A Flannel Pyjama Tunic

 I made this set of pyjamas back in March. (It is a measure of how well my year hasn't gone that I'm only just getting to posting about them.)

A Bevy of Woven Bands

I'm in the process of making myself a new shirt. It's square cut, which is my favourite type of shirt construction. I've had a fair amount of practice with this style of garment, what with all the t-tunics I've made for medieval re-enactment, though making a shirt is involves more steps. It's all measuring things and cutting out the right sized rectangles, so there's no fiddling about with pattern pieces (which I despise). Best of all, despite being a fairly simple construction method, there's a surprising amount of room for tweaking the design of the final product.

While I like the idea of the "pirate shirts" that are everywhere nowadays, I live the kind of life where Dramatic Sleeves™ are a drawback. So I wanted something that uses the idea of rectangular geometry, just with a bit less flamboyance. Conveniently, history provided.

Review: the Daedalus Falcon e-spinner

I confess, this is a departure from my usual "let's do things with the least amount of money we can get away with" style. In my defence, I strive to be frugal rather than cheap. I don't mind spending the money to get a good quality, durable product, if it's something I know will get a lot of use. An e-spinner definitely fits that category for me, for several reasons.

One, I fall well on the frog hair end of the spinning spectrum, something most traditional wheels just aren't designed to accommodate. I actually found it faster (and easier on my legs) to use a spindle for the kinds of fine, high-twist yarns I prefer to spin. But, there are limits to how fine I can comfortably go on a spindle - anything past about 50 WPI and I have to concentrate just on the spinning. Not good when you typically use a spindle on the go.

Two, I have a lingering knee injury that doesn't like the treadle action of most spinning wheels (something I find hilariously frustrating given I ride a cargo bike anywhere I can't take the train).

Three, I spin mostly to weave. Much as I love spinning, I like it to end eventually so I can move onto the weaving part of the equation.

After three straight months of research, the Daedalus Falcon came out as the hands-down winner for my goals of speed, fine yarn, and product durability.

In search of compostable clothing closures

Making clothes that are 97% biodegradable is surprisingly easy. Pick a natural fibre fabric, buy some 100% cotton or linen thread, and you're there. (You can even get 100% cotton overlocker thread - though you have to go searching for it.)

Those last few percent, though? That can be tough. One of the biggest offenders is closures. While there are plenty of clothes that don't need something to hold them shut, I confess I like having the option. Below is a round-up of various closures, and their compostability.

Note: for the purpose of this article, I'm treating metal closures as "compostable", in the sense that they're 1) easy to remove before you compost the rest of the object, and 2) infinitely reusable on other things, unless they break - at which point they're usually recyclable using our current commercial systems. And remember, re-using things that already exist is always preferable to buying new, "better" items.

Turning Bedsheets Into A Wardrobe and Other Second-Hand Thoughts

The Dilemma

When it comes to my clothes, I'm a remarkably lazy snob.

I want things that fit well. (This isn't an unreasonable thing to want, I feel.) I want comfortable fabrics that breathe, and don't end up smelling like a billy goat slept on them. (I swear, since starting T, I strip my shirts more often than I ever had to strip the cloth nappies.)

I want colours - black and white and grey don't count - that don't make me look dead. (When did all the t-shirts in the men's section become navy and olive?) And I want them to last longer than six months before they start a part-time internship in the mending box.

The pile doth wax and the pile doth wane, but there's always a bloody pile.

This short list is surprisingly difficult to achieve, off the rack. Anything that fits my shoulders won't fit my chest, and vice versa. The armscye is usually either comically large, or too small to fit my biceps. And pants? Let's just not go there. (Belts help. Kind of.)

A Brief Overview of Alpaca Farming in Australia

The Royal Show is on this week. Being in need of free entry civic minded, I volunteered to help man the spinner's and weaver's guild stall.

This gives me half a day to wander the showgrounds, and half a day where I stand at the booth, spindle spinning for the public, and blowing people's minds with random facts like "This is how people spun thread for most of human history, the treadle spinning wheel was only invented in the 1500s" and "It took longer to spin and weave the sails for a Viking longship than it did to build the ship itself". Kids in particular love to see how thread is made.

My first shift this time was a morning one (I only slightly regret that choice, being that I Am Not A Morning Person). So of course the first thing I did when I knocked off was go and talk to the alpaca breeders. (They were easier to find than the sheep.)

I must have arrived at a good time, because I had a great chat with the rep manning the Alpaca Association stall in the building. I have a keen interest in the local fibre industries, for obvious reasons. So I always take the time to talk to anyone involved with it, in any capacity.

This is about half of the comptetion fleeces that were on display.

May Progress

Well. May sure was A Month.

I was hoping to get this out closer to the start of the month than it's ended up being. Alas, blogging is the last on the (very long) list of things that aren't absolutely critical, but that I'd like to eventually get done. 

I ended up exactly as exhausted after the medieval fair as I expected. I promised myself that I would do pretty much only what I wanted for the rest of the month. No obligations beyond "keep everyone alive" and "keep the house liveable" (no small task with both children and ADHD running rampant around here).

It turns out that "Do whatever you want" bears a striking resemblance to my regular life, but with vastly more reading (eight novels and a LOT of articles and short stories), gardening (17 hours), and weaving (20 hours 21 min). Funny that...

• Words written: 1,925
• Weaving time (goal 650 min): 1,221 minutes
• WIPs finished: 1

April Progress

This was a weird month, and its flow-on effects were vast (as I'm sure you can tell by the April post going up on the very last day of May).

I attended the Australian Permaculture Convergence at the end of the month, a five day conference held just outside Adelaide this year. It was far enough from home that camping there was the only sensible option. To compound the matter, the SA Medieval Faire was only two weeks after the Convergence, where I camp with my HEMA/theatrical sword fighting group for the weekend.

Both these events were a string of long, active days, in unfamiliar settings, with even worse sleep than usual. So I basically wrote off the entirety of May for recovery, and treated myself gently for the last half of April.

March Progress

Well, that was a month.

It started out fine. Things were happening, projects were worked on, life was hectic but (mostly) manageable.

And then the Fire Nation attacked I found moths in my workroom. (I probably would have sworn less about the Fire Nation attacking.) With the amount of fibre, fleece and fabric in there, not to mention my entire wardrobe of both everyday and re-enactment clothing, it was all hands on deck to banish them. I’m still not done. So if this month or the next is a little light on progress, that’s why.

• Words written: 3,065
• Weaving time (goal 650 min): 734.5 minutes
• Note: 150 minutes per week becomes 650 minutes per month, when spread over a year
• WIPs finished: 2

The Autumn Flush (AKA so much to do, so little time)

*Content note: discussion of spiders (no pictures)*

In which we discuss the weather

Overnight, it's becoming autumn here. This happens fairly reliably around the March Equinox, something for which I'm eternally grateful.

Summer here is hard. Even in a mild one, like the last two have been, the heat drags on you and makes it hard to keep on top of things. This is unfortunate, given that summer is also when the garden needs the most attention if it's going to stay alive. A single day of missed watering can easily kill off half the potted vegetables, if the north wind is blowing in off the desert. And the only thing that gets you out into the yard on the *really* hot days is the need to keep the chickens cool and well watered.

Summer *drags*. By the end of February you're certain it's never going to end. You'll be stuck sweating through your sheets at night and lying on the floor in the breezeway in the afternoon forever. You suck down gallons of water and curse the tiny eaves that let the mid-afternoon sun slide through the windows months before you want its warmth. You curse the weather service for promising low thirties (Celsius, my US friends) at the start of the week, only to revise it up, and up, and *up* as the days drag on.

And then comes the Equinox. Even when the daytime temperatures are still frying eggs on the concrete, the mornings start to smell like a promise of frost under the shade of the trees. The winds start to bend,  coming off the Antarctic instead of the desert, and though you can't smell the penguin shit in it yet, you know you will soon.

And the garden? The garden goes fucking apeshit.

February Progress

I am slightly shocked that February is over already. (I suspect I'll be feeling that way for every single month this year.)

The month started and almost immediately became A Lot To Handle. The school term started the last week of January, and that meant the return to extracurriculars for me and the kids. It's amazing how much time and energy that takes up, even when it's a thing that's both enjoyable and looked forward to.

Two strings of 37ºC+ weather didn't help matters - I become a useless puddle of falling over and sadness when the temperature goes above 35ºC. Thus I spent a good chunk of the month wobbling between the couch and the kitchen, ducking outside just long enough to keep the plants and chickens alive, and catching up on my pile of reading.

Still, projects were worked on and progress was made.

• Words written: 2,394
• Weaving time (goal 650 min): 662 minutes
• *Note:* 150 minutes per week becomes 650 minutes per month, when spread over a year
• WIPs finished: 2.5

Remembrance

I started this project last year, the day after Trans Day Of Remembrance, and the day of the Club Q terror attack. My heart was heavy, and I needed a way to redirect a whole bunch of feelings about a thing I couldn't do anything about.

The warp and weft both came from several balls of a 5 ply acrylic knitting yarn. They had been given to me in one of those many small "I don't know what else to do with this" moments that happen when people know that 1) you're a knitter and 2) you'll happily collect donations and pass them on to various local organisations if you can't use them yourself.

If you wrap the warp chain once around the cloth beam, it keeps tension on the warp while you're beaming it. Much easier to do the job solo that way.

I'd looked at them and immediately went "that's a trans pride bundle of colours if ever I saw them," then put them in the stash and let them percolate. (I don't knit with 5 ply much, I already had more than enough projects that needed finishing, and I had no idea what pattern would do justice to the vague idea I had. Sometimes things need to compost a while before you can grow anything from them.)

The warp, beamed and heddles threaded, ready to sley the reed.

I originally wanted to do a heart twill. After a bit of thought, mostly centred around my lack of experience, I went with a diamond twill instead. This was the first project on my new-to-me floor loom, and the diamond twill was more straightforward.

Plus, counterbalance looms don't deal well with unbalanced shafts - you can certainly weave them, but they take a bit of experience, and it's best to have the majority of the threads on the front shafts rather than the back. The heart twill pattern I had put more threads on shafts 2 and 4 than on shafts 1 and 3, and I didn't have the headspace or the experience to flip the draft.

It took me eight days to wind the warp, beam it, thread the heddles, sley the reed, and tie on. (I wasn't tracking project hours back then, so I don't know how long those things actually took, all up. They certainly weren't full days.) I'd started on the twenty-first, and was threading the heddles by Sunday 27th. On the 30th, I started weaving.

It took me a little while to find a good beat - I started out far too soft, so I had to cut off the first few inches when I'd finished.

Besides me not liking the look of the elongated diamonds, this beat would have resulted in a sleazy fabric.

Once I got the beat figured out, it was (fairly) plain sailing. This diamond twill changes the treadling pattern every eight picks, so I had to pay attention at all times or I'd end up having to unweave sections. I ended up writing down the treadling plan on a piece of cardboard, and blu-tacked it to the castle. As I wove, I moved another blob of blu-tack along every "section" to keep my place.

Even with that help, I found I could only weave for 40 minutes at most before I got too scrambled to keep going. This was not a project where I could put on a podcast in the background. (Good for ergonomics, not so great for getting things done in a timely fashion.)

According to my project notes, I only actually wove for eight days between getting the loom warped and cutting the finished fabric off. Given the thickness of the threads, that seems about right - I'd roughly guess at six or seven hours of weaving time over a ~2.3m warp.

Fresh off the loom.

After that it was a matter of wet finishing (I washed it on the wool setting, with a bunch of socks that needed cleaning, in the washing machine), trimming the loom waste and the weft ends, and doing double folded hems at each end (I am Not A Fan of fringe).

Draw-in was only about 2cm (0.75"), and take-up equally small at ~4cm (1.6"). There was practically no shrinkage when I wet finished it, too - I'm told that's common with acrylic. All up, the finished wrap is 161 cm (63.5") long and 67 cm (26.5") wide.

Is it perfect? Hell no; there's at least two threading errors and the beat changes from start to finish. But it's soft, and warm, and it's full of the hope and productive anger that I managed to find after the beat of the loom helped me climb out of the pit of helpless despair.

January Progress

 Yes, I know it’s almost the end of February.  We shall ignore that.

January was a surprisingly good time.  I did a bunch of things I wasn’t expecting to do, but nevertheless enjoyed getting done immensely.

• Words written: 4,865
• Weaving time (goal 10 h): 12 hours, 1 minute
• WIPs finished: 3(!)
• Items mended: 7

Word count and weaving time are self explanatory, I think. Let’s look at the other two instead.

How to keep your shafts steady while threading

I have a counterbalance floor loom. It's my pride and joy. (Counterbalance looms are like hen's teeth in Australia.) I've finished one project on it and am well under way warping the next, so I'm still in the honeymoon phase. However, this honeymoon hasn't been without its issues.

The Problem

Like a lot of pulley-based looms, mine has wooden shafts top and bottom that float freely in the castle - no sides or guide rails. This can make it difficult to thread the heddles. They wave around and bump into each other, and before you know it you've threaded shaft three with shaft four's intended thread, or worse - threaded *both* together.

Habitica and Plans for 2023

After a ~5 year break, I’m back to using Habitica for day-to-day task management. While the vast majority of my project/task management happens in Obsidian (love that app), I found I needed some distance between “everything that I ever need to do, whether today or five years from now” and “stuff I need to get done within the next week or so".

Both my needs and attitude towards task management have changed a lot over the last few years, so I was hesitant to go back to it, but for right now it meets 95% of my needs. It helps that the elder child is old enough to start learning to manage their own stuff, instead of me. The gamification (especially the pets) is catnip to them. Our little two-person party is doing pretty well for a perpetually-stressed adult with too many responsibilities, and an ADHD homeschooled tween with no sense of time.