hhAH

When this news broke my dad told me and my siblings, all of us who are US Citizens, born and raised in the US, that we have to carry some form of official documentation on us, especially because we live in a city that has been heavily targeted by the Trump administration for being a sanctuary city. My grandmother was staying with us and even though she is my non-latine grandmother, and she's a US citizen, my dad and aunt made the decision to have my dad drive her back home to New Jersey because she has an accent and her documents are back home.

As someone who is latine and south asian, I need you to know that this will not just affect latine people! My non-latine cousin was pulled over by ice about two weeks ago just for being brown! However this will disproportionately affect latine people. Just today ICE was seen on the street by my home and my work! One of my duties at work is to make sure that ICE does not come into our elementary school because we're a predominantly latine school. I HAVE TO MAKE SURE ICE DOES NOT KIDNAP 5 YEAR OLDS. That is the reality of the situation.

I want it to be known that I have been scared before because I'm living as a person of color in the United States. I have been scared before because of being a south asian born post 9/11. I have been scared before being a latina growing up during the Dreamer movement, despite being a citizen. However, before this week I have never been scared enough to feel the need to carry documentation proving I am a citizen of the damn country I was born in! Now I feel that scared though. Especially because a few months ago, for the first time in my life, someone assumed I didn't speak English. Another person of color assumed I didn't speak English and shit talked me in the CVS aisle because they assumed I didn't speak English. And then a week ago I also got mistaken for not speaking English when I went to the doctor's office and chatted with the receptionist in Spanish and then was handed Spanish paperwork to fill out.

Anyways, the point is the fact that I have seen maybe two? three? posts about this on here is upsetting and immensely telling. Speak up. Talk about the fact that this is happening because it will not stop with targeting latines. It will become worse. It already is because the government is going to punish immigrants for "making light of" charlie kirk's death. Not for celebrating, or joking, for making light of.

This absurd yarn is 45% cashmere, 55% silk. I have never worked with anything even remotely like it - no cashmere, no silk, and definitely nothing so thin as 92 wraps per inch. Ninety fucking two.

New, it originally cost £200/kg. A very, very kind weaver in Scotland was de-stashing and sent me 5 kilos for £50 total (plus shipping).

I have many dreams for it but right now I mostly have screams. I have no real idea how it will behave in weaving, so I've wound a small warp for some sampling and a scarf. This is 3.5km of yarn (a bit over 2 miles) and it weighs 119 grams (a bit over 4 ounces?). For those of you playing along at home, each 1kg cone is thus 30 kilometres of yarn (nearly 20 miles). It does not feel like any other yarn I have ever touched.

Because it's so thin (difficult to handle or even see) and so valuable, I am using it with a "dummy warp" - I have left the remains of the baby blanket warp on the loom and then I tie the new warp to it, thread by thread by single fucking thread. This means I don't have to set up the loom all over again and almost none of the fancy yarn will become "loom waste", the unweaveable section of warp at the end of a project. But it also means tying every knot, perfectly in order for each end of both the old and new warps, without the cat getting too interested.

A mild amount of back pain and an estimated 5.5 to 6 hours of knot tying later...

By the end I was up to 204 knots per hour, or 235 miles per hour². (This is a nautical units joke.) (It's not funny though.) Every tutorial warns you that it will look like a bird's nest at this stage but it's very hard to have faith.

But it straightened out! The knots flowed through the reed beautifully, and through the heddles only slightly less beautifully!

The new problem is the knots which spontaneously appear between the reed and heddles while winding on. Everywhere. All the time. I can wind on like two inches before needing to detangle 50% of the warp again, which really kills any sense of progress. Slow and unsteady may at least finish the race, perhaps by sometime next week...

After an estimated 20hrs of work - tying onto the dummy warp, trying to warp through all the tangles, then trying to unwarp and turn the threads on the loom back into a warp chain again, then trying to warp with that new chain, then cutting off the dummy warp section (sorry to my 1024 knots) and trying to wind on just the remainder, this is what I had to show for it:

Dummy warp braided/spun into a set of climbing ropes for my partner's pet mice, final warp attempt one enormous snarl (but at that stage I hadn't really expected it to work, this was a quick last effort before the bin). First warp I've had to give up on since my very very first project, where I had no idea how to put it on the loom and the cat got caught up in it.

But it's okay! I learnt a lot and I'm glad I tried it. It was slow but not usually frustrating, even when it didn't work. Someday I will try the new-to-me methods again, but in the meantime I will stick to familiar methods, which take a little more yarn in theory but will make up for it by not having to discard entire projects.

Finished threading, sleyed the reed at 40 warp ends per inch. Tied on, started weaving, oh no it's massively off being balanced - in plain weave, 48 weft picks per inch compared to those 40 ends. I had thought the slight fuzzy halo on the yarn would fill out the gaps, but it was too fine.

Gentle sigh. Cut it off. Sleyed again at 50 warp ends per inch, still possibly a little low for the twill I had planned (twill requires higher epi than plain weave) but very easy maths. Much closer to square. Left some room for a fringe and then started a scarf for real.

I just--

The weaving itself, once I got going, took barely a day - probably 4ish hours total. Tying and twisting the fringes was another few hours.

Next my partner asked around and found people happy to give me tiny quantities of delicate detergent for me to hand wash it, and then I excavated the iron from the attic for the first time in years, and now at last it is done. And I am so, so, so happy with it. There are mistakes but they don't matter, it's perfect.

Our Colorful Midsummer Dreams

went on a boat ride with my comm for ILD yesterday and had a lovely time! Boscomm best comm babay!!! So many pirate/marine/nautical/sailor-themed coords - i forgot i bought AP's secret treasure chest at AB so i wore that!

BtSSB Osaka Exclusive coord for picnic with friends :)

More incredible photos my friend took of me ❤