Hi. I’m Mateo.
It is nice and warm outside almost every day now and I get to head on out to the catio to check on the bunny. He’s still there!!! I would like to stay out all day but the Mother of Cats forces me to COME BACK INSIDE after she makes her breakfast and morning latte (She tells Hannah that she needs to learn how to make a latte, but does she pay attention? No. Hannah just does whatever she wants, and she never gets into trouble like I do…), and then she usually doesn’t let me outside again. Why is she so mean!!! I watch the bunny from the front window, but it isn’t the same…
The Mother of Cats has been spending a lot of her time weaving downstairs on the big loom. This loom is a little bit scary. She stomps on the floor peddles and pulls the big swingy reed thing towards her while throwing yarny shuttles back and forth at the same time that crashy parts are going up and down. Do I hang out with the loom? No. I do not. I do feel like I should show off what she has been making.
After the Mother of Cats had finished the homework weaving she dug around in her yarn stash and made a woven piece from some sock yarn that she bought years and years ago.
Look at that yarn! Years ago she made those socks with the elephant on them, and last week the rest of the yarn was used on the loom to make a table runner. Personally, I like the socks better, but the Mother of Cats likes the new runner too. It is cool, right? The Mother of Cats was so excited by the look of that yarn she headed back to the stash and got MORE yarn.
This yarn, which is called Silk Garden, is thicker than the first yarn. Wouldn’t that yarn make a nice cat toy? Maybe some knitted mice? The Mother of Cats completely ignored my needs and wove another table runner. She likes the way it looks so much she went back to the yarn stash again and got some pink silk yarn. Yep. You Guessed it. ANOTHER table runner is now getting woven on the loom.
Hannah likes this pink shiny weaving more than I do. Pink is kind of her favorite color.
I do have to mention, the Mother of Cats has been kind of crazy with the pink lately. She went out and bought pink plants. Then she bought pink shoes. Then she bought a pink cricket. Seriously, crickets are for playing with!!! Crazy Mother of Cats, she has it with the plants in the indoor garden.
The Mother of Cats says that the pink makes her happy, so I guess I have to put up with all of this pink silliness.
I’m trying to think really hard about what else has been going on around here. There has been some knitting. Boring. She has made some more hats for the infusion centers. Also boring. She went out and left us several times this month for meet-ups with her friends and some doctor visits. Also very, very boring. I guess I can show off the weaving on her rigid heddle loom:
I guess that’s all that I want to talk about. It is about time for the Mother of Cats to feed us our special night time tuna, and then I’m going to make her play with me for a while.
Bye for now,
Mateo
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
- The first color changing yarn that I used on the loom is Noro Silk Garden Sock Solo, a single ply fingering weight yarn. I wasn’t sure how the cotton warp would work with the wool blend yarn, but it looked great.
- The second Noro yarn is Silk Garden Sock yarn, a DK weight single ply yarn that is twice as heavy as the first Noro yarn. It wove in great, and I liked the look of the more solid color blocks.
- That pink yarn is also a DK weight called Bamboo Silk (silk/bamboo mix) that was hand dyed by a weaving shop north of me. I’ve had this yarn for years: really special, it was hard to find a good use for it. I’m liking it in this woven piece. I plan to put another warp on the loom in the same threading pattern, but this time in a purple colored cotton, and then I can weave another piece with the same pink yarn. I can’t wait to see how that turns out!
- Don’t you like the pink cricket? My new rigid heddle loom is a cricket made by the Schacht Spindle Company. Of course it needs a pink cricket to keep it company!
- I’ve been reading convoluted mystery books lately. The two that I am reading right now are set in very different situations, but I am loving the many technical details, cultural themes, and foreign settings that are similar in a spooky way.
Imagine living in a time far in the future. You are the pilot attached to an archeological group recovering artifacts from ancient civilizations on distant planets that abruptly disappeared. What happened? Can a lost alien language be decoded in time to understand these ancient beings who have left behind their poetry, religion, and relics before the catastrophic mechanism that killed them returns? It’s an interstellar crime of cosmic proportions, and time is running out. The key to solving much of this is… a printing press.
Or, almost as foreign as the ancient aliens and their lost civilization, is London 1667. It is the year following the Great Fire, and political intrigue is thicker than the smoke of that great conflagration. The city is being rebuilt, but refugee camps remain. There are children afflicted with scrofula, a form of tuberculosis that presents in horrible swollen tumors grown from lymph nodes in the neck. There is murder. There are royal directives, and machinations by important people to secure power. Nothing makes sense, but everything is connected. There is a printing press involved. Of course.
I’m having fun reading both of these at the same time.
The other big event that happened. That would be Rare Disease Day on February 28th.
I decided to not write a whole post about it this year, but I wanted to make a point or two. There I am, looking much better than I deserve to, flashing my zebra shirt. The decal on my car tells the story. Even though I am told often that “I look great!”, and I suspect that some of those people think that I am faking for attention, the reality of scleroderma is that it is… complicated. I take 22 pills a day in an ongoing effort to slow the progression of the damage being caused by my disease, and almost all of my organs are being impacted. I now have serious lung and heart complications, but to be truthful, the impact to my digestive tract is what causes me the most grief. Scleroderma, especially the systemic form, is rare; the complications that it brings are even more rare.
Systemic sclerosis, the type of scleroderma that I have, like many other rare diseases, is invisible, but the struggle is real.
Whenever you can, support the zebras that you find in your life.
Yarn, Books & Roses 
I will support you for the rest of my days by reading your always fascinating blog-posts, Marilyn !! – and commenting upon ’em.
OK, Mateo … that is indeed a bee-yoo-tiful photo of you. It is possibly the best one I’ve seen ! Which seasonal coat are you currently wearing ? – I think it ought to be you Spring coat.
I do indeed LOVE the MoC’s pink shoes; but the cricket is rather large and fearful. Erhmm … frightful ? Possibly I mean fear-inducing. As long as YOU are not alarmed by it, all’s well.
Dear MoC, that is a really GREAT t-shirt with the BLZ on it – very colourful !!
ALL the weaving is mind-bogglingly wonderful – truly !! But I think I like the rigid heddle fabric most of all. They make me feel like an absolute dummy. 😦
Both of those books sound terrific ! I love the over-all Restoration period; and the SF one is not weird fantasy.
I wonder: have you not received email advice of my last two blog-posts ? – that’s happening to most people. As well, I am not receiving emails about comments. Sighh …
I have not gotten any email notifications! I will check out your blog now that I know.
I finished The King’s Evil and just downloaded the next book in the series. I’m now up to 1668!! This is all really interesting to me as I haven’t really read much about this time in English history. These books are just full of political intrigue and I’m stunned at how these complex mysteries are so like what is happening right now. Money. Blackmail. Battles in court. Complex conspiracies for power. Oh yeah… murder.
You don’t like my cricket? He is so cheerful sitting right by the African violets and orchids, keeping me company while I weave.
Mateo is still in that dang winter coat, but I am brushing him every few days now because he has started shedding it out and I want to reduce hair ball events. Poor Mateo.
It is good to see that you are keeping so busy, Marilyn. I like the t-shirt. As for you, Mateo, you are clearly paying a good deal of attention, saving Mother a lot of writing
LOVE the t-shirt. Your weaving projects look great. Uhh, pink cricket. I hate crickets. I rescue spiders and take them outside but I squash crickets. But glad you like your pink one. I honestly thought Mateo was telling us you got a pink cricket machine.
Isn’t the tee shirt the best!! I bought it after I was diagnosed with my 3rd rare condition and I was told that it made me a unicorn. Ha!! Why do something unless you are going to overachieve?!
The loom is named a cricket, and even has a green cricket stamped on the side. Now I weave on that little rigid heddle loom with the pink cricket hanging out next to me. I do have to mention that grasshoppers are one of Mateo’s favorite playthings. I have to really watch out as he likes to bring them into the house to play with them.
Mateo, that first photo made me laugh. Looks like you’re giving everyone the stink eye. (But I know you don’t mean that.)
MoC, I love the pink. It’s a happy color and so appropriate for Spring! The pink cricket is okay as long as it doesn’t hide in my bedroom and chirp at me in the middle of the night.
That t-shirt is awesome!!
I can’t believe that everyone isn’t loving the pink cricket? It makes me laugh every single time I look at it, but them I have had many the cricket adventure as an old biology teacher.
Pink is just making me really happy these days. If I could find a nice pink coat I think that I would buy that too. Of course, that may be a little hopeful as we don’t seem to be having any rain or snow lately. My poor lawn!!
Snow tomorrow, so they say. Historically, you’ll get it down there on the south side and up here on the north side, zilch. But my fingers are tightly crossed! My lawn is looking pretty crispy, too.
And hey, if you come across that pink coat, buy it!!
There is snow!! Mateo came in covered in the stuff. My lawn is so excited!
Your weaving is so beautiful! And the color changing yarn makes it endlessly entertaining.
I really am happy with the color changing yarn! Overshot is so rewarding to weave and I find that it is a great way to manage stress, but now I’m also motivated to try out all these different yarns to see what happens in the weaving. So much fun.
Your table runners look great! It’s lovely to find a project that you want to make in every colour 😊
I’m starting to come to the end of the warp so I will finally be able to see the finished runners. That’s the only downside to weaving with color changing yarn. As I get to new colors, the ones that I just finished get wound onto the front beam and disappear from view. It is going to be exciting to finally cut the warp off!
That’s an added bonus – the end is a surprise even to you!
I like your crickets better than my crickets. We have crickets that somehow get into our house and make it upstairs to the guest bathroom tub without us seeing them make their way there. And then we have to either rescue them or (if we don’t find them in time) remove the corpses. Your pink cricket and cricket loom are much nicer.
I have crickets in the yard and garage every fall that make soooo much noise, but I can never locate them. I do have to mention that when I lived in Japan there was a type of cricket that always appeared in the bathroom: it was coming up the pipes! My pink cricket and the loom are better behaved!
I wonder if our crickets are coming up the pipes? Hmm. Worth looking into.
I love all your pink! It’s a very springy, hopeful color 🙂 Your weaving is amazing – can’t wait to see what you do with it next 🙂 Mateo and Hannah are both so beautiful, and you take lovely photos of them! And finally, thank you for sharing information and spreading awareness of your condition.
You just can’t go wrong with pink, right? Well, there is purple, too…
I started thinking about ordering in some more warp yarn last night. I think that I’d better concentrate on knitting for awhile. Luckily I have all the yarn!!