My right hand has feeling in it again, after a long night of waking up with it numb. If you’ve never experienced this, you might think that having a limb go to sleep while you are asleep would not disrupt your sleep, right? I mean, that seems logical. Wearing my wrist brace helps a lot but it doesn’t take long for me to start whining about wearing my brace. Cons: hot, itchy, slightly uncomfortable, quite inconvenient at certain times, and you have to repeat what is wrong with you to everybody. My problem is an old one: chronic tendinitis.
I was able to end a pretty stressful week on Friday night by getting about as drunk as I have been in a very long time at Old Town with some M.A. students and a professor in celebration of them finishing their comprehensive exams that day. The exams did not go well – they had a blackout midway through the morning session and a lot of them lost their work and it caused a big disruption for everyone. I felt so sorry for them, and thankful that I did not have to take comps for my M.A.
The interesting part of this was that not only did I not have a hangover, Saturday morning was the first morning in a very long time that I didn’t wake up with a headache. Other than getting up once in the middle of the night for a glass of water, there was no punishment for my fun. I thought that was very nice of God.
I spent much of yesterday cleaning out the gazebo of the raw papermaking materials (okra stalks, artichoke blossoms, joe-pye weed stalks) I had stored over the winter, and sweeping out the leaves. I spent a good couple of hours painting pages to include in books and then worked on measuring the warp yarn and tying on the warp to my previous warp on the loom, two inches at a time. This part is what I think is hard on my hands, holding the individual threads and tying weaver’s knots. However, it is half the work of threading the reed and the heddles to do it this way. The disadvantage is that I will have to use the same threading as before, but I can get a completely different look from it.
I used colors in this striped warp design that I saw out the studio door and window: the red Nanking cherry tree in blossom, the bare trees just beginning to leaf out, the violets, and the blue jay flying past every few minutes. The stripe design was fairly random, using the Fibonacci sequence of numbers for balance, but I balanced it further by adding a symmetrical design of larger stripes in between the randomness. I’ll post a photo if I ever get the damned thing warped so you’ll see what I mean.
In the Fibonacci sequence, each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…
I applied for a small table at Shindig on the Square, which looks like it will be enormous fun to be a part of even if I don’t sell anything.
And, by the way, I did go the the Friends of the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market board meeting, and I am a member. I cannot say at this time how much help that I’m going to be, but I can at least show up to make a quorum at the meetings.
slowly she turned 