Winning

Tuesday, November 3, 2026

It’s election day. We voted before we left. I tried all day not to think about it, because if a giant blue wave did not soak the entire country, I don’t know what I would do. As results started to come in, it was looking good, but Minnesota was looking RED. Even after races elsewhere were flipping red to blue, we still had a light red box on the results map. Finally, everything turned blue and I could breathe again. Fingers are still crossed for Michigan – still not called.

Kristine asked if I wanted to weave a towel on her loom. YES! I assumed it would take the rest of our time here, but no! It went pretty fast. The warp – the strings that go up and down on the loom were already in place. It takes her about two days to create the warp. She wraps a really lot of string on pegs on the wall in a certain color order (obviously depending on what she wants the colors to be) and ends of with 24 yards of warp on the loom. The pegs don’t hold all of that, so there are many steps to getting it done.

I lucked out that all of that hard work was finished. She has been taking an online class to learn new techniques and patterns. Each of the “practice” patterns is supposed to just be that – practice/learning – but she figures why not make a towel so that work can be used? Practical!

Here is Kristine using her high-tech bobbin winder. I chose to use yellow because it is Keith’s favorite color.

I wove my towel with just yellow against the yellow, blue, and white warp. Throwing the shuttle from side to side after pushing the pedals (like an organist!) and battering the string (battering? I don’t think that is right. It’s definitely a b word. Bam! No. Not bam. It’s something) is great fun and you feel like you are really doing a thing. I tried to get a rhythm going – push, throw, bam, repeat. My rhythm was more like push, look, think, throw, unthrow, bam, throw, think, push. A couple times I got it right and then thought about that achievement and had to restart thinking. It was great. I have a couple rows where Kristine thinks I might have pushed the wrong pedal, so there is a bit of a different look. I call those areas fingerprints – making my towel different than anyone else’s.

When I got it 28 inches long, Kristine moved some lever and gears and paper and strings and then she could cut off the whole section of the warp that had been used. She had several towels made already using the same warp, but changing what the weft has (the back and forth strings) totally changes the pattern you get. I am absolutely fascinated by how different they all look! You can see the similarities, but you wouldn’t notice it if it was just a pile of towels sitting there. So interesting!

We had to trim the strings (I helped!), then turn and iron the hem before Kristine zig-zag sewed it. Into the washer and dryer they went and came out beautiful, soft towels.

Here I am with her last batch. This black, white, grey, and red bunch just blew my mind with all of the difference combinations to make them look so different from one another. I couldn’t pick a favorite. (Until she brought out some previous previous ones and I fell in love with a boucle purple on with a lime stripe. Lime!) (I get to take it home, because all visitors get a prize towel)

My take home prize, just for coming!