I finished getting the notes online, plus a little more general housekeeping. Outside the computer, I’ve started taking skeins out of bags and hanging them to dry. The twisty linen told me it was more humid in North Carolina than here, so I thought I’d also air the rest of them. Then the box gets packed up for a while. I volunteered to do a guild program on the COE, but unless another speaker drops out there isn’t an opening until March. So seal it up with a packet of desiccant and off to storage it goes.
Posts tagged ‘COE’
I don’t know what it is, I try to sit down and update the website and it’s always something. I came home to find that The Boyfriend lost his keys and locked himself out of the apartment, and in the middle of working our network comes crashing down for a hardware failure. But, no, I’d rather not be in New Jersey. My sister’s place is far nicer than ours, but we have a better Internet connection.
I’m adding comments to the COE pages, both from the judges and my own. You can see how individual items were scored and what I thought about it. It’s amazing how much work you can get done trapped in a flying tin can with nothing else to do for five hours. (Many thanks to United for having a spiffy frequent flyer program that lets me get my butt out of Economy on a regular basis. Although we won’t talk about what happened to my vegan meal. It’s good I only need non-dairy.)
Ok, so I’m lame and I haven’t updated anything in weeks. I’ve been, you know, like, busy. I had a lovely about two weeks after I got the box out the door and then Real Life started to intrude in a big way. (I’m writing this from my sister’s spare bedroom in New Jersey, in town for a family funeral. Yes, it was expected, we are sad but relieved, thank you for asking.)
I got some clothes made and managed to spin all of a half a bobbin of mindless project yarn and did some indigo vats on a fiber camping trip. While I was on said camping trip, up in the Sierras where cellphone towers dare not go, I got a phone call from the COE registrar. Actually, I got several but she didn’t leave a message until later and I didn’t get it until the next day. (I was checking messages daily — in the middle of all this, The Boyfriend was off doing disaster relief in Mississippi. Neither of us had reliable phone service.) She was calling to tell me I passed, and had tried several times to reach me over the weekend because the judges were interested in talking to me. They eventually went searching the Internet and found this website.
So it’s really done now, and I passed. I actually wasn’t thinking too much about that because either outcome would have told me much about how the process works. But I did, and I’ll have lots more to say on that as I finish writing about my experience. I got many comments on my submission, some that I agree with, some I don’t and a few I have serious questions about. In general, the examiners were impressed with the quantity of teeny tiny yarn but not as much with the traditional style yarns I prefer to spin. I have been declared boring. They think I did a few really interesting things, many technically challenging things but my novelty yarns aren’t novelty enough. Considering that I hate novelty yarns and did little with them before this project, I’m not exactly surprised.
I’ve been trying to not obsessively check the package tracking, and I thought I was being fairly mellow about things. Then I realized I had a typo on one of my labels that made it incorrect. All my checking and checking again and reading over everything and making sure the right label with the right information got stuck on the right card and attached to the right object. I’m actually not all that surprised there was an error with all the different pieces involved. Each yarn had six printed stickers to go with it. And several times I stuck on the wrong one only to realize it seconds later. I tried to set up a system as much as possible so that I got everything together correctly, because this is a huge project to try to organize.
So, needless to say, I was in a panic. I calmed down enough to contemplate my possible options and then sent the mentor an email. It was still a little early here on the west coast to call her. But the registrar is in North Carolina, so I called her. She is the one who will be handling all the boxes anyway. She was exceedingly helpful and would be happy to attach a new label if I sent her the correct one. I was so nervous about it I even got which label it was confused. (I had the wrong number of plies, which is on the yarn index card, but the others are correct.) I immediately printed out a new label and stuck it in an envelope with a snippet of yarn for easier identification. I’ll run it over to the post office in a little bit and it will go out today. As much as the official instructions are intimidating, confusing and even occasionally conflicting, the people have been friendly and helpful and for this I am thankful.
Now, with that emergency resolved, I can continue on with my weekend. A bunch of local fiber folks are getting together for a retreat at someone’s home. I’m not bringing a spinning wheel and I even decided to not bring a spindle. I have some knitting to do, a gift project, that is about as close to mindless as you can get without it being a garter stitch rectangle. (It is basically a giant dishcloth, exactly the kind that aunts and grandmothers have been knitting of 4-ply cotton for decades.) Which is good, because I’m going to sit on my butt by the pool all weekend. I’m going to chat with friends and bake bread and knit and generally not do anything I don’t feel like. I might teach some weaving, I packed the frame loom and a bunch of assorted shuttles, shed sticks, weaving swords and rods.
I haven’t done much with updating the website, but I do have pictures of most things to put online. A few yarns went out without photos but I still have samples of most of those so I can at least have something up. I’m going to take it easy with that because I have a bunch of things to do, for this website and others. I have a ton of article ideas that have been on hold to get written, in addition to starting on my summary of the COE process. I’m not going to publish anything on that until I get the results back, but I’m starting to think about how this has gone and what I want to say about it. But right now there is a deck chair in Petaluma with my name on it.
It’s done!
The package is ready to go out in the morning. I didn’t get all the yarn pictures taken but I have little bits of most of them remaining. I’ll just do a new one in a few months when I get everything back. It will take a few weeks to get everything online anyway.
And I have several months of cleaning to catch up on. But The Boyfriend sure is happy to hear that food will again appear out of that room at the other end of the apartment. But first, I think I need a nap.
