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 