Musical happenings ...

July and early August brings us the NH Music Festival, an extraordinary event--and so close to home, which thrills me. I went to opening night this year. The deciding factor was Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. If you have never heard this, do yourself a favor:



If nothing else, listen to the 2nd movement. Image yourself lying supine, floating around the heavens on a cloud... it starts at 21:10 in the video.

The evening was sheer pleasure. Opening night at the festival includes--gratuitous with ticket--wine and/or champagne, cheese, crackers, fruit--as you will. Pre-concert and during intermission. Very impressive. Before intermission, the orchestra played Handel and Haydn. Bliss. Beauty. Perfection.

I attended my second concert last Thursday: Brahm's Requiem, formally: Ein Deutsches Requiem. Oh my word. To begin with, Brahms is one of my favorite composers. One of the very first pieces I ever taught myself was his Lullaby. It was in a book of music we received from my Aunt Emma. I well remember sitting at the upright in the living room--with it's missing keytops and a few broken keys--but hey! It was better than nothing!!--learning how to play it. It sounded so fresh and beautiful and deep and meaningful. A fabulous, fabulous concert. Overwhelmingly powerful at times with the orchestra and choir at full throttle. Honestly, I was drained when it ended. Drained in the best possible way.



On a smaller scale, we held our summer concert this afternoon. It too, was full of joy. We played in a new-to-us venue: A Unitarian Universalist meeting house in Norwich, VT. Very serene, joyous space designed in an almost Shaker-like simplicity. High cathedral ceiling; great acoustics! We enjoyed standing room only! Golly. Much, much fun. Cookies, fruit, and juices post-concert. Lovely community gathering.

Now I can bring my energies to focus entirely on my lesson material: Bach's Arioso.

A Wee Problem ...

Oh, oh. It's evident I'm a little out of practice at the loom! As I was threading some heddles just now, I realized that I neglected to distribute them evenly on both sides of the central hooks which hold the bars which hold the heddles. It's no big deal, I can bend the bars that hold the heddles just enough to get them off the hooks and thereby allowing me to shuffle the heddles from one side to the other. But in the process of thinking it through, something made me look at the draft again. Oh, no!

Two things: 1) As it was I had just enough heddles to thread this draft: I have no extras floating around; and 2) looking at the draft again I realize that I missed the fact that the corner block threading was given only once (it's not quite obvious unless one is really alert) and I should have counted it twice (because I need one on each side of the center panel). Oh, no!

Some tense moments. What to do? I would need to order some more heddles, wait for them to arrive, and get them on the frames. Ordering isn't a problem, but there's no way to add heddles after threading has begun. Not on this loom, anyway. Oh, no!

"Think of a solution," I thought. "Make it work," as they would say on "Project Runway". Could I make up some string heddles and get them on the frames? Ooh, that would be a lot of work and I'm not sure what the result would be. Should I order some more heddles and cut the top and bottom loops so I can get them on the frames? Seems such a wasteful thing to do. Oh, no!

I came close to deciding to scrap the project. Start over with something new--or the same draft--but start over. I decided to hold off a bit. Maybe a solution would come. But what? What can I do? Oh, no!

Well, a solution just came to me. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a solution I can live with... The center panel of the draft is a motif of 24 threads repeated ten times. That's 240 threads, hence 240 heddles. If I repeat the motif only 4 times (e.g. make the center panel quite a bit narrower) it would free up 144 heddles--the corner block requires 140. It works. Oh, yes!

So my runner is still going to be the width I had planned on, only the center panel will be narrower. Will it look unbalanced? Maybe. Maybe not. Time will tell. (I think it probably will.) At any rate, I think I will still enjoy it, and I will enjoy the process of weaving it, for sure. And I think it's better than starting over and losing all the work I've already done. Oh, my!

Live and learn.

Orchestra Summer Concert ...

When the winter season came to a close with our concert back in March (or was it April!?), a plea was made by the conductor looking for volunteers to take over some of the tasks of running the orchestra. Hence, I joined the executive committee and offered up my experience with graphic arts and made myself available to help with promoting the orchestra. We've been meeting every other week since then, discussing ways to grow the orchestra, acquire some name recognition, and lure people to our concerts. I was promptly set to making a membership drive poster in an effort to attract more instrumentalists.

Summer orchestra rehearsals began 5 weeks ago with the same guest conductor we had last summer. The music we are playing is fun, beautiful, and exciting. Handel (Oh, how I love his music.), Bizet, Rossini, and Sibelius. Selections from The Water Music, Intermezzo from l'Arlesienne Suite, No. 2, Barber of Seville Overture, and Valse Triste. A relatively short, pleasant, satisfying, summer concert. The concert is next Sunday. We have our final rehearsal Wednesday and will have a pre-concert warm up to review a few sections.

In my new capacity doing promotional material, I designed a poster. The background image is my back yard! :)

Sleying the 8-shaft

There are so many possibilities in the craft of weaving--endless--I sometimes have difficulty deciding what to weave, in which structure, in which colors. So, so, many possibilities.

To be sure, one of the projects I have in mind for the 8-shaft is double-weave color blocks. So very beautiful and full of color. But I'm not starting with that. What I'm really in the mood for is another overshot pattern, but overshot really only needs 4-shafts not 8. No matter, I'm going for it. I'll use only 4 of the 8 as an exercise in getting to know this new-to-me-loom.

So I've decided on an overshot with border draft called "Norse Kitchen" as a table runner. I'm using 10/2 white cotton for the warp and weft tabby, and 5/2 cotton in a burgundy color named "lipstick" for the pattern threads.



I couldn't decide on an epi (ends per inch) for the warp. I found some overshot patterns in the same yarn weights I'm using calling for 24 epi, and I saw some for 20 epi. Originally, I opted to go with 24 but I kept going back to the examples of other weaving I'd found and just couldn't get settled with it. I finally, in my final decision, decided on 20 epi, only to discover after doing the calculations that it wouldn't fit in my loom! So I compromised and went for 22 epi. Glad that's finally settled.

I wound the warp yesterday and proceeded to completely mess up one bout by losing the lease cross. Oi! So I made a new bout this morning and finished sleying the reed this afternoon. Post inspection, I found 3 warp ends hanging around on the wrong side of the reed. La dee dah! Drat! Toughie, this one. One of the ends had simply slipped out of it's reed, and that was an easy fix. The other 2, somehow, had been missed, so I had to re-sley half the reed to make room for them. Well golly! But now it's done.

I have started threading the heddles and discovering the difference 8-shafts makes in dressing the loom: A bit more reaching. I hope to have it all threaded in the next day or so (there are 458 threads).

We had a very pretty moon this week. These pics taken a day apart ...

A new loom ...

Tools of the Trade, 8 shafts, 10 treddles, 27" width. And it's mine.

I received a message from a high school classmate last week saying he was wrapping up the estate of an elderly man whose deceased wife was a fiber artist. She had 5-6 looms, as many spinning wheels, and a lot of yarn; much of which has spent too many days visited by mice and moths, which is a bit sad because there was so much of it. My friend was asked to see if he could unload them. "Sure, I'd love to see them, maybe I'll be interested in one (or more?)," was my response. So I went over and found two 39" 4-shaft LeClerc's, a 27" Tools of The Trade 8-shaft, a 6-shaft Macomber rug loom, and 2 or 3 smaller looms that were wanted by family. Most of the wheels, including one great wheel, needed repair of one sort or another. I don't need another wheel. What with my great wheel, my castle wheel, and my flax wheel I'd say I'm reasonably well equipped.

I have wanted an 8-shaft loom for as long as I've had my 4-shaft Herald loom, so when I saw the Tools of The Trade, I knew almost immediately that, yes, I would love to have that loom. A little elbow grease would remove the mouse stains and it would clean up nicely, quite sure.

My understanding is Tools of The Trade was a one-man operation in Fairhaven, VT. He is no longer in business, and from what I can gather, his looms are sought after and desirable. It's a lovely loom, nice size (not too big), well made. My research gave me an idea of what to offer and it was accepted.

The loom is now--for now--between my living area and dining area in the main room of my downstairs. I will need to consider carefully where it's permanent location might be, and I think any plan for rearrangement of furniture will have to include getting rid of something(s). There comes a point where, after bringing this and that into the home, the walls start to bulge and the only solutions are 1) buy a bigger house, or 2) unload something! Number 1 is not an option.

Oh. But I now have an 8-shaft loom. I cleaned it up this afternoon. :)



One of my favorite views of the flower beds, taken yesterday before the rain:


I was just now reminded by a commotion on my new deck that I had left a partial bag of bird seed on the swing this afternoon. Plan was to bring it inside after I finished something else--which I cannot remember--and obviously didn't remember the seed as well! It is now in the possession of a lucky black bear. They've been around a lot this year.

Pics of the garden ...

A few of my favorite pics from the garden this spring and summer ... so far ...


I call this one "piano fingers":

Critters ...

There has been plenty of activity about the place, spring and summer--so far. The latest bit of unpleasantness has just now been resolved, but not after at least a month-and-a-half of mystery and frustration. I first started noticing the disturbing odor in late May! At first I thought it was the pile of straw which I removed from the bird room and which rests out back, not too far (not far enough, at any rate) from the house. It's my intention to move the pile and move it I will, after several "must attend to's" have been attended to. I have certainly hoped that pile was the source of the odor, because it would be a simple explanation with an easy remedy. Yet, there have been suspicions that the problem might be something more difficult, specifically: mouse activity between the floors.

Oh, a mischief of mice practically over ran the place last month! Luckily, a solution presented itself before I had to resort to an unpleasantness I don't like to think about: killing. The solution was offered to me by the mice, themselves. Yes! They did indeed, teach me how to catch them... I keep my bird's seed in plastic containers under the kitchen counter. One of the containers is deep and stores parrot food. One morning I discovered that a mouse (with or without accomplices) had chewed through the hard plastic cover to gorge himself on pumpkin seed. It irritated me greatly that they had figured out how to reach the seed, so I purchased a heavy, heavy plastic pail with strong lid and started hiding the seed within.

Then my trip to NYC came up and I was away for 4 days. When I returned late that Tuesday evening--with a non-functioning car--I immediately noticed an unpleasant smell about the kitchen, but couldn't pin point it. It wasn't the garbage bins. Did I have some old, rotting food in the fridge? No. Two days later I had occasion to retrieve something from under the cabinet and discovered that the old plastic seed bin with the chewed hole in the cover contained 3 decomposing mice! Apparently they had crawled in through the cover, fell to the bottom, and could not get out. I felt badly they perished this way, but learned how to make a mouse trap for future needs.

The odor in the kitchen dissipated quickly. The persistent odor in the living room area, however, persisted. Returning from shopping this afternoon--an overcast, wet, rainy day with heavy atmosphere--the smell was getting my annoyance up. I poked around the eaves (I have 2 secret doors in both upstairs rooms that allow me to enter behind-the-scenes spaces up there.) and found a hole where mouse are able to enter, I believe from the outdoors but I'm not entirely sure about that. I will plug up that hole. Otherwise, the smell up there was nothing that alarmed me. There was nothing overwhelming about the musty, dry, attic odor. I was afraid my fear of mice between floors was going to turn out to be true. Still, however, there is that pile of straw out back.

About an hour ago I arose from the settee to go towards the bird room and as I passed the wood stove, it seemed to me the smell was strongest right there. But was it? Or was it my imagination? Well, I should at least open the stove and see if there might be an explanation within. There was.

So glad to have finally found the source of this malodorous air, but sad to discover two rotting red squirrels in the stove. I removed their decomposing carcasses and am at this moment burning some incense in the cavity of the stove.

The air around here is improved already.

It's country living, I understand this. I love the critters around here, but I do wish they could be a bit more diligent in observing boundaries! Next week I will get someone to cap my chimney. Squirrels have entered that 'door' for the 2nd time this year.