Handwoven with all bamboo rayon yarns - again on my Macomber with 8 harnesses in a twill weave. Pin stipes in gold and brown on 2/3 of the warp and a solid black 1/3.

I finished weaving this warp for tops and scarves around November/December 2019. I’m sure I put it on my loom in the summer and it took forever to weave it off. During the summer of 2019, we were visiting my in-laws on their farm in West Virginia. While we were there a stray black kitty followed my nephew and father-in-law up to the house. She started wandering around looking for attention and food - and it was apparent to me that she was pregnant so she was likely looking for a great place to nest and have her kittens. Being the animal/pet lovers that we are…we all fell instantly in love with her. Feeling the need to take her home with us to North Carolina and properly care for her, let her have her kittens, and find homes for them when the time came.

That’s exactly what we did.

She had her 6 kittens in my garage studio and I doted over the mom and babies for several months - finally finding homes for 5 kittens and deciding to keep one when they were 8-12 weeks old. I took them all to the vet together at least once to have them all checked out. It is amazing the amount of joy a pile of kittens can bring to people. They are so sweet and silly and fuzzy. They all seemed to have different personalities, too.

In October 2019, my grandma June died. I had to leave for the funeral the same weekend that we schedule to have the kittens picked up by their new owners. It was a sad time. Weaving was slow and I found it difficult to finish projects.

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Life is just so full of all of it - love, joy, pain, sadness. To watch these kitties grow and worry about them and laugh at them and cuddle them and play with them was like living out a childhood fantasy. It was like a gift to my childhood self to just absorb it all without guilt. Balancing this against the pain of loss - what can I say…? It is all so apparently and blatantly a part of life. You just can’t have one (joy) without the other (sadness). It’s amazing to me how much capacity for both we have as humans.