dreaming bittersweet

(Formerly stalled drafts have been nudged by end-of-term exams, in progress.)

Sonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, The Rajes 1 (2019)
Recipe for Persuasion, The Rajes 2 (2020)
Incense and Sensibility, The Rajes 3 (2021)

Beyond the pairwise romance ostensibly cranking its plot, the first book is a love letter to third-culture kids whose lives have been bent by contradictory familial expectations, and an acknowledgment of bits of the wreckage wrought by postcolonial aspiration. Light touch, relatively, but I appreciate that these books say some of the quiet things aloud about costs and---better---that several characters encourage each other to speak to someone specific.

"Raje" isn't ordinarily a surname, which makes it a good choice.

Perhaps the most important feature of the setting, as a fix-it, is that when the kids who figure in these books as adult characters were growing up, several older relatives were local. I also appreciate the queer side-character situationship, whose arc suits the books' setting.

Anyway, four books total---none for Mansfield Park, which I think would be tough to fit. The fourth is The Emma Project (2022), which I've begun.

Still knitting: while I address a request, Sundial has gone on hold, a few colorways from its probable end. I have enough scraps after all to vary the latter's sequence of hues out to reasonable scarf-length.

For trying to restart weaving: spent some time with old notes and recent reading/viewing. (No new notes. For example, Long Thread, a magazine publisher, lets influencers rent ad space in their newsletters, but they're never useful (delete, delete) when they repackage info from older practitioners and researchers who're still active. If one knows about the latter, it's better to visit the source.) Besides Susan Foulkes, whose blog I've read almost since its start, off the top of my head there's Laverne Waddington, Liz Gipson, Annie MacHale, and Linda Hendrickson, for expert weavers and reliably clear teachers who've shared info generously.

I will never want or need to do this, but check out Hendrickson tablet-weaving with wire.

I've checked my yarn stash for something warp-suitable---similar yarn weight to the scraps for Sundial, but with a different tension requirement. Years ago, tiny skeins of cotton yarn were sold in sets of a few colorways, the fingering-weight equivalent of worsted-weight dishcloth yarn. They were marketed ten years ago (when big-box craft stores still walked the earth in my region) for fingerweaving or basic knotting as "friendship bracelets"; narrow bands are exactly what they're intended to become. Lion, the manufacturer, makes some sets from acrylic yarn nowadays, but a couple of all-cotton sets are still sold. The two packets in the kitchen craft drawer are plenty for playing with before I try hemp or wool.

One reason to restart weaving: another way to use up yarn scraps from knit and crochet. :)

(TIL that Lion bought Quince the yarn company in 2023. Not surprising that something would've; could be worse.)

For three years, I've pondered off and on how my current hands could do a bit of narrow weaving again---bands/tapes, not cloth per se. Whether it's weave, sling-braid, sprang, or something else in that direction, having something other than my hands to hold part of the threads' tension seems wise. My hands have improved a bit since I paused my embroidery self-test (for needle-dropping), but not by so much as to change the target parameters.

Susan J. Foulkes has a demo video showing five ways of weaving narrow bands. What's most helpful is its use of a rigid heddle. Tablet weaving is mildly interesting but would require some complicated-for-me setup. Separately, thanks to the spindle workshop as self-test, I know that string heddles of any kind are out.

Available to me: an inkle loom, basic backstrap-weaving instructions for several cultural traditions, and two Stoorstålka kits (backstrap with rigid heddle) acquired on sale---or so I thought, until I opened the kits. Each kit has a strap and a heddle, but the simpler one isn't warped (threaded through). Perhaps it was returned and resold.

Haven't decided yet how to proceed. If I try the fancier kit and mess it up, self-knowledge says that I won't spend US $40 merely to get another pre-warped setup, which means it'll languish. IOW, I should start at the right difficulty level---tough to guess for my current hands. The simpler kit's heddle is a basic one, no extra holes to support picking up, and I understand in theory how to thread it. I'm just wary of things that result in loss of sleep overnight, such as cutting up one raw carrot, heh. Peeling an entire pomelo is fine; cutting daikon and raw potato and onion are fine, in moderation. Carrots are apparently made of adamantium.

(Pickup in weaving is how one gets decorative bits amidst the right-left-right over-under default. Often they're raised a bit relative to the neighboring threads. Pickup is a sprang-type exception, where twining interrupts the usual weft passage.)

Stoorstålka has a cute video on how to start weaving with their kits when the heddle has been warped; Foulkes has a more practical howto that uses a Stoorstålka heddle to make a different band. Another weaver has a chatty video for warping an Ashford inkle loom, which tells me I don't want to do that yet.