March 2009 – Daryl's Blog

Catch-up, and Stupid Kid Tricks.

My whole family suffers from ADD, and I admit, so do I. There are lots of pros and cons to this. We are a bunch of really creative people, who are always inventing new ways to get out of the proverbial box, but living with us is always a challenge. One of the great features about people with ADD is the ability to hyper focus. So that’s basically what I’ve been doing morning, noon, and night for the last couple months. I get into a project, like the web site designs, and I don’t come up for air. So everything around me can get really neglected. I try to keep up with the laundry and housecleaning, because I, unlike the rest of my family who thrive in clutter, can’t stay focused when there is chaos all around me. But I’ve put off a lot of little correspondence things, and I had a couple of orders that needed shipping, I promised Tien I’d send her some interfacing samples from my vast stash. I had some follow-ups, and a huge pile of bills to organize, banking to do, and general desk clean up. So I took the day to take care of all the stuff that had been piling around me. It felt really good to do that. I’m getting to the harder parts on the website, not that they are difficult, they are just frightfully time consuming. Each lecture and workshop has to be updated, polished, PDF’s created, and then pasted and linked into the new site.

So then there is my creative ADD son. He got distracted by his friends in the car, leaving the ShopRite parking lot this afternoon, and didn’t realize there was a huge curb in front of him? The photo is of course one of about 200 taken in the parking lot by every cell phone in a 10 mile radius. The photo is already traveling at breakneck speed through Facebook. I was afraid to ask how the car got off the strip and into the driveway, fortunately the car was a Scion Xa, and the guys said they just lifted it. More information than I needed to know.

I will say we laugh a lot in my house.

Music, Metaphors, and other Musings…

I went to church this morning. That in itself isn’t such an unusual thing, after all it is Sunday, but I don’t usually attend church, I haven’t in a number of years. Without getting into a lot of personal issues and events, the church where I raised my kids, and I, parted company a number of years ago, my daughter still attends regularly, but I couldn’t quite find my way back. This particular church suffered a number of situations and personalities and events that got in the way of what’s important in life, and a number of those I’d raised my kids with, including myself, just stayed away. My spirituality was in danger, and I’m quite protective of that.

Anyway, a new pastor was installed today. It was a sort of rebirth, or new beginning of sorts for this congregation, and many of the old faces were present, those I’d raised my kids around, and I felt a renewed sense of community. But that isn’t what this musing is about. In 1996, as a Sunday School teacher, and local handweaver, I did a program for this church, one Sunday in May. I brought in one of my 25″ floor looms, threaded with a 4 shaft bird’s eye, and I put it on the altar. For the service, each of the Sunday School children came up one by one, and wove a thread across the warp. Each of the members of the congregation wove in a thread as well. When someone couldn’t be there that Sunday because of an illness or injury, someone wove in a thread for them. The cloth, as it took shape, came to represent the community or congregation of this particular church, gold and silver threads, and black and white threads, and the metaphor here, was how critical each thread was to the whole cloth. If one thread was removed, the cloth wouldn’t be as structurally sound, and there would be a definite hole in the cloth.

There is a wonderful poem, The Plan of the Master Weaver, most weavers have heard of it.

The Plan of the Master Weaver

Our lives are but fine weavings
That God and we prepare,
Each life becomes a fabric planned
And fashioned in His care.
We may not always see just how
The weavings intertwine,
But we must trust the Master’s hand
And follow His design,
For He can view the pattern
Upon the upper side,
While we must look from underneath
And trust in Him to guide……

Sometimes a strand of sorrow
Is added to His plan,
And though it’s difficult for us,
We still must understand
That it’s He who fills the shuttle,
It’s He who knows what’s best,
So we must weave in patience
And leave to Him the rest…..

Not till the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why–
The dark threads are as needed
In the Weaver’s skillfull hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.

Anyway, I mounted the cloth, with this poem in a frame, with the date and event, and it hangs in the auditorium of this church, off the sanctuary. I spent some time looking at it during the dinner reception for the new pastor. I thought about so many things in my life, where I am part of something greater, and that each person’s contribution no matter how big or small is pretty critical to the whole, my guilds, my family, my neighborhood, my weaving community, even the classes I teach, and I even thought of it this afternoon, when I went down to Morristown for my recorder ensemble rehearsal. Here it is even more obvious when someone is missing from the group. There are two sopranos, two altos, two tenors, and two basses. If one of them is missing, the music is somehow not complete.

I like that about life. I like to think that everyone has something to contribute, and that everyone’s contribution is important. And without someone, there would be a hole in the cloth. Life is about teamwork. And getting along. And holding together in the darkest of times, and the best of times, and all those normal average times in between.

So I went to church today, and I saw a lot of old friends, and I thought a lot about what I do, and my contribution to the “cloth” no matter how big or small. I’m glad I went, it was good to get away from the computer, and my studio, and just be with people, and I think for now, I’ll go again.

A Quiet Saturday

I spent the day mostly at my desk, working on the next gallery page for my site. The house was quiet, the men are away skiing in Vermont, and my daughter spent the day working in a kennel. She loves the dogs, and caring for them, and always comes home quite in need of a shower! I drove her tonight to her friend’s house in a neighboring county, where she will spend the night.

So I’m alone tonight, and after I finished fine tuning the collar/facing piece, and getting it and the hem all basted in, I spent some time couching the lime green floss around the collar/facing edges. This is a bit tricky, I loosened the tension on the upper thread, and loosened the tension on the presser foot, which helped keep the couching from compressing and skewing the collar as I sewed around it. I had to first pre-thread the floss using a tapestry needle, up the front, through the underside of the collar at the start of the fold line, since couching is one sided, around the collar, and back through to the underside of the collar, continuing down the other front. That way when I put the special cording foot on the machine, I could break the zig zag stitching when I had to switch sides, but not the floss.

I took my hand sewing kit, and curled up in front of a pre-recorded episode of PBS’s Great Performances, King Lear starring Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Obviously it was an unbelievable performance, and I was able to get all the hand sewing finished, the hem, the facings, and the backs of the buttonholes. The sleeves are next.

It Worked!

I’m so excited, and pretty embarrassed that I finally figured this out after only three months of blogging. Thanks Tien! I love you! Actually, Tien’s suggestion on how to get the pictures clickable and still remain rectangular wasn’t exactly the whole problem. I had actually found that setting last week, and thinking it would fix the problem, was disappointed it didn’t. But after talking with Tien, I realized that there had to be a way, she did it in WordPress, why can’t I, and lo’ and behold, I merely had to click on the image URL to give it the link suddenly, I’m cooking with gas!

So being the naturally obsessive compulsive person I am, I stayed up until 11:30 pm, going back through the blogs, and I’ve clicked on the image URL’s all the way back to the beginning of the month, and now all the little images should become big screenfilling images when you click on them! So I only have to fix February, January, and December, plus work on the website, plus finish the jacket plus go to sleep sometime…….

Oh, and if you get HBO, don’t forget that Alexander McCall Smith’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency series starts Sunday night at 8pm, starring Jill Scott. It got rave reviews in our paper.

Focused Friday

So far the feedback has been really positive on the site. I did, in one of my middle of the night awakenings, think that I really should have the galleries run from most recent to oldest work, so I reversed the 2000-2005 gallery. I think it is better to click on the gallery link and see the newest work added, rather than scroll way way down and find it at the bottom. Then I spent most of the day reprocessing images for the artwork gallery. Some of the older pieces there were originally shot in slides. Many of my slides were not great to begin with, and I think my scanner isn’t doing the best job anymore. But I did my best with what I had to work with, and vowed that next time I set up a photoshoot, I’ll reshoot some of the older important work in digital with proper lighting and a better backdrop. It was interesting to see how far I’ve come as a photographer.

The men made it safely up to Vermont for the last ski trip of the season, I got a text message at 2:15am letting me know they arrived safely. (That’s probably why I woke up last night and re-thought the gallery!) In spite of the rain yesterday, they had a good day of skiing today, and are looking forward to the weekend.

I worked on the jacket after dinner tonight, and got the upper collar/front facing in, and the backs of the bound buttonholes finished. So I can actually button the jacket. I love the narrow trim collar, and the lines on this are really really slimming. I took an interior shot of the jacket before I started on collar/facing, because I always loved what goes on behind the scenes in a garment like this.

There are a couple of blogs that I really enjoy, one of them is Tien’s Blog, the traveling tigress. Tien is a weaver who makes garments out on the west coast, and blogs about her adventures, like me, but she is a wonderful writer. I love her musings, and look forward to her latest adventures. We spent a lot of time emailing this afternoon, I gave her some advice on interfacings, and she gave me some advice on using WordPress and how to get my images to be clickable, but remain rectangular. Before when I used this feature, the thumbnails in the blog would be square, cutting off important information, like in a long gown, you’d only see the crotch. Not attractive. So she advised me on where to click in the settings to change this feature to eliminate the square thumbnails, and we’ll see if this works. Hopefully my interfacing information works for her.

The other blog I follow is from Susan Hinckley, called Small Works in Wool. Another fabulous writer, she is absolutely hysterical, and peppers her posts with old magazine images to get the point across. It is the best laugh of the day when she puts up a new post. And her work is great, she takes old sweaters and beads, and buttons, and turns them into little works of personally and politically charged art.