Not exactly our loom, but looks similar.
I woke up early to spend some time on the dock before
starting the day. The cloudy sky lay
over Great Pond, filmed with fog. Since
we’d be moving out of the lake house today, I took advantage of having prime
access to the water by doing a water workout this morning. I’m not a lover of water now as I have been
for most of my life, but the lake water became comfortable in no time. During my time out there, the fog crept
toward me, swallowing the islands up the lake that had previously been
visible. Spooked a little, I got out
before Nessie’s cousin could catch a scent of me.
I fed the animals and scooped their poop this morning, and
watched the shop until Mary arrived from the lake house. Kenya caught the rooster that has been
roaming the forest for the past 3 weeks.
It’s a beautiful and large green, red, and gold cock with glossy
feathers – welcome to the family, Big Red.
The main event of the day was building the loom with Ray. Ray is the family friend who put together the
teepee with Gilbert. I’ve had little to
no experience working with wood, but Ray did a good job of explaining each step
to me. We built a frame using 4 3x3”
cedar planks by cutting 1.5”-deep chunks into each with a bow-string saw to
interlock them. We lashed all 4 corners
with fishing string by wrapping each in an X-pattern and tying them with a
square knot. We stuck the frame ~10”
into the ground and tied the spokes (vertical strings of the loom – horizontal
strings are the ‘weaves’) 1”-apart from each other. Sage and I spent the rest of the afternoon
gathering materials around the farm that people could weave into the loom:
dried flowers, thorny blackberry bushes, metal artifacts found in the ground,
strips of fabric and denim, horse hair pulled from Nestor’s mane, sticks and
bark, pine branches, milkweed, daisies, cock’s comb flowers, and sunflowers.
We finished the day with harvesting every and all of the
produce in the fields, namely string beans and squash. Eli joined us for our All-American dinner of
hotdogs and chips – not the kind of meal that our dining table sees to
often. Eli would be sleeping over
tonight, outside with the pig. As our
‘local chef’ for the Dinner on the Farm even the next day, Eli would be
roasting the locally-raised 160-lb pig for hours up to the event. He decided that the pig would go on the roast
at 4 a.m., so he’d need extra hands. Mary
almost made Jillian and me get up to help at that time.
Jillian made a guest book for the event while I typed up a
story that would be attached to the loom, explaining why we have this loom and
its purpose as a community builder at the farm.
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