The finished Kool-Aid dyed Sibe fur!
Wow! It’s been awhile since I last wrote an entry! I apologize! I haven’t done too much in the way of fiber arts in the last two weeks, other than start another bobbin of Sibe fur on Anansi. The skein I dyed came out merely okay. I had too many areas the Kool-Aid color couldn’t get to, so I will have to buy some more and redo it, but I did find out that the fur will accept dyeing! So I posted a picture of it anyway.
The two items in the title are totally unrelated to each other. One refers to a video game, and the other is fiber-related.
Diablo 3 is what has kept me busy in recent days. Yes, it’s a computer game. I know, I know, but this game has been eagerly awaited for ten long years!!! I have played both of the previous entries, and never once gotten to finish either. Something always interfered, whether it was a computer crash or loss of the game disc itself, or the fact that the computer was upgraded and the game was not. It has always been one of my favorite games, a good, old-fashioned, button-mashing, hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. No complicated combos to remember, just plain old mouse clicking. I love this game.
As I said, it’s my favorite, and apparently a favorite of many other people as well, enough so that there was a midnight launch of the game a few days ago, which I attended to pick up the two collector’s editions my husband and I ordered so that we could play together. The first night was an unmitigated disaster, as the game servers were completely unprepared for the sheer number of players all trying to log on at the same time globally. We were all supposed to be able to play at midnight, Pacific time, but my hubby and I, at least, were unable to play until 2:30 in the morning, and then the servers crashed, further infuriating the hordes of players who were already infuriated at being unable to play at the promised time. When finally we were able to play, it was for hours. What can I say? I’m a huge kid. I put the game on both of my computers, so I can play on my Mac while supervising dinner, or downstairs on my PC after the kids are in bed.
The cockiness refers to Talyn. If you recall, I finally put him under warp a couple of weeks ago. Normally, with a loom I’ve never used, I warp with a yarn I don’t care about, generally one of the dozens of skeins of acrylic cluttering up my studio. It’s cheap, readily available, and I never use it for anything important. That’s my normal modus operandi. This time, however, I was too confident in my own abilities. This time, I warped with the considerably more expensive 5/2 mercerized cotton I’d been hanging onto.
Part of the reason for this massive glitch is the fact that I downloaded a drafting application for my iPad called iWeaveit. All I had to do was input the colors I was using for warp and weft, how many shafts I was using, set up the shafts and the treadling, and essentially hit enter. The program does the rest and shows you what the piece will look like according to the setup you give it.
It should have worked. It isn’t the program’s fault. I screwed the pooch on this one. I couldn’t understand why the shafts weren’t following the drawdown properly. I’d move a shaft and have threads in the shed, other threads dropping or rising when they should be doing the opposite…I couldn’t figure it out, and was blaming poor Talyn when I should have blamed my very own self.
I got sick of it today and decided to cut off the warp. Then I rethought the situation and decided I would try to save it. I hadn’t gotten very far, as the problems had begun pretty much immediately, so I untied the warp from the cloth beam, and proceeded to pull out the weft, which took me about an hour to do. It is now a very pretty butterfly, waiting to be used again, no harm, no foul.
Once the weft was out, I took a good hard look at the heddles and the reed. Lo and behold, there are errors in both. Am I surprised? No, not really. They are fortunately easy-to-fix errors, but they were major errors in terms of the design I was trying to weave. So I will need to pull a few strings out and re-thread them, but that is a job for tomorrow. For today, Bryony is in a “whine and scream about everything and nothing” kind of mood, and Aneira is trying to “help”, which, inevitably, makes the situation worse and Bryony’s screaming louder. As I am out of patience with both my children, aided by the throbbing headache I now have, this carries over into everything else, so I think it would be wise not to tackle Talyn tonight! Tonight, after I cook dinner, I will be planting both my children in their beds early, or at least in their rooms, and I will spend some gloriously mindless time playing more Diablo 3!
Kids, Dogs, and Crafts...Oh, My! 