Nostalgia…

I know I’m not posting as regularly as I usually do, there are all kinds of wonderful things happening, and the days slip by and I realize that I haven’t connected with you dear readers, and so I promised myself I wouldn’t go to bed tonight until I blogged.

This is a post inspired by many of the things that have happened to me in the last week or so, starting with another fantastic day in NYC with my beloved Textile Professor from Montclair State, Carol Westfall. (I graduated in 1977) We tore through NYC, starting in  Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, and hit six museums and galleries, finally heading home late in the evening.  I could spend three blog posts on all I saw, and I should really, because that’s how I remember everything, but I won’t, because there are too many other things to say.

I will though say that anyone who lives within a couple hundred miles of Brooklyn absolutely has to see the Jean Paul Gaultier retrospective at the Museum.  It is the best fashion installation I’ve ever seen.  There are no photos allowed and none on the Brooklyn Museum website, and photos can’t do justice to the amazing work, fantastic curatorial job, and original installation.  Many of the mannequins have projected faces, that move their eyes and mouths and talk and sing and appear to be looking at you.  It is haunting as is Gaultier’s work.  The exhibit is there until February.  I stole this photo off the internet, again, it doesn’t begin to do justice but it gives you an idea of the projected faces.

Anyway, it was wonderful to spend a day with my old college professor, we talked about my work, and about art and about vision and so many things I could take back with me and mull over.  It was like being back in college in a very good way.

Meanwhile…

Brianna came home for Thanksgiving.  Always a bright spot when she walks in the door, I never quite know what to expect, and she showed up in this really fun “collegiate” vest.  I first thought she whacked the arms off a sweatshirt, but actually, she explained she cut up a pair of sweatpants.  OMG!

She has been getting into upcycling, taking old unwearable garments and cutting them into something else.  She has a lot of old unwearable garments, especially in her closet in her room.  Brianna has lost 60 pounds since she went away to college, or rather since we got her ADHD under control, loss of appetite is sort of a side effect, and she just squealed in delight at all the things she found to cut up.

Brianna has an older Uniquely You Dress Form, and of course, it no longer represented her body in any recognizable way, and she looked at it with those sad eyes and said how much easier redesigning clothing would be if she had a form to work on…

Meanwhile, it was Thanksgiving Day…

I cooked all day.

Brianna and I shared Margaritas which she can do now that she is 21…

I always serve meals to my family buffet style, it is less effort, less pots, less clean up, and one eats a lot less if it isn’t sitting there on the table in front of you…

It was wonderful to have my kids both home at the same time.  This time last year my son was deployed because of Hurricane Sandy.  He missed Thanksgiving completely.  This year, he could join us for dinner but it had to be an early one since he is a Team Lead at Target and had to be at the store by 6pm.  Retail…

I asked Brianna if she wanted to tackle reworking her dress form Thanksgiving night.  She looked at me with such excitement how could I not?  The foam form was definitely too large for the cover once it was refit, so I started carving away, which was sort of ironic since I served a pre-cut spiral ham for dinner, there was no turkey to carve…

We got the form/cover pretty close to her shape and her measurements, and she immediately started redesigning a shirt from something in her closet and some lace from my stash.

She sliced up old t-shirts and started braiding a belt.

And then I left…

Coincidentally my 40th High School Reunion was Saturday night, in southern NJ, where I grew up.  I haven’t missed a reunion yet, and it meant a lot to be able to go to this one as well.  But it was really tough to leave my daughter.  I wouldn’t be back by the time she had to return to school. 🙁

But the reunion was a chance to go way back in time, some 40 years, and revisit people I cared about, people who shaped who I became, for better or for worse, and I spent the last month or so, updating a lengthy PowerPoint presentation on our years in HS.  See, I had a horde of memorabilia stashed in the attic, that I hauled out 10 years ago, when I first made the original presentation.  I scanned stuff that you wouldn’t have believed someone could save.  I have now discarded or passed on all of that memorabilia, digital archives take up so much less space…

Off I went, in my jersey dress, with my hair cut in layers and curled, and I had a blast.  The presentation ran all night on my projection equipment, and all seemed to appreciate the ability to look back and remember.  We stayed in a local Marriott and had a wonderful breakfast with another old old friend whom I haven’t seen in many years.

So now, I’m getting down to the wire.

I have only two major goals in the next few weeks, one is to finish the towel warp on the loom, since that will be a number of Christmas presents, and to continue working on “The Family Album”.  It has already been established that I am the PowerPoint queen.  A few years ago, in a desperate attempt to stem the flow of gifts for Birthday and Christmas, we have too much and I don’t need anything else to dust or care for, I decided that organizing our vast archives of photos from all of our adventures, all the way back to 1974 when I first met my husband, would be a way of giving to the family something irreplaceable.  I’ve slowly worked on this album over the last couple of years, scanning in images from important events, and some that weren’t that important but still told the story, and from our many many trips. I’ve loaded all of them into multiple PowerPoint presentations, which can be stored in the cloud and distributed to my kids. I’ve finished the 70’s, and the 80’s and for my husband’s birthday last March, I finished the 90’s.  In 2000, my husband got his first digital camera.  That changes everything.  It means I don’t have to spend hours scanning photos, but since digital film is free, there are about 100 times more photos for every event.  And with the kids at the perfect age for family trips, we took a lot of them.

Tonight I did the pages for our August 2001 vacation.  We spent a couple days taking the kids around NYC.  We took them on top of the World Trade Center.  Those pages were really tough for me to do.  Three weeks later was 9/11.  Each photo I placed in the digital album sort of gave me that punched in the stomach feeling, knowing that within a couple of weeks, everything would be gone.

And of course, there are the towels.  I am trying to weave a yard a day, looking ahead to see how little time I’m going to have in the next couple of weeks.  I think I have woven more than six yards, I’ve sort of lost count, but it doesn’t matter because I’m just weaving yardage and will cut it into towels later.  Which is one of the reasons I am happy with using the grey weft and don’t plan to take the suggestions from you dear readers of doing a couple of towels with dark weft even though they would be lovely.  The other reason is I don’t have any dark Cotlin and really don’t want to spend the money on additional yarn.  They will be fine.  And with my newly re-engineered warp beam, this warp is weaving like butter, easiest weaving I’ve ever done on this loom.  I can’t tell you how happy I am…

And so, Thursday night I’ll be leaving on a jet plane for Munich Germany, where my husband and I will be spending a long weekend, just getting away.  Thanks for all your suggestions, I’ve printed them all out and we will try to get to as many as we can in the couple of days we have there.  When I return, my lovely oldest and dearest friend Candiss Cole and her husband will be arriving for a nice visit before she does the Morristown Craft Market.  It is turning out to be a whirlwind month and I only wish there were more hours in the day and more days in the month to fit it all in!

Now I can go to bed. Stay tuned…