Easy grain free cranberry muffins

Winter tends to be a time for indulgence for me normally, lots of hot coffee and baked goods.  This year with all of my autoimmune symptoms in full swing I have been much more careful about what I'm putting in my body, in hopes the inflammation will die down some.  But as much as I love cooking a scratch breakfast every morning (hahahaha, I'm the least morning person EVER) I needed something quick I could prepare ahead and nom on with a morning unsweetened coffee.

Enter my favorite winter combination: cranberry orange.  Sigh.

These actually use fresh, whole, unsweetened cranberries.  They're everywhere this time of year, although if you're not paleo you could probably sub the sweetened/dried variety too.  

Ingredients:

2 large eggs
¼ cup honey
3 Tbsp. Coconut oil
1 Tbsp. Coconut milk (the canned variety)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 ½ cups almond flour
½ cup tapioca starch
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. sea salt
3/4 c cranberries
4 drops wild orange essential oil OR zest from one orange

For me, this made about 10 muffins, 12 small might be doable as well.  Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes (mine were done in about 22).

How long it takes to weave a project (part 1)

Like any other crafts out there, there's a lot of misconception on just how long a project takes.  So I'm going to try my best to really track this next project from start to finish and *time* everything.  I'm doing a post-holiday towel swap.  A pick me up after the rush and hectic mayhem of the holidays.  I had an idea of what I wanted, not quite a color gamp but the kind of stained glass window effect that you see from broken color stripes.

I spent about an hour playing in WeaveDesign for the initial mockup.  Approximately another hour deciding on a draft and playing with thread counts.  (I still do not know if I will need to add a floating selvedge but I will play with that after the loom is dressed.

My plan is to warp 15 yards, so I have some towels leftover to barter, sell, or gift.  The first few are for a towel swap and I plan to keep a couple for my house.

Designing - approximately 2 hours, since I had a clear picture of what I wanted going in.

So today, I start the actual measuring!

12/14/16 - I realized that my harnesses don't have enough heddles on them, and need to do some moving around.  Approx. 90 minutes to fix harnesses 2 and 3.

12/15/16 - I'm GOING to start measuring today!  Carl made me a new warping board which is my preference for shorter warps.  I set up with an episode of supernatural to start measuring (even though harness #1 still needs heddles).  Sadly, the quick sanding job was not really enough, yarn is snagging.  Winding is slow because I keep stopping.  First 2" measured out during one 50 minute episode of Supernatural.  Plus side, only 22" to go.  That's like a season of supernatural, I might get caught up on my show!

12/16/16 - Speeding up a little, logged another half hour of measuring, and 20 minutes to fix Shaft #1.

12/17/16 - Another half hour this afternoon to do little things like swap out my reed, and finish the first chain.  Because of the setup and my ability to go front to back for warping, I can start doing some of the threading now and break up my work to avoid strain from repetitive motion.  This is great, because of the health benefits, but it's also much more difficult to keep track of.    But as a benchmark, I measured a bit over 4" (out of the 24 I need) in just over 90 minutes.   Total time to get this far:
 4 hours and 50 minutes.

12/18-12/19 was a bit of a loss because of working on weaving the tartan, I didn't really get to touch the towel warp.  I realized though that the clock is ticking for the swap, so 12/20 I picked it back up and put in another 45 minutes.

Today, 12/21, I managed to spend 2 hours and 15 minutes (in 2 separate chunks) and finished the 2nd chain, sleyed the reed for the first, and got 2" into the 3rd chain.  That's halfway!  Halfway through measuring, one chunk sleyed, now we're up to 7 hours and 50 minutes.

The end of the Bergman adventure, part 2

Eventually with some help from people on Ravelry, I was able to move my warp off of the Bergman and back on to the Nilus.  It was not fun, I don't know how I had the patience to stick with the project.  But I sort of got tabby sheds and put in lease sticks, and moved it and warped front to back.

Once the weaving started, it was done quickly and easily.  I was reminded by how very *reliable* my Nilus always has been.  I decided to invest in texsolv heddles to replace my breaking string heddles, and give it one more try.  I wound on some bronze 10/2 to make a handwoven cowl.  The structure needed a first floating selvedge.  It was a nightmare with the double back beam setup.  

I was able to complete the project just fine, but I realized that as fond as I was of the character of this loom, it was not up for the production kind of weaving that I needed it to do.  I ended up selling it as I finished up this scarf warp, and immediately replaced it with an 8 shaft Herald from Eugene Textile Center, and it came with a sectional.  A whole new thing to learn!

The end of my Bergman adventure, part 1

Once the competition was out of the way for fall, I decided to attack a project I'd been wanting to do for a while.  I saw a picture circulating on facebook that absolutely called to me.  Lately when I am inspired it manifests in cloth, it has to.  So I decided to warp the Bergman, give it a test, and make a wrap project to get this need for this cloth out of my system.

First, I needed heddles.  Lots of them.  I read, and read more, and even more.  I ended up buying seine twine and made a little over 1000 string heddles, with Pi's help.

It took a lot of time.  My wrists and fingers hurt.  It was a labor of love, and honestly, money saving, because that many texsolv heddles are NOT cheap.  I was told string would be just as good, if not better anyways.

Well, long story short, lies!  They were twisty and a pain to thread.  When I finally finished, everything threaded and on the loom, it was catastrophic.

I think the whole project was pretty doomed from the beginning.  Warping back to front was painful.  Trying to maneuver to thread from the lease sticks there, into the heddles, it was a nightmare.  My hand didn't fit, and reaching made me ache so bad.  That in itself was just a loom structure issue, not anything I could help, but if I could get it to work front to back later, that would be another thing I could maybe overlook.

But once I got it threaded, the reed sleyed, and was ready to weave, things were not good.

Knots were coming undone.  Heddles were ripping off the bottom shaft.  My knots weren't secure enough.  It was a mess.

Not only that, but there was obviously continuing problems with the uneven levels of the shafts.  I was getting a ton of thread skips.  It was unworkable.  It sat on the loom, skips all over, for weeks and weeks while I contemplated what to do.

Fall weaving competition

Things got crazy for a while in here after I last posted, gearing up for the Great Competition of Babywearing Weavers on Facebook.  In September I was working hard on my submission but couldn't share anything, since all entries are anonymous.  I was still dealing with some late first trimester nausea but weaving was still something I could do, my normal knitting and spinning I absolutely couldn't.  (Even cooking was a huge challenge).

Pi helped me decide on my final draft for the contest, and it ended up being very popular overall, it was a fun process and exciting to see people enjoying it and playing guessing games as to who wove which wrap.

The theme for this one was "children's literature" and we decided to do the Hobbit, with a focus on the dragon Smaug.  My entry was this collage

I warped enough for a second wrap to keep for this next/last baby, and made the weft in wool I hand dyed.  What I ended up with was a lesson in exactly how much yarn crackle weaves suck up.  With a bit over a pound of yarn dyed, I expected a pretty long wrap.  I added red gradient tapers and even so, barely squeaked out 3.8 meters.  Sadly I still had a meter of warp left that was usable, but no weft yarn for it!  Live and learn.

Here are the gradient tail accents on the wrap I am keeping for the baby

And yes, I have a tag!  I've been printing my own for now, but I officially have tags and am compliant with U.S. regulations for babywearing wraps.  

Many firsts with this, my first woven in middle marker in the competition wrap, my first tail accents for the wool "sister", my first time weaving with tencel, my first attempt at crackle.  I expected many tragedies, but nothing really went wrong.  I fell in love with crackle and tencel both.   For now, I have the wool version out traveling, getting feedback on the weft.  So far feedback has been very positive, it's bouncy and very grippy.  I had expected it to weave up much softer, but hopefully it breaks in enough to be very soft by spring.

The state of the Bergman Loom

Once we got the loom set up into its most basic shape, a few things became evident.  The heddles were a mess.  The owner's husband told me that there were a "lifetime of heddles" in the box, but there were hardly any on the loom itself, less than 100, most were knotted and tangled, and there were just a few bundles in the box, I wouldn't have guessed more than 5 or 600 total.  I told him I currently kept about 1100 on my jack loom and he acted astounded, so before I even had it home, I knew heddles would be an issue.

The ad on Craigslist had also said that a partial conversion of the tieups had been done to TexSolv.  I didn't really know any better, the treadles were disconnected for travel anyways, and I knew nothing about countermarche tieups, so I just figured I'd learn from what had already been done.  I put it on a back burner, while I researched countermarche tieups, particularly Bergman.

A friend on Ravelry suggested getting underneath and just tying up like I would on my jack loom, and then assigning the rest of the spots after.  Well, that made sense, more than anything else, so I decided to climb under and see what I could make of it.  Aaaaaaaand... I discovered that the "conversion" was actually texsolv HEDDLES just hanging from the lamms.  No measurement had been done.  The old rope was actually still in the treadles.  I was starting with truly nothing, not even a clue of how the rope HAD been connected, once upon a time.  Panic set in.

I really couldn't make sense of the decision to use heddles.  There wasn't even a way to connect them to the treadle.  I learned from posting this picture online though, that I had actually put the treadle assembly in wrong.  The knots were the old bottom of the treadles, I had to pull off the bar, flip the treadles around, turn the bar 180 degrees and put it back in.

Once it was switched, I could see loops on top, which the old cords had been knotted to, and the little tape labels marked 1-10 to keep track of the treadle sequence.  One issue solved, but the bigger problem remained of what to do with the ties.




Many thanks need to be given to the Bergman Looms group on Facebook for the next part, because I was totally stumped.  The idea of countermarche looms being totally foreign, things weren't clicking.  My jack loom, you press a treadle, it lifts the appropriate shafts, and that forms the shed.  On a countermarche, you depress a treadle, and part of the shafts rise up, and some are pushed down.  In a nutshell, you do an initial tie up, to the lower lamms, and then go back and all of the blank spaces on a draft, you fill in with the upper lamms.  The lower lamms raise the shed, like a traditional jack loom would, and the upper lamms lower the shed creating more depth.  Once that was decoded, things started looking much clearer.

So I gathered some bravery, some texsolv, ordered some arrow pegs, and got to work.  The most important thing to keep in mind was really the jacks at the top needed to be locked.  We both did some minor adjustments later, after I had unlocked the top and it did NOT go well.  The cutting took time, but actually placing the pegs wasn't too awful.  Somewhere I had seen people putting one peg through both of the cords that went through each hole in the treadle, but once I started weaving, the arrow would slide out of one on some of the treadles, I found one peg per cord worked better than one peg per hole.

Tied up!

Shaft envy, looming up, and restoring a vintage loom

I really am hoping to document this process here, because it's been a fantastic learning experience for me and I hope to save some time for anyone else trying to do something similar.

I think most weavers have experienced what I refer to as "shaft envy", which sounds dirty, but really comes down to coming across a pattern or structure that is gorgeous, calls their name, and requires more shafts than their loom is capable of doing.  Probably part of why looms tend to breed so much.  While I hadn't even touched the tip of the iceberg on 4 shaft patterns to try, I kept stumbling into 8 shaft drafts that I wanted to do.  For the most part, I pushed it to the back of my mind, and continued to enjoy my Nilus.

I will get into the story later of the ill-fated warping reel/mill another day, but I had approval from Carl to find a warping mill and purchase it, because he wasn't going to make me another.  The biggest issue I'd been having with the Nilus though really was in warping.  Not only was I having a beast of a time getting longer warps on front to back (which I really feel like the Nilus is better suited for) but getting it packed appropriately to maintain tension on the selvedges was proving to be challenging.  So I kept going back and forth - should I try to upgrade my loom to a sectional, or should I look for one with more shafts that might potentially have a sectional or better warping setup?

During my time of debate, I came across a vintage Bergman loom on Craigslist.  $550 for the loom, 36" weaving width, 8 shafts, and it came with a warping reel.  I knew nothing about Bergmans, but I called and set up an appointment to come see it and make sure it would work for me.  I talked to the husband of the couple selling, he made sure I was a weaver, saying that it was complicated to set up and they wouldn't be able to help me after buying.  I explained that yes I was and that should be ok.

I went and just checked it over for damage, it had some reed rust but nothing I was concerned about, so I made arrangements to pick it up.

So now, not only did the loom take over my entire craft room, but now I lost half of my living room.  Sigh.

The new loom mostly "assembled" - unfolded at least to its full size.

Boat shuttles that came with the loom.  The 2 towards the front appear to be Bergman shuttles, from what I am finding around the internet.

A photo of my LeClerc Nilus for size comparison

The Bergman folded flat.  It's pretty ingenius, it gets tiny and is really not heavy.

Me next to the Bergman.  Taller, but with a much smaller footprint than the Nilus, not only in weaving width, but in depth.

The GIGANTIC warping reel, and the extras, including reeds that need some de-rusting.