Projects to Complete

First of all, thanks for all your well wishes. I had great plans to kick off retire-
ment, but ended up doing a lot of sleeping and reading instead.
We received these Japanese tree bells from my sister-in-law in SoCal. We had admired hers when we visited in March, so last week while sitting on the front porch, applying retirement time wasting skills, a UPS truck pulled to the gate and tossed over a box - these. They have the most delightful chime when the wind tosses the branches around.

I did get my towels hemmed and ready for use. I had a couple of problems along the way. For one thing, I didn't realize that my tape measure added a 1/4" before the first inch. I'd measure where I was when I had to leave for work, and then take up from there. As you can see, every towel is a different size. I had an large amount of warp breakage and finally one frustrated Saturday, emailed a Beryl, a retired friend. I figured all days are Saturday when you're retired and she responded promptly with many a variety of thoughts.
She said that black, because its over-
processed, tends to be unstable as a cotton warp. Because all the broken warps were the dark purple, I do think that is the problem. I had at least 12 break, some I found in time to tie back on and one of those broke a second time. You can see which is the first and which is the last towel. I decided to weave off the last towel in green, which looks pretty icky - bad choice. Its short because a couple more warps broke and I cut it off.

I have so many projects that I started that are still on a back burner and need to be completed. I look forward to starting afresh soon. I'm just about finished with one that I am very proud of. My parents lived in Alaska when I was born and so I have their photo albums. Daddy kept a photographic record of the building of the Alcan Highway done in 1942, which I realized earlier in the year is of archival quality. I contacted the Alaska State Library and though emailed conversations, they have agreed to accept this collection.

DD Chris wanted us to preserve a digital collection for our family and we have collaborated on this - hours! It was a giant task but this week I was able to finish and have uploaded the images to Flickr and you can see them here. Many of the pictures were taken by Rolleiflex and are surprisingly crisp. They are best viewed as a slide show.

I am pleased to be able to present them to the State that my father loved so passionately and had to leave because of his asthematic daughter. I have a little more paperwork to complete and I can get them to where they belong. Though its hard to let the physical photographs go away forever, I know Daddy would be very happy. I am blessed to be the daughter of this amazing man.