I know it has been awhile. Not that I haven’t been busy or anything…
My husband’s illness is in a holding pattern while he receives the next round of chemo. He feels much better in general than he did last fall when he couldn’t eat or drink anything and ended up in the ER numerous times. He is more mobile with this round of chemo, so we are taking advantage of my actually being home for once and trying to do things together, things we haven’t done before. Though we both hop on planes all the time, or at least he use to (note he finally achieved million mile status on United three months before his cancer diagnosis), he wanted to get outta “dodge” so to speak, so we hopped on a plane about 10 days ago and went to Florida.
It was a lovely and memorable couple of days, including a trip to Kennedy Space Center, neither one of us has ever been, and we actually got to see a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch, which had been postponed five times before it took off without incident the day we were there. We also saw the Atlantis space shuttle in its final home, and saw some incredible images and some incredible things, and learned some amazing stuff that I never knew about the space program, its history and its future.
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We headed over to West Palm to visit a couple who are probably my oldest friends, and saw a production of Curtains, a murder mystery within a stage production, where my friend had a minor role. We got to see the matinee after lunch in their lovely home on the intercoastal, and then met them again for dinner on the Atlantic Ocean in Delray Beach. The “Tower” for four and the watermelon salad were worth the trip to Florida. And I got to wear my newly reworked skirt and the cotton shell I knit last season. (C2Knits Zoe Tee [2])
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I spent a lot of time on the plane, in the airport lounge and in the car from Orlando to West Palm and back. I decided to take something small to knit, and I managed to use up all my bits of fat cotton and linen balls, and ended up with seven new dishcloths. The guy next to me on the plane, the bass guitar player for a rock band coming home from a gig in Daytona Beach, just kept shaking his head as he watched me knit my dishcloths from odd bits of yarn. He had a new respect for household textiles and the wacky women and men who make them…
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Today we got to do something really fun, we got a backstage tour of a wonderful theater, the Papermill Playhouse [7], where we have had season tickets for probably 30 years. We have never been on the other side of the curtain, and the tour was amazing. Subscribers are always invited to a behind the scenes tour in the spring between shows, and this is the first time my husband and I have been in the same state at the same time to actually attend. That’s me in the knit sweater…
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Meanwhile, I’m actually doing work in the studio. Really. But it isn’t anything exciting or showy or will get 150 likes on Facebook.
For those who have never taken a class with me, and actually for those that have, I use a jacket pattern that I’ve had for years for my classes. It was tweaked from my production patterns in the 1980’s when I sold jackets and coats at craft fairs in the northeast. I have a master pattern with many copies, and my sizing is all my own, illustrated in colors, so there is no reference with current ready to wear sizing which is so inconsistent that it isn’t even worth trying to mimic.
My patterns get pretty worn and marked up and every few years I take the time and recopy everything. The problem is that over the years, I’ve wanted to tweak a couple things, adjust sizing, add a size or two because bodies are changing, really, and if I make any kind of adjustment to the master pattern, I have to recopy 20 pattern pieces or so, and make all new samples. Right now I travel with 13 different jackets, a half dozen vests and now that I offer the tunic, I think there are a half dozen of them as well. All of them are made from commercial fabrics, some of which are weighty and take up a lot of room in the suitcase, and create a dilemma for workshop participants trying to compare one size to another since the fabrics are so different.
Since I was about to recopy the patterns anyway, and the sizes and details needed to be tweaked, and I needed to change the colors of the sizes I use, orange is now purple and purple replaces the cyan blue which always faded to the same color blue as the real blue, confusing students, and there was also the need to be able to create a princess seam jacket from one of my designs for people who have narrow handpainted warps where a full back or front can’t be cut from one width of fabric, my entire repertoire of patterns needed to go through a massive rewrite. It was long overdue. I’ve been diligently working behind the scenes since early January, reworking my jacket patterns and testing them, and ultimately making all new samples. In sheets.
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Yep, we came across a windfall of pretty colored sheets and they are light weight, consistent in fabric, and hold their shape really well so they stay true to the pattern even after many many try-ons by students. I think I’ve made close to a dozen jackets at this point and many more to come…
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In addition to all this, in a quest to have more variety, I went back to my old production silhouettes from the 1980’s (did you know that 1980’s styles are really fresh and current? I can’t even…), and looked at this jacket from 1987. I liked the shawl collar which is an add on, not unlike the band I usually use, but a little more complicated. They take more fabric, and more time to install, and I’m always cognizant of the three day time limit I have in a jacket class, so I spent some time working out that pattern as an add on.
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Which meant I had to write directions.
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And while I was at it, I needed to rewrite the original jacket directions because my illustrations are way better than those early attempts with Microsoft Draw and I never spent the time to get really good with Adobe Illustrator. Even though I’ve owned it for 20 years. There is nothing like a hand drawn illustration to get the point across.
I’m very happy with the edits and redrafts of the patterns, and so far the jackets have been successful on the friends who have tried them on. I’m fortunate that my daughter is a completely different size and build than me, so she is always recruited to try on a jacket. Even my weekly walking partner Sherrie had to try on a jacket before we set out on our regular hike down the Boulevard in Mountain Lakes.
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I won’t really know how successful I am until I actually use all these in a class. The goal is more variety, without making participants crazy with too many choices. (But you know that’s going to happen). I hate when a guild contacts me for a workshop and says they want a jacket class but there are only six new members who haven’t taken the class before and what else can I offer for those who’ve made a jacket already… Well there is the tunic [17]…
I’ll eventually finish making all the samples and making copious copies of all my master patterns… Meanwhile guild meeting tomorrow and the accountant comes on Tuesday.
Stay tuned…