The craziness and fantastic energy and calendar overload of the past month have all begun to quiet down, which is just lovely since I’m not sure how much more wonderful stuff I could take. Life should be about balance and the goings on of the last month were cataclysmic-ally out of balance. All of it was great, all of it was a collision of wonderful events, but when that happens all at the same time, it is really hard to savor each one.
My daughter is home from college, moved in, and started her first day of work today. She has a full time job in her field, and I’ll know in a couple hours how it went.
My son has returned from his 11 month deployment in the Middle East and he has weathered the first couple weeks. I can’t imagine what that must feel like, the most I’ve been gone has been a month, but he said the other night, “Mom, the best way I can describe the feeling is that life went on while you were gone, without you, and somehow you must learn to fit back in.” He is in Boston as I write visiting one of his oldest friends.
My husband is back on the road, leaving me with the care and feeding of the gardens, I harvested a big bowl of snap peas, and added a few inches of dirt to the potatoes. He is in Dublin for a month.
Which leaves me home alone.
YES!
I returned Tuesday evening from teaching a five day class at Peters Valley [1], which is my second most favorite place to teach in the world, the first of course is Sievers [2]. Peters Valley does have two advantages over Sievers Fiber School, there is a kitchen where all three meals are served (at Sievers I have to cook my own). This year the food was excellent and I came home three pounds heavier. No joke. The other advantage Peters Valley has over Sievers is the amount of classes running simultaneously, in all kinds of mediums. There was a Blacksmithing class, which my daughter took, and came to each meal looking like she rolled in the fireplace. She had a blast. She promised me one of her hand forged magic wands. There was a ceramics casting class, a wood turning class, a fine metals enameling class, and of course mine, a five day intermediate class in weaving yardage. The conversations were wonderful, especially between the other instructors. I rarely saw my daughter, she hung out with the other blacksmithing students.
I was fortunate I only had three students. It made the class much less stressful.
I started them doing yarn wraps, exploring value, complementary colors, ugly combinations, and using images as inspiration.
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Then they narrowed down their choices to the yarn available, and the goal was to learn to work in repeats of 8-10 threads. I’m surprised I had no shots of their actual final yarn wraps, but they jumped into the math like it was their job.
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Next came winding the warps, which was a challenge for all of them, two were experienced weavers and my dear lovely Grace, barely 20 years old, had never woven before and jumped in head first and never missed a beat. I had them learn to use a warping paddle, which allowed rapid winding of the 600+ ends in their warp. It was tricky but they all were pros by the end.
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Next came sleying the reed. I’m a front to back girl and so that’s what they learned. This class was about weaving yardage, and I wanted clean tidy accurate warps with nothing to stand in their way.
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Then of course, came the threading. I asked Grace when she was about half way through if she was enjoying the process. I expected her to give me an eye roll or something, she had never woven on a shaft loom before and I threw her right into the deep end, 26″ wide yardage, 20 epi, 6 yard warp. She smiled and said she was actually enjoying it. She had her tunes on, and she was just in a groove…
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Robin in the photo below on the right had come to the class because she has never had a successful warp, she described every warp she has ever woven as “the warp from hell”. She started beaming her warp, and looked at the perfect warp from the back of the loom and I got the biggest hug you can imagine. She was so excited to have yarns under control.
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Once they were sleyed, threaded, and beamed, they tied onto the front and then it was time to sample. I had them try a number of wefts. In the perfect world we would have cut off the samples and washed them, but time was tight and we just went with our gut instincts.
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And then, with about a day and a half to weave, they wove their little hearts out. Robin and Dee were able to work in the evenings, but Grace in the third photo wove her entire five yards of fabric in one stretch on the last day of class. She was remarkable.
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There were a lot of smiles when the knots came up over the warp beam. The end was in sight.
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And I should give a big thank you to my assistant in the fiber studio, Caroline, who was inspired by the lectures I did and decided to wind a pretty colorful warp, not using a repeat of course, so she spent most of the last three days of class, winding. And winding, and winding some more…
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Though the class ended Tuesday and everyone finished their yardage, we had a mini reunion Wednesday night at the Jockey Hollow Guild [21] Meeting. Robin and Dee are members of the guild, and Grace it turns out lives in the next town over from me, and I picked her up, and took her to the meeting. All three had washed their samples and the results were lovely. I loaned Grace one of my surplus looms, hoping she’ll keep the momentum going… Because we do that. It is all about getting the next generation hooked!
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And so I’m home for a bit. There is plenty to do, but I get a bit of a break. I have one session left of my five part webinar series on Garment Construction for Handweavers [25], which airs on June 15th at 1pm EDT. And at the end of August I am back at Peters Valley to teach a beginner class in weaving. Check it out here [26]. And of course in mid August I fly to Sievers in Wisconsin for a 2 1/2 day inkle loom weaving class [27], which is filled, and my garment construction intensive [28] which has a seven day [29] option. We won’t talk about the fall just yet…
Stay tuned…