At this point, I’m really impressed that anyone is still reading my blog, filled with travelogues and adventures on the road, I don’t know about you, but as the writer of the blog, I really really am tired of writing about my adventures on the road, and really really want to write about some new fun adventure I’m having in the studio. So I tried to budget in a day or two this week, to actually put a warp on one of my looms, just for old times sake, I’d almost given up thinking I’d ever find time to weave again… or sew for that matter…
Spurred on by the request by the Santa Fe Weaving Gallery to carry “my scarves”, which don’t actually exist yet, (except for the two loom mates I shipped once one came back from the exhibit in Albuquerque), I decided not to spend too much time over thinking anything, which is largely my favorite past time, and focus on just getting a warp on to my 8 shaft 25″ floor loom. That would be the loom I would weave the scarves on. 
I leafed through my binder of all the palettes I ever did for Handwoven magazine’s Color and Fabric Forecast, and selected the last one I did, Theatrical Fantasy (maybe from Jan/Feb 2008, I can’t be sure since my binder/portfolio of articles is packed). It is vibrant, and fun, and something I was in the mood to work with. So I ran around the studio and gathered everything that could possibly work with the palette, focusing on rayons, tencel, silks and bamboo, things that would really drape well.
Just looking at the pile of yarn on the table made me giddy with delight, it has been so long since I made anything in this room, my hands on creativity reduced to whatever I could manage on an airplane. God knows I’ve been on enough of them lately…
I started with the draft, and printed it just larger than life size. I glued it to a piece of heavy cardboard so I could do warp wraps directly on the draft, knowing when to put in the supplemental threads. This worked really well, and I added and subtracted, tweaked and adjusted until I got something I thought would work.
Because almost every one of the 264 ends is different from its neighbor, the method of warping that made the most sense was the AVL warping wheel, which would produce two inch bundles of warp which could be beamed sectionally as I wound them. I love this pricey piece of equipment, and would probably never have bought it had I not been at the right place at the right time, when AVL first introduced it in 2000 at Convergence Cincinnati. I paid a whole $250. It costs almost $600. now. I am so glad I own it, it is perfect for this kind of multiple thread warp.
I warped and beamed, warped and beamed, until late last night, after a wonderful sushi dinner with an old friend, I finished the 10″ wide warp. I put on 9 yards, I’m hoping to get four scarves out of it, we’ll see. I’m thrilled because I’ll come home to a loom calling to me, instead of a bunch of dirty toilets and dog hair on the carpets dense enough to be raked… I’m doubting I’ll have time tonight to start the threading, I’m mostly packed for my trip to Siever’s Fiber School tomorrow, but I don’t want to cut myself short and leave anything for Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, Part 2 of my The Weaver Sews: What to Weave column on Weavezine is live, just posted about an hour ago. I’m really having fun with this column, there is so much to say, and I love having an archive of photos and work to pick from to illustrate my points.
Stay tuned for a field report from Sievers Fiber School, Washington Island Wisconsin, provided I get any form of internet connection while I’m there. I haven’t in the past, so don’t hold your breath!
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I spent a couple of hours last night with my daughter, whose senior year in HS schedule along with a couple of evening classes at the local community college, along with all her college applications due this fall, is not for the faint of heart. We talked for a long time about how one goes about getting it all done. Sometimes I feel like a master of the technique, and sometimes an abject failure, I always pull it out in the end, and my daughter’s comments mirrored that sentiment, but sometimes what you pull out in the end isn’t quite your best because you left too little time to really do the job justice.
I’m a big believer in lists. I have a Google Calendar, accessible from all of my electronics, and printed up month by month on the refrigerator. It sync’s with my husband’s calendar as well. But my calendar on the refrigerator doesn’t break down each little task I need to accomplish in a day, like “Clean the Bathrooms” and “Sort the Bills for Payment”. For those task lists, I use a little daytimer calendar on my desk, and pencil in the day’s assignments. It is with great joy that I erase each task as it is completed. This week saw lots of catch up work at the desk, contracts, a book review, an upload for edits of my next installment of my quasi monthly column for Weavezine. I had a local business man in town send me some pants to hem, a favor I’ve been doing for him for years. I had to add that to the list. I had to order more shoulder pads, more Form Flex interfacing, more 15 denier nylon tricot, and more office supplies. And there were all the final meetings and adjustments to the weaver’s guild schedule for the year, since I’m in charge of programming. All of those tasks got added to my little daytimer, so I didn’t have to waste anymore brain power trying to remember what I had to remember. I broke down the bigger tasks into smaller pieces and tried to create a realistic schedule for myself of what I needed to get done and by when…
I tried to share this system with my daughter who is in the throes of cramming the unfinished summer assignments in calculus and English into the last few days before school starts. At 17, sometimes it is easier to sit at the computer watching Japanese Anime, (in Japanese) for 5 hours than tackle the tasks that really need to be done. I felt like that last night when I started knitting another pair of socks and I was really suppose to be cleaning the bathrooms. Toilets, socks, toilets, socks, the pull was just too much… In the end, because I’ve been doing this a long time, I managed to do both, and went to bed quite happy with myself.
My daughter worked late into the night creating her own Google Calendar. I don’t know how long it will last, but these are baby steps. Learning how to prioritize the tasks, and stay on them is tough for anyone, especially a 17 year old who gets distracted by a roll of duct tape… And I continue to add to, erase, and adjust my own list of tasks as the week moves forward and I do the final preparations for my flight Sunday to Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, I finished reading a wonderful tome while I was in Harrisville last week. Marion Marzolf, a talented weaver and retired journalism professor wrote a lovely historical fiction novel about a Swedish Immigrant, Lisa Lindholm, born in 1911, who made her way to the United States as a young girl to teach weaving in a small mountain school in Appalachian, NC. Lisa’s fictional life weaves in and out of the early history of 20th century handweaving in the United States, and I read with great joy and surprise each time Lisa crossed paths with one of the weaving greats, all part of my own historical background studies in the 1970’s, Else Regensteiner, Edward Worst, Lenore Tawney, Lucy Morgan and Penland, Cranbrook Art Academy, etc. I really enjoyed reading this book, and found myself heading off to my own library shelf to revisit books I haven’t looked at in years, three of Else Regensteiner’s, Ed Worst’s book “Weaving with Foot Powered Looms“, and a book on Bauhaus Textiles. The full review is available on Weavezine.com along with information on ordering the book, Shuttle in her Hand, from the Swedish-American Historical Society.
OK, cross “update blog” off the list…
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It is a cozy Sunday morning, the house is quiet, my husband is in Saudi Arabia, my daughter working at the kennel, the “bottom feeders” (an affectional term for the crew of guys that occasionally live in my basement) are home from national guard drills and sound asleep. It is raining. A gentle summer rain, making a tiny attempt at quenching the thirst of the bone dry dusty landscape that was once lush NJ greenery. A perfect day to write.
I returned late Friday night from an amazing week at Historic Harrisville, where I taught in the Weaving Center at Harrisville designs, which operates in the old mill town, built in the 1790’s. From what I understand, this is one of the only remaining intact mill villages left in New England, perfectly preserved. Harrisville Designs, as we know it today, started around 1970, not long before my own career as a handweaver began in 1974 with my first college class. Harrisville Shetland yarns and looms, especially the kit loom, have been part of my weaving language since the mid 70’s. Some of my early craft fair work used the Harrisville Shetland yarns, and though I never actually owned the kit floor loom, they were part of my repetoire for decades, most weaving studios where I taught had a number of these small compact, portable, inexpensive four shaft looms (I just found out it comes in an 8 shaft version as well), they did their job as the perfect introductory floor loom for an inexpensive price (still under $1000.), and the amazing thing, it is still being manufactured, if you find one on eBay, you can still get parts for it, the loom has endured, and I’m thrilled to know that this could be just the thing to launch all those Rigid Heddle Weavers coming into weaving from the knitting community, onto a real honest to goodness floor loom, where they can explore endless patterns and fabrics, 22″ wide is perfect for yardage for just about any type of garment!
The class itself was a dream. The space was huge, well lit, plenty of room to move around, the students, all 10 of them had handwoven cloth. Many of them had taken weaving classes at Harrisville, and all of them produced very very competent cloth, the best group I’ve ever seen in any one class. All were sett appropriately, and finished well. This is a group of well trained weavers. It was a joy to watch them turn their fabrics into a garment that made them happy. Only one of the students had studied with me before, making the jacket in a different venue. For a repeating student like that, I always let them bring whatever they want to work on, and this particular student didn’t disappoint. Pat brought a pile of UFO’s, affectionately called Unfinished Objects, and we worked to bring them out of the box and into fruition. Sometimes you just get stuck and don’t know how to move forward… That’s the part I love best about this class.
There were some wonderful side trips this week, to the Harrisville Spinning Mill (where they have interesting ideas about what to do with all those empty cones), where all the Harrisville yarns are spun, along with Peace Fleece and a new line from a yarn designer whose name went totally out of my head, silly me, but it had something to do with Brown Tweed. The yarns were gorgeous. Babs, who has been a fixture at the mill for 30 years, gave us the tour, starting in the storage area at the beginning, where New Zealand fleece comes in from the dyers. The colors were bright and fresh, and I wanted to go diving into the wool.
We watched the pickers, and the carding machines, and the machines that carefully created the fine roving that would eventually be spun. They were working on white today. The dust in the room was sort of amazing, hanging and clinging to every available surface, I so wanted to grab a vacuum…
We watched the spinning machines, and the machine that plied the wool, until it finally wound onto skeins and then Babs showed us the most amazing thing, the yarns are then washed in the skein, gently, in a 25 year old top loader, where she carefully controls the soak, the spin and the amount of water coming back in during the rinse cycle, and then the skeins are hung to dry. Someone sits at a desk and hand wraps the wrapper around each skein.
Babs also gave us a quick demonstration on how to turn a standard wide eyed heddle into a repair heddle, by heating the soldered ends with a lighter. Once hot, she banged the soldered end onto the concrete floor to snap the solder joint, and unwound the end of the metal heddle. For the non weavers out there, the heddles are the wires that hang from the shafts that control each individual warp thread. Sometimes you just make a mistake in threading and instead of tying in a string heddle, or actually cutting the heddle head with wire cutters like I do, this is a cool trick for adding a missing heddle onto a different shaft when one does make that dreaded threading error.
Of course, what would a spinning mill be without the requisite wool humor!
Chick Colony, founder of Harrisville Designs, spent some time with us Friday afternoon, giving us the history of the mill and his family’s involvement. It is a great story of the history of the textile industry in this country, and how things change sometimes wiping out entire industries almost overnight. It is a history we are seeing first hand today in almost every thing we know. It is a story of survival, of regrouping, of coming together as a community to save a village, and it is a story of seeing the handweaving community as we know it today, getting a fresh infusion of young knitters who are discovering what all of us who were trained back in the good old days, came to know and love, and spend a lifetime exploring, after 35 years at the weavng loom, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.
So Friday afternoon, the class got together for one group photo, all wearing their finished jackets, some still with tailor’s tacks, I don’t let them take them out until I’m safely back in NJ. :-) They learned a lot, and are looking forward to next year, Harrisville has already requested dates from me for 2011. I love teaching in this kind of venue, there is a great energy, and repeat students bring me fresh challenges, and I get to see their skills grow and develop as they launch into a world where they aren’t just weaving cloth, they are making garments for themselves. I’m looking forward to next weekend when I fly to Washington Island, Wisconsin to teach the same class “A Wearable Extravaganza” at Siever’s Fiber School.
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I’m furiously printing, binding, cutting, packaging, labeling, and packing for my five day stint in Harrisville, NH, I leave tomorrow for the 5 hour drive north. I had the trusty 12 year old Honda car serviced, affectionately known by the residents of my basement as the “Red Swoosh”, and I’m also looking ahead to when I return and have to immediately ship up to Washington Island Wisconsin, all the materials for the five day class I am teaching at Siever’s Fiber School starting on the 30th. Use to be I could bring all this stuff in my suitcases on the plane. No more. I have to ship more and more, and that means being ready with handouts and product about 8-10 days ahead, depending on how far away the workshop is. This is a little tricky when there are only 5-7 days between workshops…
So with all this in mind, I have decided on a new press photo, Anne Marie Soto, Editorial Director of Notions Magazine, a publication of the American Sewing Guild was gracious enough to capture this classic shot during the American Sewing Guild conference last weekend in Atlanta. Thanks Anne Marie, for being in the right place at the right time, rumor has it the flash didn’t even wake me.
Anne did follow up with this shot of me actually looking awake and pretending to teach, and we had quite the laugh sitting together in Atlanta airport waiting to board the flight back to Newark last Sunday night.
On a completely different note, and just for fun because I needed a fun kind of break, my daughter has continued on her quest for all things Japanese, she is studying Japanese, and exploring Japanese cuisine, and decided while I was working hard in the studio, to make dinner for us the other night.
Bless her, the smells coming from the kitchen were intoxicating, probably fueled by the sake, but never-the-less, I finally wandered down to see what was cooking. She had Japanese cook books spread out, and all my counters were completely covered. I couldn’t tell you what she was cooking, something about fish cakes and egg baskets, and creamed spinach.
Can I tell you how much I adore this child and the way she dives into everything she discovers with an abandon that I completely envy?
Undaunted by missteps, like the fried tofu something that didn’t quite work,
Brianna valiantly surged forward, filling my sink with dishes, and making a complete mess, but having a blast!
When she was all finished, we poured the sake, OK I drank the sake, she isn’t old enough and her face puckered up in distaste anyway when she tried it, and we both sat down to a most wonderful creative, beautiful, gentle meal. I’m so going to miss my daughter when she heads off to college next year…
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Barely unpacked from the last trip, I’m making lists and tying up loose ends and getting ready for Sunday’s drive to New Hampshire, where I’ll be teaching a five day Wearable Extravaganza class in the beautiful historic town of Harrisville, staying in a cottage on the water, and generally enjoying New England in the summer. Oh, and yes, I’m teaching a five day workshop. Did I mention that? So I’m printing handouts, and organizing and packing suitcases that never made it to the attic the whole summer, I just unpack and repack. I am so longing for the late fall/winter when the traveling will be finished and I can get into some serious studio work, and I can post something other than my airplane escapades (or in this case interstate).
Opportunities are beginning to come in from my last two conferences, inquiries about teaching, inquiries about my books, and a wonderful and unexpected opportunity in the form of Jill Heppenheimer, owner of the Santa Fe Weaving Gallery, probably the most well known gallery of handweaving in the country. Jill gave a breakfast keynote address at Convergence about getting into a gallery, I attended, not because I every thought I’ve be selling in a gallery again, I did that in the 1980’s (but never managed to make it into Santa Fe Weaving Gallery), I attend things like this because I am an educator and students ask me questions all the time about things unrelated to sewing, and the more knowledge I bring to the table, the better teacher I can be.
Anyway, Jill contacted me after Convergence, and asked to carry my scarves in her gallery. She had seen the one accepted to the Convergence multimedia exhibit “Eye Dazzlers”, and loved it, and since it was finally returned from the Convergence exhibit only yesterday, I was able to box it up along with it’s sister, woven from the same warp, and ship it off to her, back to New Mexico. Can I say I’m thrilled she contacted me? Can I say I’m already trying to figure out how to weave between 4-5am (about the only time I sleep) because, guess what? She wants more in different color ways. I say yes to things like this, even though I know I’m completely nuts, because I’m so busy doing all the things that make a business, that I am losing sight of my looms, and I loved making those scarves, they were so playful and random and fun, that I want to do more, and maybe even expand the idea into yardage for garments, what I do best, and here is a ready encouraging audience.
So if you are in the Santa Fe area, and want one of my scarves, there are only two so far, stop in and take a look.
Last night I had about a half hour to kill before my daughter was ready to curl up with me to watch episode two of Project Runway that we had taped because we were both away. So I went online to find a tutorial for grafting the toe of handknitted socks, and I found this site. I love that you can Google something and have the answer instantly. Anyway, I sat with my almost finished socks, grafted the toe following the terrific photos, and I have now completed my first pair of socks ever. :-)
The mail came today, and in it was the back to school packet for my daughter, addressed “To the Parents Of…”. It was her schedule and all the other 37 pages of information from PTA membership to forms for reduced lunches. In there was the blessed parking decal page reserved for seniors, which she gleefully stole from the packet. My daughter is a senior this year, and she is my youngest. So it was sort of bittersweet as I sat down to fill out the pile of Emergency Contact Cards, and Student Information Cards, this is my last time. For more than 15 years I’ve been filling out those little cards, every start of the new school year, and this is my last. I plan to grab a glass of wine to celebrate tonight, but I’m not sure if I’m also not mourning the end of the school years… Nah, definitely time to celebrate, I hate filling out those cards… Plus after November, she will be 18 and I won’t be allowed to fill anything out for her anymore… :-)
There were two acceptances to exhibits in my mail/email yesterday. One was for a show in The Plains, VA, called Live an Artful Life® presents Fashion and Fiber Art 2010. Three of my garments were accepted, and the show runs October 9-October 23, 2010. I would love to be at the opening, but I’ll be in Boulder, CO. :-( One of my pieces even made the promo page for the show on the Live an Artful Life website!
The other exhibit was sort of a surprise. I had one of my art pieces accepted, “Survivor” to the National Art Encounter 2010 at The von Liebig Art Center in Naples, FL. (I’m only giving the link and not posting the photo since it is a pretty graphic piece, and very personal, and many of you read this blog at work.) The juror Denise Gerson is the Associate Director of the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami. She has an almost 30 year career in the visual arts. I am thrilled to have been selected. The Preview Reception is September 10th, and once again, I won’t be able to attend, since I’ll be giving a keynote address in Syracuse, NY. Tough to be in two places at the same time. The show runs September 13-October 30.
It has been a busy eventful reentry, my husband is hopefully at the airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ready to board a plane for the trek home, he will be here a week while he gets a new visa. My son is out on National Guard Drills near Harrisburg, PA, he called in today, regaling me with tales of driving Humvee’s. He is smitten… :-) And my daughter polished off one of her summer assignments, a paper on one of the tragic heroes of King Lear. It is good to have her back and have her all to myself this week. Oh, and I managed to clear the drain in the airconditioning unit that backed up while I was in Atlanta, causing water damage in the ceiling in my husband’s office and water to drip down behind the shingles in the front wall of the newly painted house, all over the hood of one of our cars. Don’t ask…
Stay tuned…
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I leafed through my binder of all the palettes I ever did for Handwoven magazine’s Color and Fabric Forecast, and selected the last one I did, Theatrical Fantasy (maybe from Jan/Feb 2008, I can’t be sure since my binder/portfolio of articles is packed). It is vibrant, and fun, and something I was in the mood to work with. So I ran around the studio and gathered everything that could possibly work with the palette, focusing on rayons, tencel, silks and bamboo, things that would really drape well.
Just looking at the pile of yarn on the table made me giddy with delight, it has been so long since I made anything in this room, my hands on creativity reduced to whatever I could manage on an airplane. God knows I’ve been on enough of them lately…
Because almost every one of the 264 ends is different from its neighbor, the method of warping that made the most sense was the AVL warping wheel, which would produce two inch bundles of warp which could be beamed sectionally as I wound them. I love this pricey piece of equipment, and would probably never have bought it had I not been at the right place at the right time, when AVL first introduced it in 2000 at Convergence Cincinnati. I paid a whole $250. It costs almost $600. now. I am so glad I own it, it is perfect for this kind of multiple thread warp.
Meanwhile, Part 2 of my The Weaver Sews: What to Weave column on Weavezine is live, just posted about an hour ago. I’m really having fun with this column, there is so much to say, and I love having an archive of photos and work to pick from to illustrate my points.
