Month: May 2014

I graduated from art school in 1977, was married in 1978 and started exhibiting at Craft Fairs in 1979.  My career started a long time ago.  One of the advantages of doing national juried craft markets  like the Morristown show was local newspapers featured me regularly, and I accumulated an entire scrapbook of aging news clippings.  I haven’t looked at them in many years.

My mother was a tailor and educator and collected a series of binders full of news clippings, leaflets, pamphlets, magazine articles and all kinds of reference materials all of which were passed to me and reside on one of my bookshelves in the studio.  I never get around to reading them…

I have tons, no exaggeration, of textile journals, magazines, and such, including the entire collection of Threads Magazine, along with two DVD’s of the entire collection.  I never have a chance to read any of the back issues.

I have a few years worth of Belle Armoire Magazine, and Interweave Press’s Piecework, and years worth of Vogue Patterns Magazine and Sewing Today.  I never get a chance to look at them.  The Piecework magazines have a few lovely knitting patterns, and some great historical information on lacemaking, but otherwise, they just take up space.  I don’t know why I still have years worth of Belle Armoire Magazines on the shelf.  The Vogue Patterns Magazines and the old Sewing Today issues are pretty much outdated, most of the patterns aren’t available anymore, but there are some important articles that I’d like to save.  I never have a chance to read any of them.

I have a daughter who is home from college, desperately seeking a job and it is a bit late in the season to find something temporary.  Since I am still paying all her expenses for one more year in college, she is going into her senior year, I figured, as long as she is here, I’m putting her to work.  I’m pretty spoiled since she is such an amazing worker, and is so incredibly organized, and loves those kind of tasks…

Soooooo, I have hired an archivist.  Yep, that’s right.  I have my lovely college senior stationed at a work table in my studio, with stacks of binders and magazines, and news clippings and she is scanning and archiving everything I throw at her.  The goal is to move out a lot of paper this summer.

My husband picked up a 1 terabyte Passport Ultra, about the size of a deck of cards, and we should just about fill it.

First Brianna scanned and printed all appropriate articles from back issues of Piecework and archived them while also rearranging my knitting files.  All projects are compiled by type.

Then she spent yesterday sorting through and scanning all of my news clippings and exhibit brochures and postcards from the 1980’s, creating an 81 slide PowerPoint presentation with those.

Today she started on my mother’s vast 10 volume collection of sewing related clippings and leaflets.  Those will be converted to PDF’s and digitally filed so I’ll be able to reference by category. This will become really helpful when I’m writing a sewing related article.  I’ve already found things I didn’t know I had that can be useful to lectures I already give.

If she stays with it, this will take the better part of the summer.  I can already hear the faint sighs of relief from my overstuffed and broken shelving as pounds of paper materials are removed. I’ll be bringing the back issues of Piecework Magazine and Belle Armoire to the knitting and weaving guild meetings, otherwise, they are getting tossed recycled.

Meanwhile I’m focusing on the next trip, coming soon, to Eugene Textile Center in Oregon where I’ll be teaching a five day garment construction intensive.  There are still a couple of spots available if anyone is just itching to jumpstart those garment construction skills.  The class starts June 11, and runs for five days.  I’m cutting and printing and packing and shipping and the studio is buzzing.  I just shipped a box to Threads Magazine for photography for my upcoming article in the fall.

And if anyone is available Saturday night, the opening for Peters Valley faculty exhibit is from 5-7pm.  I have a garment in the show.

Stay Tuned…

I spent last week teaching a five day intensive right here in my own studio.  I had two private students, and my lovely daughter came home from Massachusetts and joined the group making things a bit crowded but really fun.

My two students were actually people who are very close to me, my sister Marta who learned to sew with me when we were really young, and my dearest friend and former College Textiles Professor Carol.  Why you may ask would they want to spend a week taking an intense garment construction class?

My sister Marta is typical of my workshop students.  Well trained in garments early on in the Home Ec years, she was actually a Home Ec teacher for a brief time before becoming an architect.  But a lot of time has gone by since she made garments for herself and her body is not shaped like it was back in her 20’s.  The skills are there but they are very very rusty.  It was the perfect week for her to jump start her passion once again for making cool stuff to wear.

And my beloved college professor Carol, just wanted to be around creative people and make a garment or two.  It has been a really long time for her as well.  And she was determined to learn how to knit socks.

My daughter Brianna kept us all amazed by what she came up with, starting with a vest from a discarded beach umbrella from her beloved camp which closed at the end of last summer.

She made a muslin from my junk fabric bin for a cute top, and liked it so much she went and finished it.

She cut a motorcycle vest from a roll of black Pleather I had in the attic.

And she started on a pair of stretch denim pants in purple…

Marta made a vest from the pattern I used for my linen vest with Inkle trim.

She also made a muslin from some of my junk fabric for a jacket.

She kept us all laughing…  The bubble mailer made a nice hat.

And Carol brought a gorgeous wool knit and a classic Donna Karan Vogue pattern from her archives.  I know she will enjoy the comfort of an easy knit dress.

And then there were those socks…

We dined every afternoon and evening al fresco…

We celebrated my birthday last Thursday night at Jose Tejas with Margaritas and a couple of great gifts.  The large box was a new Cuisinart, since my old food processor died last Sunday in the middle of grating two pounds of carrots for carrot slaw…

And we ended a fantastic week with a trip into Manhattan to see the Charles James retrospective at the MET.  OMG!  This is a must see exhibit.  The animated images with each of the garments showed how the flat pattern shapes molded into these architecturally inspired garments.  I could have stayed in this exhibit for hours.

We made a final stop at Mood Fabrics.  Of course.

I bought this beautiful Cotton Jersey print.

I’m still trying to recover from the week, but there is work to be done and time’s a wastin’…

Stay tuned…

Sounds like the title of a book I should read…

I think there are two types of people in this world, that’s a huge exaggeration, but both types actually live in my house.  There are those that keep copious amounts of lists, and there are those who think (I have been informed of this), that keeping lists suggests that one isn’t capable of remembering so ergo, no lists.

I am the list keeper.  I have lists all over the place, and thanks to lovely Cheryl whom I stayed with when I taught somewhere in the mid-west (a place I can’t remember because it isn’t on a list somewhere) I have even discovered an app for that, (Our Groceries), an app that lists lists, and one that can sync with my husband’s phone (the one who doesn’t keep lists) so if one of us is at a particular store, the other’s wish list is handy.  This does work well for the grocery store and Home Depot and Staples, etc. It does not work well for Honey-Do lists.

I have running lists on my desk,

 

I have a virtual group of post it’s with lists on my computer screen, thanks to a feature in Windows 7. And I have a  ToDo List on my Home page. (Prontopage for those still in mourning about the loss of iGoogle)

I have computer print outs of all my packing lists for every class I teach.

I’m not embarrassed to say I can’t remember, and I can’t afford to forget.  And the effort to try to remember everything takes away valuable creative time, so when I write it down, I don’t have to remember anything, and I get the absolutely gleeful joy of crossing off each item as it is taken care of.

I even love the Amazon Wish List feature that lets me remember books or products that I am interested in but not in a position to buy at the moment.  If you can find it on the internet, you can add it to your Amazon Wish List.

This was a week of intense planning and my lists came in super handy.  I am teaching another in home garment construction intensive, for a pair of students, starting on Monday, and there was a lot to do for prep, mainly cleaning my house from top to bottom.  Not because I’m a compulsive cleaner, but because I’ve neglected it spending more time on the outside, planting and prepping and weeding and clearing and all that tracked in mud and debris made a huge mess.  So I divided up my house into parts and put what I expected to clean on a list for each day along with appointments like, have wisdom tooth pulled. (Seriously, I broke a tooth last weekend, and had to have it pulled Monday morning.  I had great joy crossing that one off the list.)

Last night I was scheduled to play with my friend, at a coffee house in Morristown, we played a trio of songs on the Baroque recorders, and my husband created a montage of photos on his iPhone.  Crossed that one off the list…

I love my lists, they keep me sane.  No other family member in my house keeps lists and actually seems to have a complete aversion to them.  I can’t function without them.  It takes all kinds to make the world run smoothly.  I am the list keeper…

Meanwhile, Wednesday, along with a couple of generous souls from my weaving guild, I spent another day at Peters Valley, working on loom rehabilitation.  Eileen and Carol sat on the breezy porch at the weaving studio arranging heddles on some of the 96 shafts on the 11 Macomber looms we now have.  Apparently no one told the students who previously used the looms that heddles should all face in the same direction.  There was one shaft that had each of the heddles alternating, one canting to the left and one canting to the right.  There are no words…  This will be a task that will take years…

Meanwhile I worked on replacing aprons.  This is another slow task.  Macomber looms usually came with cords instead of aprons and over the years the cords rotted, or were cut or generally failed and my goal is to have every warp and cloth beam have fresh new aprons (all 30 of them), but I’m settling for just replacing the beams that have cords with aprons for now.

And for those of you who were disappointed that I didn’t take any photos of the Peters Valley open house, I grabbed my camera before I did anything else on Wednesday, and took photos of the three rooms of looms.

Here is the front room…

Here is the middle room…

And here is the back room.  The porch is off that room.

And of course, I took a complete inventory of each loom and what is left to fix or repair and what parts we need to order directly from Macomber.  All 11 looms need beater bumpers and pads for the shaft levers.  Another list…

And I did manage over a couple of nights, to finish up the blouse I started a week or so ago, and though I’m reasonably happy with it, I would not make a blouse again that had double fronts.  Sandra Betzina suggested in this Today’s Fit pattern (out of print Vogue 7903) that she prefers having a double front instead of a front facing.  I found, especially in this pattern with so many vertical darts that the front was a bit stiff, considering the fabric was a light weight lawn, like a Liberty of London Print.  It should have draped more but can’t because of the double front.  It sort of wears me instead of me wearing it.

I’m off to finish cleaning the rest of my house, and cross those items off the list, and welcome home my lovely Brianna who is, as I write, traveling home from Massachusetts for the summer.  She is also taking the workshop, and teaching my daughter as one of the class participants should be completely entertaining…

Stay tuned…

When my daughter was in pre-school, they always made a big deal out of Mother’s Day.  The children would make some sort of project to “bring home to mom”, and this particular May, my daughter brought home half a dixie cup filled with dirt and in it was a tiny Lily of the Valley plant.

It sat in my kitchen window for a few days, and then I decided to plant it outside.  I knew nothing about Lily of the Valley and just found a part shadyspot and stuck the small plant in the ground. I promptly forgot about it.

Raising children has been sort of like that.  We do things, without much to go on, (I couldn’t whip out my phone back then and Google to find out about the proper growing conditions for Lily of the Valley).  Yet each small thing we do, each piece of information we impart, no matter how innocent, may have an impact later on that we may never know about.

The plant withered away, and life went on.  We gardened and trimmed and planted many other things over the years, but I really completely forgot all about that Lilly of the Valley.

Until about ten years ago.

One spring I went out to walk through the beds and imagine my surprise when I discovered this.

That little tiny plant had been quietly growing underground, sending out shoots, and ten years later that plant reproduced itself a hundred fold.  And each spring my garden is overtaken by the fruits of that one little act.

To my children on this special day.  Yes, I am a mother.  I taught you what I knew, what I thought, what I cared about, and hoped along the way I planted something that would make you who you are today.  I gave you wings, but it is up to you to fly with them, where ever they take you.  I think of all those seemingly meaningless things we experienced together that blossomed forth many years later when I look at the Lily of the Valley patch in my garden, and when you remind me about things we did and things I’ve said that I’ve completely forgotten about.

When raising children, no thing is really inconsequential.  Thank you to both of my children for the  wild ride, it has been my greatest joy to watch you grow up and become the people you are now.

Love, mom

The big day came and went.  Peters Valley had its open house yesterday and I proudly showed off the new and improved weaving studio to a steady stream of visitors, and got lots of ohhhhs and ahhhhs. Thanks to everyone who helped make the weaving studio come alive.  And I’m completely embarrassed that I have not one photo of how gorgeous the studio looked with all the yarn on the shelves and my handwoven garments hanging about.  Shame on me.  I’m such a bad blogger…

I took the whole morning off, to just hang outside, basking in the glorious sunshine and breeze.  I spent some time weeding and scrubbing the rug for the sitting area on the deck, the yard that I thought hopeless after the long winter is finally coming to life and maybe it is because of the long gloomy winter, but everything seem so much more colorful and alive.  Probably because everything bloomed at once. I did though, scramble over the last few days, in between appointments and commitments to keep my hands busy and start a couple of projects.

For the weavers: Desperate to weave something I grabbed one of my trusty Inkle Looms, which I always have set up since I need looms in progress for teaching examples.  This is a narrow Paired Pebbles structure, using 12 wt. Egyptian Cotton WonderFil Spagetti.  It is an embroidery thread I picked up at an American Sewing Guild conference a couple years ago.  The pattern is from one of Laverne Waddington’s Andean Pebble Weave books.  I teach an online tutorial on Paired Pebbles on the Inkle Loom at Weavolution.com.  The little motifs weave quite quickly for PickUp.

For the knitters: I purchased a couple of skeins of hand-dyed rayon novelty “Rick Rack” from Interlacements using up my gift certificate award from the Colorado exhibit, and then some…  I wanted to start something fun and summery, so I balled up one of the skeins, this one is Scottish Lichen.  I have a number of C2Knits patterns, I really like the simple shapes that fit me well.  They are mostly knitted top-down, and I’m starting to become a real fan of top-down sweaters.  Especially for something like this.  It is going quickly, just a simple knitted tank, Gypsy.

For the sewers sewists: I always try to have a garment under construction and with my crazy April I failed miserably.  So I grabbed the cotton on the top of the shirting pile, a pretty print I got last year on my NY Fabric buying trip with Peggy Sagers, tossed it in some hot water, and pre-shrunk it.

The layout was pretty straightforward, I’m using Vogue 7903, a Today’s Fit pattern from Vogue (out of print 🙁 ), the short sleeve version.  There are two options for the front, using a front facing/button placket or cutting two fronts and “lining” with the second one, eliminating a lumpy facing.  Not that my facings are lumpy…  But I had the fabric, and thought I’d try this method of shirt construction.  I’ll let you know what I think.

A tutorial:  Today’s Fit patterns use a different sizing system.  According to the chart, I’m actually half way between a B and C in the bust area and a C in the waist and hips.  Should be straightforward right?

The real key to how something will fit is in the built in ease.  Most patterns in the Vogue line have a key to ease written in the description.  This one is semi-fitted.  It helps to have the ease chart describing the fit types.  The bust ease on a semi fitted blouse is anywhere between 4 1/8″ and 5″.  I know how I like my clothing to fit.  I know I’d think this was oversized.

The tendency is to think, well I’ll just cut a smaller size.  That may not work, since it may fit better across the bust, but the shoulders and neck might be too small.  I checked the handy finished garment measurement chart on the bodice front pattern piece.

Based on this, I’m thinking 4 inches of ease in the bust, if I cut the B would be a lot better, still roomy, but better than if I cut half way between the B and C pattern lines.  Likewise with the waist.  So I’m taking a chance by not making up a muslin first, my plan is to baste the garment together to check the fit before I do French Seams.  I’m anxious to get sewing and this is the kind of pattern that can be tweaked in the construction process.

And for those of you curious about the condition of my stupid dog, he is fine.  He will have the stitches out tomorrow, and then maybe I don’t have to watch him 24/7 to make sure he doesn’t rip open his extensive incision.  He is acting normal, body functions normal, though he does stare longingly at the empty basket under the coffee table where all his toys use to be.  No more squeak toys for that bad boy…  Stupid dog…  The final bill ended up $4600, and I’ll probably get charged tomorrow at the vets for removing the stitches.  I’m half tempted to take them out myself.  I am after all, pretty adept at ripping stuff out…

Stay tuned…