using for a dart-board, or the pools of shampoo in the bathroom cupboard–he’ll turn a blind eye to those.  If, on the other hand, he’s the kind of landlord who doesn’t return deposits, nothing you can do will to make him give it back.

It’s not that I’m a neatnik.  Well, okay, a little, but only selectively.  While I am depressed by dirt, I weigh the cost of displacing of it very carefully.  I don’t like to crunch around on gritty floors, I think it’s important not to let goop settle on work surfaces, and no human being ought to have to use a gross bathroom.  Also, I have a thing about keeping the kitchen counters cleared in reaction to my mother.  (Her hoarding and her clinical OCD and are a deadly combination.)  But I loathe scrubbing and mopping floors.  And dusting.  And vacuuming.

I end up vacuuming every week or two for the sake of my dust allergies.  In terms of surface area, 80 percent of the dust settles on the floor, right?  As for the other 20 percent, despite the fact that it is a health issue and I find it extremely unpleasant to touch–nails on chalkboard, really–I go months without dusting.  And floors, oh, dear.  Back when we lived in a farmhouse with real linoleum in a speckled brown pattern I once went more than a year without mopping.  But see, we don’t spill much!  And when we do spill something, we wipe it up with soap and and water!  And we don’t wear our outside shoes in the house!

Regular spot cleaning and a household with only two adults is the only thing that makes this kind of piggery bearable.

But I’m talking about our everyday dirt, in our everyday lives.  We would never bequeath it.  That would be wrong.  Like leaving our dirty underwear slung on the chandeliers.  I’ve never faced dirty underwear in a new rental, though I once found dirty sweat bands and sweat socks that had been slung on the closet shelf.

We are still technically renters.  My parents are buying the house as a retirement investment, Der Mann and I are fixing it up.  My parents are paying for materials, we are supplying the labor.  Our rent is about the same as it was in the duplex.  However, since we loaned my parents part of the purchase price, it is also an investment for Der Mann and me.  When my parents sell, we’ll get our money back with a portion of the profit from the sale.

In case you are curious, I managed to de-paper, patch, re-plaster, sand and paint the bedrooms before moving day.  All the dog-pee carpets are gone.  Believe how bad they were when I tell you the nailed, splintering, painted and paint-splattered wood floors underneath are a big improvement.  The rest of the house is (Euphemism?  Let’s see, now…) in process.  I’m only half done painting the dining room.  It’s the largest room, and my loom and all the stuff that was going to go in there is crammed in the living room until my paint store gets another shipment of the paint I was using.

Still no washing machine.  We went through the drama of buying one, hauling it home, squeezing it through tight doors, unpacking it, and hooking it up, only find that “automatic temperature control” refers to an internal, non-adjustable thermostat which prevents washing at any temperature other than the factory pre-sets for “cold,” “cool,” “warm,” and “hot.”  The “hot” setting is lukewarm.  Adjusting the laundry taps, which is how I’ve always fine-tuned my wash temperature, did nothing.  It was late at night and I’d been breathing paint fumes for weeks straight when I made this discovery; I was literally pounding on the walls with my fists and weeping.  I stopped short of swinging a hammer through the plaster, which was what I really wanted to do–I knew I was the one who would have to patch the hole!  My poor Mann.  He was the one who suggested we could try to return it.  He did the dirty work.

Caulk: It’s What’s for Dinner

Where’s Trapunto?

Forming an ever lower opinion of the former owners of the house we are moving into at the end of the month.  After three weeks off non-stop prepping, painting, cleaning, and dog-pee carpet removal (Der Mann handled that, thank God) it is just about at the nadir.  Every stage uncovers a new horror.  The guy loved caulk.  Yes, the around-the-bathtub kind.  It’s good for everything, don’tcha know.  Yes siree, that woodwork ain’t going nowhere nohow.  And when it goes, the wall goes with it, dammit!

Fleeing the Landlord

From this:

 

to this:

 

But not until the end of the month.  In the mean time I am very busy and tired. Whelmed, but not over, if you know what I mean.  I hope to offer some updates later.  Does anyone know how you remove wood glue that someone has squirted liberally under all the lifting seams of wallpaper, directly onto improperly skim-coated sheet rock (gypsum board), without taking the paper off the sheet rock?

And as long as I’m asking for advice: can anyone tell me how front-loading washers treat handwovens?  Do you have one?  Do you like it?  I know they are more efficient than the old fashioned tub-and-agitator kind of washing machine, but I’m worried there would be not-enough swirly water going on, and too much slapping.  For the first time I am shopping for a major appliance, and I find that Consumer Reports doesn’t mention whether this or that washing machine is likely to tangle and unevenly shrink one’s handwoven yardages.

Only Four Treadle Holes on an Eight-Shaft Bergman Loom

When I first got my 8-shaft Bergman loom, it puzzled me that there were only four holes (with cord loops) through each treadle.  Shouldn’t there be a treadle hole/loop for every shaft, like the big Scandinavian countermarches?

In fact no, there is no need to have a treadle hole for every shaft on such a compact loom.  When you are ready to tie up your treadles, thread a single tie-up cord through each lamm hole specified by your draft.  Let the cords hang in their proper places–upper lamm cords in front of corresponding lower lamms.   For a full 8-shaft tie-up you will have 8 cord ends dangling in a row over each treadle.  Take two adjacent cords and tie them to the appropriate treadle loop with a snitch knot, like this:

A snitch knot is easy to adjust as you fine-tune your sheds, and easy to undo when you are finished weaving.  It is actually a time saver over other methods.

If you have Texsolv cords, a snitch knot won’t work.  You will still take two tie-up cords through each treadle loop, but you will loop and secure each tie-up cord separately, with an arrow peg.

I cover a few other things about treadle tie-up on a Bergman Loom at the end of an earlier post:

http://trapunto.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/bergman-tie-up-tips/#comments

Good luck, Deborah!

What I Learned from Eenie Greenie

My eenie greenie warp (You’re a hoot, Jane!) was intented to help me make some decisions about a project I planned back in late spring: cottolin-warp baby blankets in a Summer and Winter adaptation of the draft “Four Locked Hearts of America” from A Handweaver’s Source Book.  The Source Book is a fantastic volume of old coverlet patterns edited by Marguerite Porter Davison, presented as profile drafts.

Then I developed a back problem which seemed to be related to treadling.  The blanket project stayed on hold while I wove scarves on my rigid heddle loom.  Finally, I coaxed myself back to the Bergman with the argument that the real purpose of the eenie greenie sample warp was to see if my back problem was definitely related to treadling.  If I moved the tabby treadles to the other leg (treadles 7 and 8, the easiest), set myself up carefully, took lots of stretching breaks, and limited how much I wove in a day, would my back flare up again?

The answer was yes.  Two weeks and a chiropractic appointment after cutting Eenie Greenie of the loom, My SI joint is still giving me threatening jabs.  So that was informative.  Also sort of freeing.  I know what to expect, and I know it’s not because I’m doing anything wrong.  (Which makes sense since I’ve used the same set-up since I started weaving and had no problems until now.)   It turns out I’m just the middle-man in a rocky love affair.  “No hard feelings, I hope, Back.”  “That’s okay, Loom.  Stay beautiful!”  

This was my first time working from a profile draft, and my first time weaving summer and winter.  Leigh’s and Cally’s posts on summer and winter are wonderfully clear and to-the-point.  I reread them several times: I don’t have weaving software, and with overshot drafts the pattern repeats are so long I wasn’t about to attempt full draw downs on paper; I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.  In the same spirit I revisited the summer and winter sections in Mary Meigs Atwater’s Shuttlecraft Book of American Handweaving.

There are other advantages in the summer and winter weave.  It is possible to change the character of the pattern completely and without re-threading by changing a few knots of the tie-up and altering the treadling to correspond.  It is possible, too, to weave all the charming patterns of the old double-woven coverlets on a loom that is not too elaborate for amateur craftsmen.  All in all, this is one of the most delightful things known to American weaving.

Clearly a fan!  Mary Atwater’s notes on threading and tie-up were easier to follow when I combined them with the information and pictures in Leigh’s and Cally’s posts.  She makes a number of sensible remarks:

The weave is beautifully logical and is far easier to thread and weave than ordinary overshot work.

This was very true.  No threading mistakes.  Although…

A different texture results from throwing the A tabby between pairs, and it is necessary to watch carefully in order not to make a shift in the middle of a piece of work.  This has a very bad effect.

Once I had woven off the sample warp, I kept hearing the words, “This has a very bad effect,” echoing in a dry tone of voice.  The fiendish part is just how easy it is to make this mistake!  As you may guess from the difference between my first picture (face) and second picture (back), when you are weaving, it’s really hard to see that you’ve thrown the wrong tabby.  A pick of the incorrect tabby looked pretty much the same to me as a pick of the correct tabby on the face of the web.  Each of those glaring skips you see in the second picture came from throwing just one wrong tabby.

As to weft, Atwater advises,

As usually woven, four pattern-shots and four tabby-shots are thrown for each unit of the pattern.  It is therefore necessary to select warp and weft carefully so that the figures will be of good proportion–neither squatty nor too long drawn out.  The warp and pattern-weft should be of about the same grist and the tabby thread should be a great deal finer.

The one thing I don’t like about summer and winter is the muddied look it can get when the tabby weft is too visible.   For the baby bankets I knew I would want a pretty thick weft, which meant I would use the “brick” treadling as opposed to pairs (x’s or o’s) and thus avoid “long drawn out” figures.  The brick treadling tends to hide the tabby pretty well.  I wasn’t worried there.  But since I was also using the samples as a way to look ahead to some summer and winter towels treadled in pairs, I was eager to see if Atwater’s ratios would be the key to sharpening contrast.

I found that the weft weights and their light/dark values made such a big difference to the overall strength and crispness of the pattern, I ended up trying all kinds of combinations.  A medium-value tabby seems to do really interesting things (medium between the warp and the pattern weft).  My favorite combination for towels was a tabby of very old light bottle green Lily perle cotton (1930’s or 40’s–they call it #20, but it is finer than a 20/2) which had about 2/3 the “grist” of the 22/2 cottolin; with a 16/2 blue Bockens line linen for pattern weft.  It’s the fourth from the top.

Most of the other samples were a little loose at 15 epi, but this one was good–light and flexible.  My favorite baby blanket pairing was also good at 15 epi: cottolin tabby with a 8-ply Finnish 50% cotton, 50% linen knitting yarn for the pattern weft.  Before washing it has somewhat the texture of a soft string.  After a hot water machine wash it makes marvelous cloth!  I’m not likely to find any more of that particular yarn on ebay, but I’ve seen similar stuff in a knitting shop, and I do have enough for one blanket.  In the picture, it’s the pale strip in the middle of the green samples at the bottom.

The darker green pattern weft there is cottolin, doubled and single, combined with various tabbies.  Using a brick treadling (o’s deflect the doubled threads and make the pattern too spotty), the doubled cottolin could also make nice towels with a cotton or linen tabby weft somewhat finer than the warp–this is what you’re seeing directly above the pale baby-blanket strip.  I’d set them at 16-18 epi.

Some other things I learned:

The border I planned needs one more unit and a couple of extra repeats to look right.

5/2 mercerized cotton (the aqua, from Goodwill), ick!  Pebbly and coarse and distracting in this context.  Not a useful cloth.

With a fine cotton tabby, plain old Lily Sugar and Cream knitting yarn makes a surprisingly nice fabric, though I’m not sure how it would hold up to the repeated hot-water washings a baby blanket wants.  This combination would also be a nice weight for place mats if it wears well enough.  (Top in photo.)

Fluffy Borgs 2/2 cotton (intense violet second from top) is not a good choice for a summer and winter, at least not with the cottolin.  It is very soft, but the linty halo worsens summer and winter’s tendency to look muddy.

The dark green sample (third from the top) is Poppana, a bias-cut cotton tape that fuzzes up like chenille when you wash it.  This stuff fascinates me.  I had visions of little summer and winter Poppana bath mats when I bought it last spring, but as I feared, I can’t really use a poppana shuttle with the Bergman.  A) I could barely squeeze it between the top and bottom of the shed and B) I had to weave with my fell WAY further from the beater than works well on my loom.  I could feel the beater bearing down on it from from the top, instead of hitting it squarely.  This might not have mattered with a different weft, but I really needed to be able to hammer at that Poppana to pack it in, and I couldn’t!  Poppana comes in disks, making it easy to handle; it would be a waste to wind it from the disks onto a rag shuttle or quills.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that.  Any thoughts?

I suppose the Poppana question is moot if weaving on my Bergman is going to keep hurting my back.  I found a forum where someone who had owned many looms remarked that her Bergman loom was much heavier to treadle than other countermarches.  This doesn’t surprise me: the stubby lamms, short castle, front-hinged treadles, and all that nice, dense Douglas fir are the culprits; it’s designed for sturdiness and precision rather than mechanical efficiency.

The eenie greenie warp confirms my treadling fears, and what do I do?  I immediately wind an 8-yard rayon warp for pillow tops and a couple of stoles in “Four Locked Hearts.”  It’s pre-sleyed and ready to beam on now.  Apparently I am in denial.