Our new baby

I've been fairly busy the last couple of weeks working on things for my fledgling business, trying to get stock made up, filling orders, and coming up with new things to try.  That hasn't let a lot of time or energy for historical sewing, but I'm hoping that once things settle down a bit I'll be able to establish some sort of new routine.  It doesn't help that now that I'm fairly certain that I *can* weave, my loom room has been taken over by the newest addition to the household, the as-yet-nameless kitten.  The DH wants to call her Patches, but I have an aversion to naming animals silly words rather than actual names.  She was called Ellie at the pound, but that's the name of a friends dog, so that won't do.  Right now I'm leaning towards Annie.  So far we've been calling her Miss. Kitty Fantastico until we come up with a real name.

It's been a rough fall.  Ok, to be honest it's been a rough year or two but I think the last couple of months have really been wearing on me.  Not being able to get out of the house since the the surgery and having so much trouble doing even basic things, on top of the pain, the cat dying, and everything else has just got me down.  Usually I try not to post about personal things here, but part of my lack of productivity and progress with some of my projects is that I'm feeling really discouraged in general.  Working so hard and seeing so little return for it is frustrating, and it seems like that's what I've been doing on all fronts lately.

Rewind please?

What a miserable week.  I went to California for a jewelry show last week, something totally outside the scope of this particular blog but I've been trying to see if I can make profitable over the last few months.  The show did not go well, but I'm not really sure why.  It didn't seem like any of the vendors there were selling much, so as far as a learning experience goes it was kind of not that helpful. 

Business matters aside, the trip sort of went down hill from there. Trying to get home on Sunday, the plane I was supposed tot ake out of LAX developed some sort of water leak and the flight got canceled, leaving me stuck in LA for 11 extra hours, with another 5 hour layover in Miami.  When I did finally get home Monday afternoon (only 17 hours late and not having slept or eaten properly) I found my cat sitting on the living room floor in a puddle of her own urine and unable to stand up.  The vet did what she could but she (the cat, not the vet) ended up having to be put to sleep yesterday morning.  According to the DH Maya (the cat) had been  acting strangely for the last couple of days and he hadn't seen her move on her own since before Saturday.  I feel awful that I wasn't there for her, not that I could have done anything.  Poor old kitty.

Anyway, the trip wasn't a total fiber waste.  I did stop by Village Spinning Weaving and get some more Gotland for my never-ending warp spinning project.  I'm trying to spin up enough to weave either an apron dress or one of the short sleeves Greenland dresses.  So far I have 3 shades of Gotland for the warp, but I think if I warp carefully that won't be a problem.  I will need to make sure I get all the same color wool for the weft or I'm going to have a crazy checked dress.  I also got some bamboo to try out for tablet weaving.  It's much less expensive than silk, making it less scary to work with and get wrong, but has a fairly similar hand so it should (I hope) work up better than the cotton I have been using for the London bands.  I want to make a filet, similar to the one in the MOL book with the bits of fake hair still attached.  That particular band did not work at all well with the cotton so hopefully the bamboo will improve things.  Once I get the hang of things a little better I will move on to silk, I'm just not brave enough yet to spend that kind of money on a learning project.