No, seriously. I had intended to clean house, which I sort of did, but then I did a lot of other stuff. And while that’s all well and good, I still need to clean my house. Oh, well.

Anyway. Here’s what I did instead of house-cleaning:

1. Worked some more on learning chain-stitch. I find that Hulu is a good motivator. My computer is old and doesn’t handle streaming very well, so I will watch a bit and then do something productive while I wait for the stream to buffer (this happens a lot). Here’s what I got done on Saturday:

I am pretty happy with the zari work. To my relief, the gold thread is easier to use than the silk, though I did the little spirals with the silk much faster than the rest of the design. I am learning. I plan on purchasing my own needle and possibly a large frame in the near future, as I am pretty decently close to doing something more real with this.

However, the back needs help:

This is where you can see that I’m only just a novice at this, and will need to keep practicing a bit more before I start on it for real. The gold bit on the left (the eye-ish shape) is what it ought to look like. Incidentally, that was the first gold  bit I did.

2. Poked holes in my book quires and did some more research on bindings and end-bands. I also began to make up my documentation for the project, and therefore for its test-run at Magna Faire. Luckily, the bookbinding I’m planning on uses fairly modern case-binding methods, which I’m pretty comfortable with already. Greet (because I know you read this), you’ll be interested to see how the end-bands work; you basically sew the [EDIT] warp (thanks, Greet) threads into the binding of the book, then use two needles to weave the colored bits into the binding over a strip of leather. I think there’s also a bit at the bottom that’s straight-up one-color weaving. This both excites and terrifies me. Here are the quires, ready for sewing:

There are four sets of holes, which is less than I’m used to. Apparently books like this had as few as two sets, and so it’s pretty common to have trouble dating these texts, since it’s easy to swap out covers. The book doesn’t even attach to its cover using a sewn attachment, either, post-11th century. Weird.

3. Went biking on the Silver Comet Trail.

The husband bought this gigantic garage-made bike off ebay about a month ago.

You have to remove the wheels to fit it in the Volvo. It’s nearly three feet longer than my Townie. And he’d never ridden it before, so we decided that a long afternoon bike ride was the way to learn. We drove ourselves out to Mableton and got on the trail (after repairing a flat tube on my bike).

And it was lovely:

(I don’t know what that weird  black thing is at the bottom of the photo. It’s clearly on my lens but I can’t seem to be able to remove it.)

It was sunny and cool and pretty darn awesome. I took a video.

And the thing to realize about the Silver Comet trail (specifically heading towards Powder Springs from the Floyd Rd. entrance) is that it’s deceptive. You start out and it’s great. You’re going downhill and you’re breezing right along and everything is lovely and you’re even taking photos of your husband while riding! Wild! And then you get past Powder Springs and it goes uphill a little bit, but you say, “I can keep going! This is great!” but your husband (wisely) suggests that you use your second wind to turn around and get back to the parking lot. It turns out that your husband is a very smart man. Halfway back, you realize that you had been going downhill all the way before and now you’re going ever so slightly uphill, and three quarters of the way back you think that perhaps your legs will just fall off at the hip and you’ll be stranded, legless, in a really lovely little bit of stony path. And then you do make it back to the parking lot and you go out for a giant slice of chocolate cake and you feel pretty proud of yourself.

But remember that the way back is decidedly uphill.

I plan on getting to the point where that doesn’t matter, because I’m in shape. Even with the legs-about-to-fall-off syndrome, I am glad I did it and plan on doing it again soon (and often).

Today I’m still wrestling with coding, and I’m pretty sure that Java Script hates me.