2019 Year End Wrap up, part 2 – everything else

Well, I put this post off for a little longer than I should have – but I had what I think is were understandable reasons mixed with a little procrastination.

In mid-December of 2018, Stormi began spending almost all of her time in the bedroom which meant more time for me in the bedroom taking care of her.  That put some projects and some of my usual stress relievers on hold because I wouldn’t leave her alone for more than a few hours at a time .

One thing I did keep up on was spinning.  I find that it centers and relaxes me.  As a result – largely because of spinning challenges like the Tour de Fleece – my end of year yarn production was impressive all things considered.  It didn’t seem like much until I put it all in one place.  In fact, my handspun bin is full now and I feel like I need to take a small break so I can begin to use some of it.

The year’s progress. I haven’t checked mileage yet. Will update when I do.

I had picked up a “bucket list”spinning wheel in Dec of 2018 and spent a good part of the first few months of the year getting to know her.

Anne is a Cadorette built Canadian Production Wheel.  There were many manufacturers of CPWs (they’re basically a type of wheel built mostly in Quebec, Canada – not a brand.)  Anne was built by a member of the Cadorette family – I suspect one of the sons based on what the seller told me about his mom using it.

That now brings the total to s-*mumbles indistinctly*.

I did re-home 4 wheels in 2019 too – the Dodec that I built from scratch and upgraded several times to make it quieter and smoother.  It’s not so loving nickname was “firewood”, so I thought it was time.  I also re-homed an Ashford Traditional that I got in incomplete and rough shape.  I refurbished it into a really nice quiet wheel and completed it with the missing parts and it’s since taught at least one person to spin and may become the learner wheel for our local spinning group.  The other wheels that found a new home were a Electric Eel Wheel mini and a head that could go on a treadle sewing machine.

I will be looking to re-home two more in 2020 too. A Country Craftsman and an unknown wheel that I rehabbed.  That will narrow my collection to only Canadian wheels and happily all are in working condition and I try to exercise each of them from time to time.

In February, I began work on an electric Spinning wheel based on my Lendrum wheel.  The plan is/was to make a wood wheel using a spare flyer that I have and a 12v motor/motor controller to power it.  That would allow me to take a project I was working on at home on the Lendrum with me if we went away for a bit without having to worry about the Lendrum being damaged.   This is also a project that I had limited time to work on.  I got as far as using the lumber and fasteners that I had in the house and tools I had in the house with a few small cuts done in the garage.  I won’t show that progress, it’s embarrassing.  It spun well from the beginning though and was quieter than the mini eel wheel ever was.

One of the ways I plan to use up some of that handspun is by weaving some of it.  To that end – in April, I picked up an old and rather neglected weaving loom at the weaver’s guild’s annual sale for $15.   The loom is a Leclerc Jano with a treadle stand.  It has about a 20.5″ weaving width.   I spent a couple of weeks refurbishing it and getting the parts it needed.   I even pressed Ronnie (the FW Ryan got me that started what would eventually become Archaic Arcane to begin with.) into service for the refurb.

Prior to this, I’d never touched a loom or thrown a shuttle.  As usual, I dove in head first and ended up rehabbing before I even got to use it.  This is a good thing though because I was thoroughly familiar with the loom before I ever threw the shuttle. It made troubleshooting anything that came up way easier.

LeClerc’s Original advertisement for the Jano Loom.
A small part of my first ever weaving project.  And yes, that shuttle is wider than my project! 🙂

The first project went well but I was distracted by what we named “The Neverending Bathroom Reno from Hell” – where we learned that the people who owned this house before us had installed a mis-sized window (which is in the shower) incorrectly and figured caulking would take care of that gap to the outside.  At least we finally knew why that bathroom is so cold in the winter!

What we found behind a really thick bead of caulking and a little insulation.  That grey and the light behind the grey in the bottom corner is the outside of the house and also outside of the outside of the house. We frankly got really lucky there wasn’t more damage than a couple of boards that we had to remove and replace.

What was supposed to be a “quick” re-caulking of the tub turned into 3 solid weeks of bathroom “refresh” – even a new shower head when the old one sprung leaks everywhere, a new diverter when the old one broke in two on removal (to replace the leaking O-Ring) and even stucco outside when we lowered the window by 2″ and had to fix the outside as a result.  Every time I thought we were almost finished, something else would crop up.  By the end of it, I was pretty close to invoking the cleansing power of fire.

It took until the end of May to finish that first weaving project that netted me 6 little dish cloths.

Feeling confident, I immediately wound and beamed my second warp (a shadow weave set of placemats using a draft I found in a Google Image search. ) but by July, I’d officially abandoned it. I was uninspired, frustrated by mistakes I kept making and hated the colors (I prefer cool colors but this was meant to be a pseudo warp / dummy warp and proof of concept before I tied on a blue set and a green set.)  It began 2020 as a UFO – still on my loom.

On top of the bathroom drama, Stormi was getting worse.  She was getting recurrent UTIs and often went off her food.  She was approaching 23yrs old at this point and every day I woke up wondering if today was the day that her CKD (kidney disease) would get her.  I would sometimes cuddle her to wake her up just to make sure she would.  Sometime around here we discovered a mass in her bladder too.  Her vets assured me she wasn’t in pain and that they didn’t feel like it was time to help her to the bridge yet.  I was an emotional wreck but she kept on fighting.  As long as she was fighting, we would keep supporting her.

In June, we bought a 3d printer.  I had planned for it to be mainly for Ryan because he’s always had an interest in CAD and such things.  For some reason though, he’s not done a lot with it but I’ve been learning CAD and creating things.  This was something that I could do while cuddling and taking care of Stormi and I was learning which helped to keep my mind occupied.   I started customizing (other people’s designs found on 3d printing sites) and printing bobbins for the all of spinning wheels and I printed a couple of bobbins for the loom.  These are some of the early ones.  Later, I moved on to designing my own.

Left to right: LeClerc E352 bobbin, Cadorette CPW bobbin (a little longer than a Bordua but otherwise, it fits the Bordua too), Lendrum bobbin, Country Craftsman bobbin Front: Ashford Traditional bobbin. Background: Country Craftsman wheel.

Then my thoughts began to turn to still more fabrication.  That eSpinner project that had been on the back burner because I didn’t have time to practice my router and other wood work suddenly had an interim plan.  I turned it into a 3D project that would help me learn CAD without losing interest.

That’s not to say I didn’t get any work done in the wood destructor shed.  I took on small projects – bushings for the uprights of the new-to-me Leclerc E-352 spinning wheel I picked up (I blame this one on Ryan – he thought that it was cool that it “matched” my loom. ;)), and I “turned” a new peg for it as well by chucking a dowel in my drill and using sand paper to shape it to the same as the other one.  Grunt also got a new tension tablet one afternoon.  All projects I could do in an hour or so here and there away from Stormi.

Original on the right. Recreated on the left. Staining is on the list for this summer.
Bushings that sit in the uprights and hold the axle. Recreation is on the left. One original was missing when I bought the wheel) and this remaining (damaged) one is some sort of plastic and long since discontinued.

Then in mid-August, one month after her 23rd “birthday” – we lost Stormi.  She suddenly went downhill almost overnight.  On the morning of August 18th, she left the house for the very last time.

My little warrior who’d won so many battles had finally lost the war.   What started in 1996 with me scooping a 4 week old kitten off the road had come to and end.  My little love was gone.

I came home to a house devoid of furry companionship for the first time in my adult life.    I was and still am devastated though I knew that it was coming for years – since her original diagnosis of CKD when she was 16yrs old.  I can’t understand how one little girl’s absence can make the house seem so quiet and empty.  I still catch glimpses of her from the corner of my eye sometimes.

Several times, her vet heard stories of the things Stormi would do and said I should write a book about her.  She was a very unique little cat and taught me many things.  She made me a better person. I have every plan to write her story.  It will be based on a series of Facebook posts I made on my personal page over the years.  The title will be “Strange Confessions of a Geriatric Kitty Mama”.

Stormi and her favorite teddy hand.

I made a promise to Ryan.  I would try to go 6 months to a year with no new furries brought home.  That would give us some time to travel, etc.  since we’d been basically house bound for the last several years taking care of Stormi.  The last time we’d been on an away vacation was 2012  and I had traveled for work only a couple of times since Stormi’s CKD diagnosis and only because Ryan could be here to take care of her meds, fluids, etc.

It went exactly that way for a little bit too. September found us on an impromptu trip to Jasper.  We’d decided to take a road trip to the Twisted Barn and decided we were close enough to the David Thompson Highway that we’d head home via Jasper.  We stopped in Rocky Mountain House to grab some food and a change of clothes and headed east. I didn’t even have a real camera with me – only my phone.

Ryan’s vacation in October found us in Jasper again for a few days – where we got to experience snow and ice on  high altitude roads on summer performance tires.   That’ll wake you up! Luckily, we had the really sure footed car with us and not a couple of two wheelers!

I had lost all momentum on all projects after we lost Stormi.  By late October, I was able to focus enough that I started work again on the eSpinner.  That progress has been fairly satisfying so far.  The final plan will likely still be a wood wheel – and likely won’t necessarily look like a Lendrum MOA but the exercise of recreating the Lendrum parts in CAD taught me so much and this lets me sneak up on a final design look without ruining a lot of expensive wood.   The wheel has also been kept in working order through most iterations.  Some of this year’s skeins of yarn were spun on this wheel during its testing iterations.

V0.3 – still using the IKEA wood box. The next version will have the control panel sunk into the front panel and all panels designed in CAD and printed. This is partly complete as of Feb 2020.

Mid-November saw a complete I.T. infrastructure refresh here.   I still had multiple machines running on Windows 7 that needed to be upgraded or replaced before Jan 14th, 2020 when MS discontinued support for Win7, plus a couple of Linux machines that needed upgrading.  While I was at it, I thought it would be a good time to clean up some file server drives and make my backups a little happier.  At the same time, for some reason, I decided to upgrade my several years old phone because it was no longer connecting to the car properly (I know, first world problems).  So I effectively I disrupted absolutely everything at once.  Apparently I’m crazy like that.  That took way longer than I planned and by the beginning of January when I finally finished everything (between paying work and life in general…) I didn’t want to even think about IT maintenance again.

December brought an opportunity again to use the 3d printer to fix something that might otherwise have been disposed of.  The mount for the door shelf in the freezer broke ages ago.  The duct tape wasn’t holding it anymore and so you’d open the door and get the entire contents of that door shelf dumped on your feet.  So, I took an evening and designed and printed another one.  That saved us from having to source a new inner door panel/seal. Amazingly, I got it in one try too!  No printing waste at all from this project.

Fix for the door shelf of our Amana bottom mount freezer.

Christmas brought a Woolee Winder for my Lendrum from Ryan.  The plan: to be able to switch it back and forth between the  Lendrum and the electric wheel when it’s finished.

mmmm,… I like neat bobbins! 🙂 Phoenix Merino and Silk.

And with that, the longest year of my life ended – plus the 4 months that it took to get to the end of December.

No wait, there was one more thing.  I broke my promise to Ryan.  I didn’t make it 5 months.  We started talking with Zoe’s about adopting Bandit and Grey just before the New Year.   We realized that with him away from the house as many hours a day/week as he is that made sense that I was lonely – even if I was working. I was used to Shadow being “basement cat” and always in the studio with me.  To Stormi coming and getting me for cuddles because I’d been downstairs too long.  To being able to cuddle a cat when a sewing machine or computer was misbehaving that much.

OK. I think that is basically the year.   Reading back, I see now why I was exhausted all year.  Here’s to a less stressful New year for everyone!

I have a draft post in my browser to detail how some of the sewing machine and other projects have been coming along for the past almost 2 months. So that should mean – in theory – that I won’t be going so long between posts for at least the short term.

 

8 thoughts on “2019 Year End Wrap up, part 2 – everything else”

    1. In a way, it is less stress for me. I’m less stressed for myself than I am for my pets when they’re sick.

      But you’re right, it’s a terrible start to the year.

      I hope you stay healthy too!

  1. I love your machine repair videos. But, I was curious about which 3D printer you got. My husband was looking for one and you seem to be having great success with yours.

    1. I got the Prusa Original i3 mk3s – there are a lot of clones out there that are less money but the support is excellent with Prusa. That’s not the case with the clones.
      I was pretty confused when I started looking so when I asked around, it’s what people I trust recommended.

  2. Oh Tammi, so sorry to hear about Stormi. They really carve a hole in your heart. And I know what you mean by an empty house and catching glimpses of them.
    And I too, seem to attack everything at once causing general mayhem till you and everyone around you wants to scream. Fortunately you do eventually get to the end of it, vowing to never do “that” again.
    Tell me, do you ever get ahead of collecting sewing machines? I’m thinning my “herd” to the three I use – but I so want to keep a 301 that I’d really wanted. It needs some tender care but I can’t justify keeping it. Especially not when I’m selling my FQ 221 and 222. Sigh…

    1. Thanks! I still catch glimpses of Dax in the yard as I back up to the fence some days too. I swear sometimes they visit. I simply can’t understand how something so small – she was less than 5lbs at the end – can make such a hole in the house and my life when she’s gone.
      You should see my reno projects – the planned ones – even those tend to destroy the house. In the end, it’s usually worth it – but still. I still stand by what I’ve said though – roofers, plumbers and most of the trades in fact are worth their weight in gold. My knees still aren’t the same after doing the roof several years ago. The problem comes when you go in for a small fix and it turns into what I call a “shit onion” – you peel back a layer and the mess gets bigger and the S word just gets louder with each layer removed. No tradesperson in their right mind would want to take that on once you’re that far in! 😉
      I do think you can get ahead of it – but it takes discipline. You have to methodically and ruthlessly cull the collection until it’s down to the prime pieces. I can cull but not ruthlessly so I still have some “spares”. I think if machine makes you happy – keep it unless keeping it is going to mean financial ruin or starvation. Of course, I’m also an enabler, so you might want to take that with a grain of salt…

  3. Yet you still found the time to help those of us with our quirky sewing machine problems. Thank you for your help! May 2020 be a brighter and less stressful year.

    1. I did – mostly because sometimes it was a good break for me. 🙂
      Thank you! I hope your 2020 is miles better than my 2019 too!

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