Clara's Window

Yes, I guess that is what you'd call a loom with a view! There are four north-facing windows (of which you see two here) looking out on my blueberry fields, woods, and pond (that flat white frozen thing in the distance). All it needs are a few happy little grazing sheep.

The pattern is my first solo design attempt. Fortunately weaving patterns are much easier to figure out than knitting ones. No elaborate sizing with increases and decreases, no fitting together of multiple pieces, just lots of basic math and some imagination, with a dose of symmetry tossed in for good measure.

Weaving is much more physical than knitting, and I'm enjoying the change. When you knit, your body is basically very still. Most of the time I love this, but sometimes I start to feel too much like a sedentary blob whose only movement is from wriggling fingers. But with weaving, so many of the steps involve broad, sweeping gestures, from measuring your warp to the actual weaving process. And that, too, can be very therapeutic.

My only problem has been the lack of an appropriate seating surface. Loom benches need to be higher than normal chairs. Last weekend I ended up sitting on the arm of a chair, but as you can imagine, this had its limitations. Until I have $350 to foot a solid cherry loom bench, I've ordered a stool from Sturbridge Yankee Workshop that I hope will do the trick.

This weekend's plans include starting my seeds and painting a bay window that I've been scraping for... oh... the past 14 months (what can I say, scraping windows isn't my forté). But I also hope to get in several hours of uninterrupted weaving time, in which case I'll post more pics soon!