Things!

UPDATES ON THINGS:

1. I looked at work for a D ring for my belt. I had a choice of hot pink, blue or green, all made of plastic. Great. Next to those ones was a big empty space where the metal ones go. There were lots of empty spaces on the shelf because it was a shelf of BIRCH things. Birch is evil. If anyone ever mentions to a manager that they need something but the shelf is empty, the first thing they ask is "is it Birch?" even though they know it MUST be Birch, because they immediately follow the question with mutterings that you can't quite hear but there are most definitely obscenities involved. If there's more than one manager there, then they also exchange Knowing Looks. From what I can understand, Birch is bad. Anyway, no D ring for me. After a chat with Mister Nathan in which he gave me far too many options and lots of inconveniently located shops, I have decided I am too undecided to make a commitment about the stupid belt buckle. Also, I am cranky at it. This has become way too difficult so I'm going to ignore it and think about it later.

2. I started sewing up my cotehardie! Now I have twelve pieces of dress, but only eight pieces of lining! Yay! Soon I will have only one piece of lining, then I can start working on making my twelve big pieces pieces into one big piece :D

3. I didn't do any sewing today. Instead, I strung up the loom again. I have decided that there needs to be a piece of tablet weaving in progress for the St Basil O-Day tomorrow. So I found a nice simple threaded in pattern that I wanted to do (the Anglo Saxon one), and strung up my loom. I think I'll donate the finished product to the Baroness' Fighter Auction table. After watching me intently as I measured out string, Tory decided he'd like to help

Look at him sitting there looking all innocent, like he wasn't just pouncetackling my string. I growled at him, and he went and lurked just behind the door. He obviously thought I couldn't see him, but I was totally onto him :P So when I ran out of yarn and decided to go out and get some more, I locked him out!  Mwahaha, he was so not happy.

4. I went to Joondalup Spotlight, cos duh, I couldn't go to Innaloo during my morning off, then go back again for my shift. So I went to Joondalup. I found some more yarn, then I accidently walked past the clearance table, and accidently rummaged through it, and accidently found WOOL FOR $5 A METRE!!! :D :D So I got just over four metres of red, and just under four metres of purple, because that's all that was left on the rolls. There's still a roll of charcoal, because I didn't want that colour :P. It's the Melton wool which is only 60% wool, but nice and heavy and good for cloaks. Maybe I willl have a new cloak for Rowany Festival after all. I think I wanna line it though, I need more warms than just one layer, but I haven't decided what I wanna line it in. Maybe I'll get myself some nice soft wool suiting, or just some cheap fleecy stuff. I was pondering what to do with the red stuff, when I had a brilliant ambitious plan to make it into a man-cote complete with man-hood with wanky dagging and giant liripipe, but that also involves brais and man-hose so I dunno. I'm only ever really tempted to wear short tunics and stuff at festival, where it gets very wet and skirts get very annoying, but that means adding a quite ambitious project to the pile of things to do in the next six weeks. And I don't think I have enough stag buttons left. An awesome man-cote needs stag buttons :P

5. Anyway, I went home and finished stringing up the loom. Then I started weaving. Then I realised that something was wrong. First of all, the pattern was totally not even recognisable as a pattern. I looked at my threading diagram and eventually realised I'd threaded the whole thing backwards. This one was alternating S and Z threaded, and I thought I'd started with an S threaded card, but clearly I mixed myself up and accidently Z threaded it. Why is the S and Z thing so difficult? Anyway, this problem was easily fixed, I just needed to flip every card over. Yay! The next problem was that one of my edge cards wasn't being woven in with the rest of the band. It was just hanging out there all my itself, slowly twisting up with no weft going through it. After studying my turning sequence, I realised that even though the threading diagram was for 25 cards, the turning sequence was for 26. I have two packs, so I needed to have one edge card in one pack, and the other one in the other pack. I pondered threading up another card, then realised the pattern would become UNSYMMETRICAL and we can't have that, no no no no, so I just shifted the rogue card to the other pack, and the problem seems to have fixed itself. Huzzah! here's a picture:

Ah epic fail. You can see where I fail at beginning braids, then the weird backwards threaded pattern, then a big lump where I flipped the cards and turned them all back to the top, then finally the real pattern starts! Why am I so bad at these things? I thought maybe this time would be different, that finally I'd be able to just start weaving like everyone else seems to be able to do, but clearly I was wrong :P At least I fixed it, and it was relatively easy to fix, because it would've been a whole lot of wasted time and yarn. Although I guess it also goes to show that one teeny weeny little mistake can just turn the whole project to shit.

6. I've almost got my dad enthused for making me my own tablet loom. I'll work on him a bit more on Saturday, then hopefully I can transfer this project onto my very own brand new loom made just for me, and give Tex's back to her so she can lend it to Rachel :P

And that's about it from me today. Tomorrow I'm going to hang with the college kids, hopefully it's not too hot, like every other O-Day that has come before. I've decided to wear my German, since it's flashy and comes with a nice giant pizza-hat for keeping the sun off :P The freshers won't have any idea that it's all cheated sleeves and made out of the wrong fabric with crappy plastic beads.