Tuesday, June 24, 2014

I'm still weaving, but forgot about blogging...

I'm working on 2 pieces, one is an alphabet piece and the other is an owl design that I did a couple of years ago. When I was cleaning up and going through some stuff, I found another loom that Gary & the boys made for me a few years ago... all warped with a cartoon in place... I decided to go ahead & weave it!

It's funny how I know how to approach a design after doing the sampler & browsing around looking at other people's work! If I were to re-do the following box weaving project again (either as a box weaving or otherwise), I would know how to approach the trees without having to do them sideways.. sideways is an option also, if it's not going to be on a box woven bag:


These are the two pieces I'm working on now:


I haven't decided whether or not I will do another row of letters or if I will just work on write-weaving "now I know my XYZs"... I have some ideas for how to approach this so that I can include some other types of letters like Q, R, S, etc... roundish letters... when I did Flyin' Cat, originally it was supposed to be "and then it flies away with the cat" but that would have made that piece WAY too busy, so I decided to go with "Fly Away Cat"... I had trouble with the W, so decided to go wtth Flying cat... trouble with the G so I decided to do an apostrophe instead of a G...  conquered the W in this project and probably should also make sure to try a G... as well as B or/and R...

I should have done the above letters project FIRST! Heh... hindsight. Flyin' Cat will be in Rhode Island with the Untitled/Unjuried Small Format show in Rhode Island in July


I plan to make the owl a little smaller since the warp ends at the very top of the loom.  There is another piece on the other side...

Other news: things appear to be going forward for my cochlear implant... I had the initial evaluation with a new clinic on the 11th and have a few more evaluation appointments and a pre-surgery clearance checkup coming up in July.  Hopefully I'll have a surgery appointment soon! 

Sadly, it seems that I have missed hearing my youngest son's voice change in real time... he has some videos with his voice on them, so I'll be able to listen to them later on... 

I wonder if I'll be able to hear/understand accents any better than I do now... 
I had an English roommate back in 1975 and I was able to understand her most of the time. If I couldn't, she would spell out the words that I missed... I got used to how she spoke, so I knew what to expect. Something similar happened when we had someone with an accent come to our art guild in early 2013... I turned my hearing aid up and after a couple of minutes, I got used to her accent and was able to understand her pretty well!

I'm mostly happy with the idea of going through with the surgery and really don't think that even a digital hearing aid would be helpful for me: I've read what others have said about their CIs (from the "thinking about it" stage, evaluation, surgery recovery, etc), so I have a pretty good idea what to expect. 

Everyone is different, of course, but I'm hoping that my hearing memory will be on my side, and also, I'll have to remember that I learn most things a bit at a time and then one day I realize that I don't want to go back! 

I stopped listening to music for a while because my telephone coil no longer works, so I'm not able to listen with earbuds positioned on the speaker of my hearing aid, but I'm able to hear the speakers on my new tablet, so I've started listening again. Some of my favorite songs by Neil Young and John Denver sound weird now, but James Taylor sounds clear & awesome. Weird how that works. In a couple of weeks, NY and JD should start sounding good and clear again... I also listened to Reverend Horton Heat's "Slow" last night and had a bit of trouble with it. I will keep trying.. just training my brain! A little at a time so that I don't get too frustrated!