A Mostly-Personal Post

I started to do this post over on my personal blog, but got fed up with trying to get Picasa/Google web albums and WordPress to play nicely, gave up, and am posting here, because this is a picture-heavy post. 

 Saturday morning we went to the Midwest Fiber & Folk Art Fair at the Lake County Fairgrounds. It was a nice show, but not very large. OTOH, Xap says it was smaller than last year. The weather was warm and sticky so Ron and I didn't peruse the outdoor things - a farmer's market and the fiber animals. We met Xap, Wash, and Lizzie there.

I kinda failed not to spend too much, but Ron encouraged me. I got a (knit) shawl kit in 5 graduated colors of a teal-ish blue-ish yarn, and a loom plus accessories.
Fortunately, its a very small loom, a Hokett mini tapestry loom kit, from the Weaver's Loft.

 We have above a picture of the loom, two wooden needles, a little-bitty tapestry fork, and a slightly larger tapestry fork, all neatly displayed on the bag for the kit. The kit consists of the loom, one needle, tiny fork, and the bag, 1-sheet instruction for the loom,  a booklet of basic tapestry weaving information, plus a baggie of yarn odds and ends. The loom didn't come warped, I did that at lunch.

To give you and idea of size, the website lists the loom as being 8" x 7", and the tiny fork as 1" x 2". I figured the tiny fork would be too small for my hand, so I got the bigger tapestry fork/pickup stick, and a second needle to do a second color with. I'd originally picked a loom that was a nice orangey color, like the tiny fork and one needle, but the bars weren't parallel. Le sigh.

Here's everything being tucked into the bag:

They also had little shuttles, but we have lumber at home, and a certain young man who'd like to earn some money, so I'll get him to make me a couple narrow shuttles and another needle or two. And find out if Wash wants any, since he also got one of the loom kits. 

There wasn't a lot of yarn in the baggie I got with it, so I also picked up a bundle of mini-skeins from another vendor, mostly in blues:

 

There's 10 skeins, each 40 yards. Starting at about 1:00 we have two blue with brown, one blue with red, two purple, one lavendar, one grey, one dark brown, and two pale blue:

 

I warped the loom and started weaving with the odds and ends that came with the kit at the show. We were going from the show to Xap's for the Cheshire Moon house concert in the evening, so I needed more yarn for when I finished weaving the stuff I got with it, right?

Lest you think I was crazy, by the time I left Xap's after the concert, I'd pretty much filled the loom. Today at lunch I wove in all the ends of good yarn, pulled out some shiny plastic muppet-fur yarn and other bits, and finished the first piece off. Had a little trouble keeping the selvedges even, but got bag into the groove:

Now, the problem is that one part of my brain looked at the bundle of mini-skeins, and said:
"That's 400 yards total. That's enough for a pair of socks. Or mittens."
"I bought it to weave with."
"Mittens"
"Weaving"
"Definitely mittens. Pretty multicolored mittens."
"Weaving!"
"Mittens. Robin rearranged bins yesterday, go pull out that nice leftover weaving yarn."
"Weaving"
"Mittens."
"Fine, just FINE. Grumble grumble grumble." (gives up, proceeds to dig in bins).
"Mittens." (Smugly). 

So, here's what I'll be weaving with next, Harrisville Shetland and Highland (one is fingering-ish one is worsted-ish), left from overshot projects on the floor loom:

The (over-exposed) white ball is 2-ply wool warp yarn, off the stupid-big cone of it I got. I don't like cotton carpet warp for tapestry weaving, its too damn slippery. The wool warp should hold onto the weft yarns better.

The Cheshire Moon concert Saturday night was a lot of fun. I think it was about 20 people, in Xap's yard. Plus a bunch of mosquitoes. Fortunately, Xap had laid in a supply of bug spray.

Hey, here's a bit that's more Otter Necessities-related!

Yesterday I spent most of the day working on the MuseCon program book. 

Ron sliced and diced the spreadsheet of programming information, and turned it into XML files, which I then brought into InDesign, using either amazing or fantastic magic to get it to auto-format...

...kinda.

It came in indented, with extra cruft.

Fix an error, re-try, poke, re-try, poke some more, re-try.

I finally realized that (expletive) InDesign was (expletive) processing indenting in the XML that it should be ignoring. Color me vexed. Cue Ron ranting, then invoking the power of regular expressions to edit the XML to get rid of problem bits that shouldn't have been problem bits if (expletive) Adobe would (expletive) handle file formatting as any rational (expletive) programmer would (expletive) expect. 

Did I mention that this was really annoying?

Eventually I got the text imported, and I think it did save time, and many mouse-clickies,  in the long run. I think the blinkies section is pretty much done, and Open Programming (drop in stuff, mobile stuff, etc.) is mostly done, barring some minor edits and adding icons. 

Tonight I should probably start the main formatting work on the main Programming section.