Struggling to Keep Up…

I returned from the Fiber Fallout and hit the ground running.  But then again, I always do.

I picked Dianne Totten up at the airport Wed, after a flight cancellation and a couple of hours delay and we made it to the guild meeting with minutes to spare.  Dianne gave a lovely talk on her fiber journey, I really enjoy when speakers talk about their adventures and what brought them to where they are, it is inspiring and always interesting, and pretty universal.

So here’s the thing.  I decided to take a break this week, and actually take a workshop.  I invited Dianne Totten to come to my guild, Jockey Hollow Weavers, and teach a two day class in Crimp Cloth on the loom.  I’ve seen her work, and seen others’ work who’ve taken her classes, and remember when Dianne first became excited with this technique, when she was weaving for me for the color forecast column I wrote for Handwoven Magazine some years back.

Anyway, I live my life packing and unpacking, hauling and carrying crap loads of… well, crap.  Fiber crap.  So you’d think that I’d get a little break by actually taking a workshop and letting the hauling of crap be someone else’s problem.  Trouble is, the speaker needed all kinds of crap you can’t take on an airplane.  She arrived with two little roller bags, the kind that fit in the overhead, and I was instantly jealous.

My Rav vehicle on the other hand, was overflowing with a loom, bench, sewing machine, serger, iron, two dressforms, a white board, and a pile of additional fiber crap, all necessary for a successful workshop, all from my own studio.  I’m doomed to spend my life in a suitcase…  Except nothing I took would fit in a suitcase.  Sigh…

The workshop was fantastic.  The premise here was that you can weave cloth using a synthetic in either the warp or weft, and with the addition of some pull threads, woven at quarter inch intervals, in the same direction as the synthetic, you can use this Japanese Shibori technique, normally used for dyeing, to pull up cloth and heat set it into permanent crimp or pleats.  It was like magic.

My warp was “anything on your shelf”, which in my case was some 10/2 cotton, I threaded in stripes in an Overshot pattern so I’d have blocks.  After extensive sampling, and this is one technique that you can’t sample enough, I hunkered down and wove some serious cloth.  It is still on the loom.  I’ve found my old canner with the rack, tucked back into the garage, but the lid is still missing.  You need this for steaming the fabric.

I’m really really happy with the sample I got, Really really happy!  Back in 2002, at the Convergence Vancouver, I remember a dress in the fashion show from Catherine Ellis that used this technique along with Shibori dyeing.  There was a lot of discussion on how to sew using this kind of fabric and preserve the crimp and stretch.  I’ve wanted a hunk of this fabric for more than 10 years to play with myself and see what kinds of construction techniques I can come up with.  So now, all I need is a little time, and the lid to my canner, and I can weave off the rest of the warp and steam it and start to play.

We stopped in Morristown to do a little boutique shopping, Thursday night after the workshop.  On one of the side streets we came upon the last breath of summer, still hanging on, and I had to grab a photo, since the temps are plummeting, in fact we had to fire up the wood stove tonight, and this gorgeous display will be a wilted dead mess by the end of the week I’m sure.

I returned Dianne safely to the airport Saturday morning, after treating her to a real NJ experience, Taylor Ham, egg and cheese on an everything bagel. Spent the rest of the day unloading my car and putting everything away.  Sigh…

Today was costume day.  Brianna returned the muslin for her Dr. Horrible lab coat Halloween costume via USPS, along with the fabric she picked up at a Joann’s up near her school in Massachusetts.  So I sat chained to the sewing machine, except for a brief run to Morristown for recorder ensemble practice, and I finished the costume about an hour ago.  My husband will take it up to her for family weekend.  I won’t be able to go since I will have private students in all week, something I’ve never done before, but am really excited to see how this works.  For once I won’t have to haul stuff out of the house.  Just around to different rooms.

I’ve agreed to moderate the Demon Seamstress of Fleet Street forum for Halloweave on Weavolution.com, so I’m going to have to put up my introductory post there tomorrow, and figure out what I want to sew from my handwoven during the month of October.  Stay tuned…