First off, I got a wonderful surprise yesterday afternoon when Jerri Shankler, one of my guild mates from the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild, stopped by to deliver the yardage she wove for me from the yarn she got from me for the Potpourri Exchange.  I love the fabric, and the random warp across the width.  She added a few of her own yarns, like the burgundy stripe, and though the crackle structure wasn’t obvious most of the time, the fabric had a texture and dimension that made it just a bit more interesting than if it had been plain weave.  Jerri and I both agreed that this whole Potpourri Exchange we participated in was a great skill stretching experience, and of course Brianna was there, squealing with delight, as only a 17 year old can do, and asking if we could do this whole experience again!  I told her I’d be happy to give her yarns and tell her to come up with something any time she wants!

So now I have another four yards of handwoven yardage to look at and mull over and figure out what to make from it, the hand is weighty and I’m seeing a jacket here…

Meanwhile, my haul from the Saturday dye day in Central Jersey continues to dry.  The scarves are fun, and the skeins turned out bright and colorful and again, I’ll be thinking about fun stuff to do with them.  And one of the 10 yard warps still hadn’t completely dried, so I photographed the two that have, and can I say I love the palette?  Everyone has their own color preferences, but this one is unusual for me, it was riskier with so much orange, and the effect of the pale melon against the lavender is really lovely, at least I think so, and after all, this is all about me, and if I’m happy, then that’s all that counts!  And once it is woven, it will look entirely different, so stay tuned.  Lots of weaving and sewing to come once my schedule from hell ends around mid-October.

I’m heading out shortly for a weekend getaway (yes I know it is still only Wednesday).  My baby sister turns 50, and my middle sister and I are heading to the Catskills with her, where she has a cabin in the mountains, for a little R&R and quality sister time.  The actual party is Saturday, and I’ll have to return Friday afternoon for a concert in Newark, my husband got us tickets for the James Taylor/Carol King event, and then head back up on Saturday, but all the festivities should be over by Sunday when my husband gets back on a plane for another two weeks in Saudi Arabia.  I’m hoping the home gods are a bit more cooperative this time around.  I’ll be working frantically trying to finalize everything for Convergence and teach a four day fiber boot camp at the Newark Museum.  Though the timing is bad, I really do enjoy teaching this class, every three hours students learn a new fiber technique, spinning, dyeing, felting, weaving, braiding, great if you want to enter into the world of fiber and need a crash course!  I’ve stocked up on green and blue Kool-Aid for dyeing (those colors are really hard to get) and I’ve got lots of fleece and a fresh supply of needle felting needles.  If you live in the north Jersey area and are free the week starting July 5th, come play with us at the Museum.

And one final note, I’ve updated my Inkle Loom Weaving monograph to include some of the additional advanced techniques I recently taught in South Jersey.  Now included are supplemental warps and a unit on 1:1 Name Draft.  The monograph is now $20.  If you already own a copy of the monograph, don’t despair, I’m offering an Advanced Supplement to add the missing information.  This monograph costs $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping (I know the shipping is excessive, but the computer figures it out that way.  The real cost of the monograph is actually $5. so I figure what you are really paying is $5. for the monograph, and $1.50 for the shipping).  Anyway, if you are interested in purchasing the advanced supplement, remember I’ll be in hiding in the Catskills until Sunday, so orders won’t go out before Monday.

Happy Summer!  It’s officially here!

The flight home was a bit frustrating, though I’ve had much worse experiences, I was anxious to get home, since I hadn’t seen my husband in almost a month.  We were to fly in 10 minutes apart.  Sadly it wasn’t meant to be, he made it in, and then a line of severe thunderstorms moved in, over the mid-Atlantic region, and our plane had to turn around and land back in Richmond.  We waited out the storm, and finally got clearance to return to Newark, where I battled lines and angry New Yorkers, and traffic, and delays, and I exhaled slowly and remembered that this is home and I really do love to live in the metropolitan NY area.  Mostly…

I took some lovely photos, and I hope to refer back to this blog periodically to remind myself of this lovely get-away, in this lovely mountain town, in lovely western Virginia.  Did I mention it was lovely?  From the sunrise in the morning, tea on the porch before walking into town for Evelyn’s egg, bacon and cheese croissant, across the street from the studio.

There were dinner parties in the evening, Lisa’s friends joined us or invited us to dinner, each night I got to share in some of the wonderful stories of small town life.  They write books on this kind of stuff.  Everyone was so gentle, so friendly, so helpful, and I feel like I have a new family there.  We visited Deborah in her home further up the mountain, isolated, and full of the sounds of the tree frogs, and the birds.  She cooked us an excellent meal, including fresh garden pea croistini, and cold avocado soup.  I wanted to live on her porch.  The view was incredible.  (And then the rational part of me took over and all I could think was, who cuts that lawn?)

Gisela and Lisa worked hard, we all did, Gisela created patterns for simple garments, we did two and three muslins before we got them right, fine tuning the fit, so she can use the basic shapes as templates for her lovely nuno felt.

Lisa got a bit sidetracked on one of her muslins, and dug out some felt scraps, and veered off onto an adventure that netted this amazing vest.  She worked furiously to finish it so she could wear it to the final dinner party at Deborah’s.

We talked at great length about turning this into an annual retreat.  There was a lot of interest from the local residents of the town, in joining the class, there were quilters, and those interested in making garments, and we are looking at dates in May of 2011.  Once a decision is made, I’ll post the dates in my schedule on my website, and consider joining us on this retreat next year, for a Wearable Extravaganza.  We will more than likely be limiting the class to 8, and Lisa has an entire house available for lodging, which from what I understand will be included in the cost of the retreat.  There is so much to see and do in the area, I wished I’d had a few extra days to play tourist.  As it turned out, I settled for lunch time wanderings in the local craft shops and galleries.  Of course I did my best to support the local economy.  And Hap’s Sweet Potato Fries are the best!

I’m still unpacking, but I managed to get through the stack of mail.  One media mail package intrigued me, I didn’t recognize the return address.  I did one of those, “Gee, wonder what I ordered?”

I couldn’t believe it when I pulled out of the envelope three Award Certificates.  My Frosted Florals Dress took first place at the Fiber Celebration 2010 exhibit sponsored by the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild, held in the Tointon Gallery for the Visual Arts, Greeley, CO . There were some photos of the exhibit posted on the internet, though I didn’t see my dress in any of the photos.  There was a monetary award with the first place certificate, and then to my incredible surprise, there was another certificate under it, for second place (with another monetary award) in the functional division for my Celebration Bag.  I’m really thrilled to get this award, since I had entered that bag in the Convergence Tampa Bay Functional exhibit and it wasn’t accepted.  And so it goes…

The final award of the three turned out to be the Halcyon Yarns Award, no mention of the criteria, but with it came a book on Collapse Weave by Anne Field, creating three-dimensional cloth.  I already have the book on my shelf, but I’m sure one of my guilds could use it in their library, or I’ll start a library collection for my daughter…  Maybe this is a sign from the universe that I have to actually open the book and experiment with the structures…

So now, I have mapped out a strategy for preparing for two very intensive workshops, one at the Newark Museum, a fiber boot camp, no experience necessary, just four days of all kinds of fiber techniques, great for fiber artist wannabes, and of course, the unwieldy Convergence, where I’ll be entertaining more than 230 students in six seminars and a day long workshop.  I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a little overwhelmed…  So the next couple of weeks, interspersed with some family events and getaways, will be all about printing, prep, packing, and preparing for both of these events.  Oh, and there is my Weavezine column to write…  But first, a trip to Jerry’s Art supply in search of a 24″ spiral bound notebook so I can use the spiral ring in my Rest in Peace faculty piece…  Stay tuned…

If you live in the Northern NJ/New York area, and are free Tuesday afternoons, starting March 23, I’ll be teaching an eight week class called Jumpstart Your Sewing Skills at the Newark Museum Arts Workshop.  Here are the particulars:

Jumpstart Your Sewing Skills
with Daryl Lancaster
Is the sewing machine in your closet covered with dust bunnies? Have you
spent a fortune on alterations lately? Is your closet packed with clothing that
is slightly outdated, that maybe needs altering, but is too good to give away?
Then now is the time to dust off that machine and get re-acquainted. This
course is structured to meet individual needs and help with everything from
simple alterations to full garment make-overs. Learn to sew clothes from
scratch or tailor for that special elegant touch. Machines provided (if you don’t have one); course
limited to eight. All levels
Eight Tuesdays, March 23 – May 11, 1 – 4 pm
Member: $189, Non-member: $210 Materials: $10

If you are looking for a summer vacation in August, come to Sievers Fiber School on the lovely Washington Island off the northern coast of Wisconsin, or come to Harrisville Designs in beautiful New Hampshire, both locations are wonderful for escaping the heat of the summer.

Sievers Fiber School: A Wearable Extravaganza (August 29-September 3) - Class Fee $ 380

Daryl Lancaster Wrap your body in clothing from your own hands.  This is a terrific class for those wanting to learn to fit and sew clothing from their own handwoven, hand-printed, dyed, quilted, felted, commercial or other special fabrics, as well as those more experienced students wanting more polished and professional results.  You will construct a basic unlined jacket with pre-washed fabric you bring to class, custom-fit to yourself, while learning all sorts of inspiring techniques to make your clothing reflect your creativity.  You can expect to gain confidence in your garment construction skills, no matter what level, and will learn to work with your chosen fabric.  Daryl’s goal is to have participants look at sewing as a creative process.  Skills will be taught using samples, handouts, storyboards, Power-Point presentations and demonstrations.  A supply list will be sent to you prior to class.  Materials fee of $35 includes twill tape, interfacing, pattern paper and extensive bound notebook.  (Repeating students who have already made the jacket may opt to make a pieced vest or bring their own pattern/s.)  Sewing machine in good working order and some minimal basic sewing skills required.  A limited number of sewing machines are available to rent for class use.  For all levels.

Harrisville Designs: A Wearable Extravaganza (August 16-20) - Class Fee $ 435

Daryl Lancaster Wrap your body in clothing from your own hands. This is a terrific class for those wanting to learn to fit and sew clothing from their handwoven, hand printed, dyed, quilted, felted or other special fabric, as well as for those more experienced students wanting polished and professional results. Students will construct a basic unlined jacket, from their own fabric, custom fit to themselves while learning all sorts of inspiring techniques to make their garments reflect their creativity. This class is designed to teach creativity and technique. Students who have already made a jacket with me in any other class may opt to bring their own patterns and agenda.

As I travel around, I have lots of requests for the jacket class, and this is a great opportunity to make my classic jacket, or even better, if you have already made my  basic jacket anywhere else in the country, you are welcome to come and bring your own patterns, fabric (it isn’t necessary to be a handweaver to take advantage of any of my classes listed here) and work on your own agenda!

Anyway, I spend lots of time writing proposals, entering exhibitions, and doing the waiting game once I package everything together and send it off.  Sometimes I even forget I entered or submitted, which is probably not a bad way to handle the stress of waiting.  Today in my inbox, I got a “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to teach…” letter from the American Sewing Guild, and they want me to teach 4 classes at their 2010 conference in Atlanta.  Can I tell you how excited I am?

On top of that, I just finished most of the final details for the April 2011 Ontario Canada provincial conference.  I will be teaching there, and giving one of the keynote addresses.  That’s been in the works since last summer.  I spent a good deal of time today, coincidentally, on the phone with a woman from Ontario, who found me searching the internet, and wanted to know more about my monographs on sewing, I had trouble realizing that she just found me on the internet, completely independently from the Ontario conference and Convergence in Albuquerque, where I’m also teaching next July, the booklet just became available for that.  Anyway, the woman was lovely to chat with, and towards the end of the conversation, she had me convinced that I need to look down the road a bit to one of my next goals, and bring it up further on the to do list.  That would be turning my monographs into DVD’s.  I bought the camera equipment last year, to be able to film the Step by Step process.  I’ve been looking at some of the sewing videos out there, and haven’t seen anything I really thought would work for how I would want my DVD’s to read.  The woman from Ontario encouraged me to pick up David Coffin’s DVD on shirtmaking.  She raved about it, and so of course, I immediately clicked on my trusty Amazon.com account and stuck it in my shopping cart, along with his book/DVD on making pants.  I’ll let you know what I think.  Always love an excuse to buy books on Amazon.

Speaking of books, my neighbor/friend is a media center specialist for a neighboring High School, and her school’s book club was sponsoring a fund raising event at a local Barnes and Noble.  Again, not to pass up a chance to just hang around in a book store all evening, I managed to dump a couple of hundred dollars, mostly on books for my daughter, she is seriously into Manga, but I did pick up a couple of movies I’ve had on my Amazon wish list for awhile.  I love the movie genre that takes a close look at a creative genius, uncovers their pain, their obsessions, their muses, and their passions.  I got a copy of Pollock with Ed Harris, and Goya’s Ghosts with Natalie Portman.  I also picked up Frida, with Salma Hayek.  I’ll let you know what I think of them once I’ve viewed them.

I cruised through the bargain book section of Barnes and Noble, and found a couple of little treasures, Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary?  First, I love Maureen Dowd, she is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times.  And secondly, how could you go wrong with the title? The book is a snarky look at feminism and the collision of the sexes.  The reviews are all over the place, so for $5.98 for the hard cover, I’m game.  I’ll let you know.

I also picked up Julia Cameron’s memoir, Floor Sample.  It had a dress form on the front cover. Julia Cameron wrote the well respected creativity book called “The Artist’s Way”, which has been on my shelf forever.  Again, the reviews are all over the place, but I thought it was worth picking up for $5.98 for the hardcover.

I mentioned that the latest issue of Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot came in yesterday, finally, I was probably the last to get my copy.  In it is the brochure for the HGA’s conference in Albuquerque next July, called Convergence.  Since I am teaching, I get to participate in early registration, but I couldn’t really do that until my magazine came in.  And come in it did!  All four copies.  I am all over the place in this magazine.  Which is why I got four copies!  I have a book review starting on page 9, a photograph of my piece The Spouse, on page 20, from the Small Expressions exhibit, and my article starting on page 31, the second installment of a three part series on the Designer’s Challenge from the Tampa Bay Convergence in 2008.  I ripped the Albuquerque conference brochure out of the middle of the magazine, and started to look through all the offerings.  It isn’t hard for me to fill out the registration, since I am teaching in every time slot, I don’t get to pick anything, but the tours before the conference look wonderful.  So wonderful that I booked two tickets for the Georgia O’Keefe Ghost Ranch tour and I’m dragging along my husband.

So, the bottom line here, is my next summer is pretty set, I’ll be on the road more than I’ll be home.  With two 5 day classes in August, at Sievers and at Harrisville in NH, along with the ASG conference in Atlanta and Convergence, and a 4 day class in fiber basics called Fiber Boot Camp at the Newark Museum in NJ, it doesn’t look like it will be much of a summer!  I’ve also got to write up proposals for two conferences for the summer of 2011.  Can you see my eyes rolling around in my head?  It is hard to follow the “One Day at a Time” way of thinking, when you are writing proposals for 2011, and 2009 isn’t even finished.  Oh the life of an artist…

All of the scheduled events I’ve mentioned above can be found with contact information on my website.

Oh, and I almost forgot, the invitations for Art Connections 6 at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University are out, I will have two pieces in the show.  The opening reception is January 17, 2010 from 2-5 pm if you are in the north Jersey area.  The show runs from January 17 – February 13, 2010

Stay tuned…

Starting with last Wednesday, my lovely talented daughter with the pink hair, gave a presentation to the Jockey Hollow Guild on braiding with the lucet.  I couldn’t get her to hold still long enough for any decent photos, and then I got too into helping people with their braids to take a group shot, but here is a slightly blurry photo of Brianna holding two different types of Lucets.  The Y and the Lyre.  Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun, and we sold a number of the Lucets we had purchased last summer from woodworker Wayne Grove.

Side bar: Bri turns 17 tomorrow.  She is focused on her driving test, which is also tomorrow.  We all hope she passes her test, no one wants to be around a 17 year old who just failed their driving test, so we are all crossing our fingers she’ll do just fine.  She is a good driver, and I’m looking forward to her being a little more independent.  Meanwhile, she is working on so many different things, it makes me look like a slug!

She showed her latest Inkle Loom band, a collar and leash for her new dog named Bjorn (Norwegian for Bear), at the guild show and tell.  She heard you could do an alphabet on the inkle loom, I directed her to an article in Handwoven Magazine,  May/June 1999, about weaving an alphabet.  So she looked up the article in my vast archives, and figured it out.  I love the way she just dives in.

She also has been watching one of our guild members crochet.  She sits next to Cathie at the meetings, Cathie is as creative as Brianna is, and the two of them always have their heads together.  Cathie crochets, and Bri has been dying to learn, and I haven’t had five minutes to teach her.

So Bri got tired of waiting for me, and last night, after taking a Vivarin to keep her awake to finish her psych paper, which she finished, but the Vivarin hadn’t worn off (Vivarin is straight caffeine), she tried to figure out how to crochet based on what she remembered from watching Cathie.  But she couldn’t figure out how to start.  This is where I’m so jealous of this generation of kids, who have never known a life where you couldn’t get an instant answer on the internet.  So she Googled how to crochet a scarf, and got a photographic tutorial, and when she came down in the morning, she had already crocheted about 4 inches of single crochet from yarn we picked up the other day at Michael’s Craft Shop (like I don’t have enough in the studio…)

I did however, teach her how to do a double crochet, which goes a lot faster and will make a scarf more pliable.  She immediately ripped out what she had done and started over in double crochet.  Bri loves fat variegated acrylic  knitting yarn for finger weaving, another of her skills, so that’s what’s in her stash.  It is fun to have separate mother and daughter stashes…

I promised a photo of one of the vests I picked up in Atlantic City last month, or was it last week?  Here is the Kenneth Cole vest, I loved the styling and the details.

On Friday morning, I headed into Newark to the museum, to teach a two day class on making a vest.  I was thrilled when I got there to find out I already knew everyone in the class, they all had taken classes with me before, or I knew them from my guild, and we had a lot of fun together.  One of the students had a family commitment the second day of the class, so I only have photos of three.

The vests need finishing, and  a lot of handwork, but they are really pretty and so individual.

The fabrics ranged from handwoven, to upholstery tapestry, to light weight Indian cotton.  And one of the students used the selvedge of the upholstery tapestry to make a fringe-y effect on the bands.

On Sunday, I returned to the museum, to teach a one day class in Inkle Loom Weaving.  I had four students, an easy class, and I already knew two of them.  They made some really pretty bands, and we had a lot of fun.

I’m missing a photo of the fourth band, a really pretty one, and I’ve emailed Dolly to see if she can get me a photo.  Dolly is a felter, I met her at the Felter’s Fling a couple of years ago.  It is great to see the cross over of fiber disciplines, felters can use Inkle Woven bands as handles for felted bags, and all sorts of trims.  I felted this bag after attending the Fling, and combined Ultrasuede with an inkle woven band for the handles.  I love the dancing woman pin I purchased from one of my favorite craftswomen, Cheryl Olney, who goes by the name of Louise’s Daughter.  I called the bag, “Celebration Bag”.

Thursday through Saturday night, we raced over to County College of Morris,  after I finished teaching each day, to attend the evening performances of their fall musical, “Once on this Island”.  I’ll post about that tomorrow, since I worked on some of the costumes for the show, as soon as I can get the photos from my husband, who took about 500 images during two of the performances.  And then there was the guild meeting today where we all learned how to twine a mat.  Stay tuned…