March 2009 – Page 2 – Daryl's Blog

New Website!

Well I’m not completely finished, but I got what I’ve done uploaded and ready for testing. I’m completely brain fried, I think I’m getting too old for these kinds of intense hours!

Anyway, if anyone wants to try out what I’ve done on the new site, feel free to go to www.daryllancaster.com

Please note that only half the pages are completed, if you click on a link and the page isn’t done, it will just say, “Under Construction”. FYI, the About Me section should be done, those pages were easy since I just had to basically cut and paste from my resume. The schedule and worshops aren’t done. And the gallery is only halfway there. It took me the whole day to rebuild the Garment Gallery 2000-2005. I haven’t decided if I will ultimately put my earlier work, I go all the way back to about 1975, but I think it is too much information and not relevant to my current body of work. 2006-2010 isn’t up yet. But I did do the HGA Challenge page, because I finally figured out what button to click to get the text to wrap around the picture instead of on top or below. A big DUH! (To further the duh moment, the technique for doing this very simple thing (the align left key), is the same one I use to use back in the Microsoft FrontPage days. It never occured to me that this maniacal program would use something so simple…

Feel free to comment about any part of the site, I’m still building it, so I’ll take any feedback under consideration. The pages with a large amount of text or images have a built in scroll bar, see if it is intuitive to figure it out. Should the gallery images go from oldest to newest on the bottom, or the other way around? Same with things like my published work. I know you can’t click on the home page images, I hadn’t intended that. It is just a JPG in photoshop. Does it make you nuts that you can’t click on them? I was hoping visitors would just go right into the site.

The biggest question is, does the Spry menu bar work in Safari browser, I heard there were some compatibility issues. If it doesn’t, what happens? My husband has Safari browser on one of his computers, so after his ski trip (yes, another one, they left tonight for Vermont), I’ll get him to check. If anything wacky comes up on your screen, let me know what browser you are using.

Anyway, I’m tired. No progress on the jacket, I wanted to get this site up and working before I go any further on it. There is one other issue I’d love some feedback on, and that is the contact page. There are two schools of thought here. Publishing my personal information, my address and such is thought by many to be a no-no, after all, I will eventually have my schedule posted and that’s an invite to unwanted visitors while I’m away. On the other hand, there is the school of thought that often a guild or other important person needs to send me something by snail mail, or they need to plan airfares by the closest airport, so by not putting it, which I haven’t ever on the old site, I know very annoyed program chair people will spend an hour cruising through my site and finally email me in disgust, because they can’t find my address. Any opinions here?

Pansies and Piping

Well it isn’t much. But I managed to brighten the dreary days of March, eager with anticipation of spring, measuring the bulbs as they poke their heads out of the damp earth. In anticipation of tomorrow’s rain, I did manage to get the deck boxes and a couple pots planted with pansies, a wonderful gift from my friend and neighbor, in celebration of my husband’s birthday over the weekend. Thank you Deb! Everything is so bare and cold, but pansies add a little bright color in mid March, the first color of the spring.

Of course you realize that a week ago, the deck looked like this:

I’m seriously crossing my fingers we are done with the spring snowstorms.

I worked hard on the website today, managing to figure out one of the things that was eluding me. I knew it was just a stupid click, somewhere, yet I sweated how to do this simple thing for days, and then all of a sudden, Wham! The proverbial 2 x 4 hit me over the head and you could hear the “DUH!” all the way to Trenton! Now that I figured out that little detail, I can start on the gallery pages, and get them moving along. I want to reprocess all the images I used on the original site, make them more uniform, and a little bigger in their thumbnail size. So lots of photo processing, finding the originals in the archives, oh goody, a treasure hunt of sorts…

I worked for a bit tonight on the jacket, getting the left side of the jacket sewn in. It fits like a glove. I’m so glad I added the additional two inches in length. I’m really loving the lime green piping, and when I looked at it on me in the mirror, I loved the way the belt brings in the jacket in the back. But I decided, after mulling over some of the comments from the original posting, that a hint of the color someplace else would be a great idea. I have some DMC floss in the exact color as the felt piping, so I took off the back belt, and couched the floss on, get this, I realized I didn’t have the right color thread, couching only works if you have the same color thread, so I rooted around in a drawer, and voilá, there in the back was a very old wooden spool of poly thread, in the exact color. Go figure…

So I couched (which means a very narrow zig-zag stitch over a cord or yarn, in this case I used floss, aided by a little foot that has a groove to feed the cord or yarn). I plan to use this couched floss to topstitch the collar and the top of the sleeve cuffs.

I love the wavy movement of the felt piping, it looks like the aurora borealis in the northern sky, and that’s the effect I was looking for, the jacket is called after all, Arctic Sky.

On A Roll!

I’ve talked to a couple of friends that tell me they have felt the fog lift and that things are beginning to fall into place. That’s how I’m feeling right now, like I’m not trying to swim through Jello. Had some great news today from one of my girlfriends who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She is through her surgery, and the path reports say they got all of it, and that it was contained and in stage O. She is the poster child for early detection screenings.

Speaking of, I visited my GYN today for my annual check-up. That ends my round of doctors for the year, starting with last fall, and my colonoscopy, stress test, physical, visit to the oncologist for my annual, my mammogram last week, and a visit to the dermatologist. Whew! And I’m happy to report that all is well. Hopefully there will be a lot more happy days in the studio to come…

Anyway, I got some good feedback from my graphics designer/weaving buddy Sally, on the logo I did, plus I sent her a JPG of the whole home page. She gave me some terrific feedback, and I tweaked the logo a bit, and changed the colors for the whole page, and I’m very happy with this latest installment. I’ve built about half a dozen of the pages so far, I won’t upload them until I’m all ready, but in the meantime, here is the current version of the new home page.

I’m working like mad on the jacket. This is always my favorite part. I love making the decisions, the designing, making it all work, but my really really favorite part is to sit and sew. I love my machine, (a Janome 6600) and my new industrial iron, a Sapporo Gravity Fed, (I had to sadly retire my old Sussman Pressmaster after about 20 years).

So I have most of the body together, the welt pockets in, the bound buttonholes in, and yesterday I showed something new I tried, cording the buttonhole lips, it worked great, they are nice and plump in the heavy wool, that steams beautifully by the way. I think the piping will be a nice accent when the whole jacket is finished. I had the exact amount, not an 1/8″ more, to go from one hem to the other on both sides. I still have to put the left front onto the jacket, but I’ll save that for tomorrow. And of course the black collar is the interfacing.

Off to bed. Tomorrow is suppose to reach 50 degrees and be partly sunny. And the winds should finally die down. Since there is rain predicted for Thursday, I’ll see if I can get the pansies planted in the deck planters.

Progress, Finally!

I love my family, obviously, but I also love to be alone. I love when everyone goes off to work/school, and I’m left alone to putter around the house in the morning, tidying up, doing the next load of laundry, cleaning some part of the house, and eating alone, reading the morning paper. I did all that, and then made it into the studio by about 9am, and continued on with the redesign of my website. I decided to go back to the beginning of the manual, because, though I understood on a surface level, each step I was instructed to do, I didn’t get it on a really deep level, so I could ultimately think for myself. My website will function very differently from my sister’s, and I’m really happy with what I have so far, but I’m sort of stuck because I can’t figure out how to go to the next step. So, reading the manual from the beginning has reinforced what I already know, and cemented more of the newer things I didn’t know, and I am plodding along absorbing as much as I can in this new field of study.

Meanwhile, here is the logo I came up with over the weekend, I think it is really simple, and colorful and looks great across the top of the website.

I love the colors of the blog, and my husband figured out the hexidecimal code to duplicate the colors for my site, so there will be some continuity. After lunch, I gave my brain a rest, I had worked through about 85 pages of the Dreamweaver manual, and I, are you ready, I actually went back to the Arctic Sky jacket, and finished cutting out the interfacing, the Ultrasuede® binding for the welt pockets and bound buttonholes, and I finished cutting out the lining.

So now I’m at the fun part. I’m carefully fusing a weft insertion poly/rayon interfacing onto the back of each piece, and then serging around the edges. I put in the welt pockets, I’ve never put ones in like this before, great design, they go from edge to edge of the side fronts, so you are actually cutting the side front into two pieces.

I cut the felted band apart, and inserted the natural edge of the felt into the front seam. I have it pinned, I’m going to look at it for awhile, the black of the collar is just the interfacing, the upper collar will be the regular fabric. I’ll need to actually sew the shoulders first, otherwise I won’t have enough length of the felt, and I don’t want a lumpy seam across the shoulder.

So this would be a good time to insert the bound buttonholes. I’ve always wanted to try a corded bound buttonhole, and since the Ultrasuede® is the lighter weight variety, I pushed a crochet hook through each of the tunnels of the buttonhole lips, and pulled a double thickness of Lopi® yarn through each side.

So now I’m ready to stitch the buttonhole lips down, cut the fabric, and turn the lips to the other side.

Stay tuned…

Can Shakes, Birthdays and other milestones…

I’m here, I know I didn’t post over the weekend, but it sort of got away from me. It was a busy weekend, lots of little appointments on the calendar, but was able to get into the garden on Saturday and start the process of cleaning up the place. I started with one length of the vegetable garden, and got all that brush and debris cleared away, pulled the new weeds, and generally had fun getting really dirty. The sun was warm, and it felt good to be outside.

I picked up my husband and son, late Saturday night from the airport. They had an excellent adventure in Utah, and other than some wicked sunburns on their faces (resulting in raccoon eyes from the protective ski goggles) they were in decent shape. My son of course regaled me with stories of his dangerous escapades, involving things like jumps and cliffs, way more information than I want to know… And yes, he wears a helmet when he skis, they both do. Not that it’s going to help when you fall off a cliff…

My husband’s birthday was Sunday. My daughter had wrapped all his gifts from my shopping expedition on Friday, she used recycled newspaper, it is cheap and goes right back in the recycle bin when the gifts are unwrapped, so my husband got to open his gifts, and then I headed down to Morristown to my Baroque recorder consort rehearsal. I’ve always wanted to play in an ensemble of sorts, never got to as a child. I attended a parochial school and we didn’t have things like middle school concert band. I took piano lessons, but that isn’t the same as being part of a group. No one person stands out, it is about being a team. There is a lot to learn from that experience, and I’m glad I’m finally getting my chance. The music is beautiful, we are playing French love songs from the 1600’s.

Sunday afternoon, I sat for two hours on a bench outside the A&P in the town where my daughter attends HS. I sat with an inkle loom in my lap, weaving away on the Key Fobs for the Frances Irwin Guild donation for the MAFA conference tote bags. My daughter stood with a can, asking each customer as they exited the supermarket, if they would please support the music programs at Boonton High School.

Now, I know there are a lot of people out there who completely disapprove of this practice. They say it teaches kids to beg for money. I actually don’t completely agree. I have spent many, many hours sitting outside of supermarkets and grocery stores, even Walmart, with my kids, (an adult always has to be present), during their years in scouts and school clubs and programs. I’ve watched my kids develop into confident, well spoken almost adults, who have learned to look someone in the eye, and ask for what they want, and be gracious when a donation is made, and even more gracious when the answer is ‘no’. My daughter has a speech issue, and it is hard for her to stand there for two hours repeating a phrase with lots of “s” sounds, and keep her diction clean and understandable. Yet she did it. She didn’t complain, she did her job, and she represented the school well. All these seemingly minor events in a kid’s life all add up to make them who they become as adults. There are lots of people out there, exciting from a supermarket somewhere in America who have fond memories of their years in band or chorus and many of them will strike up a conversation with my daughter, asking about what instrument she plays and how the money is being spent. She can hold a conversation well with a perfect stranger, (which is why there is a parent always lurking in the background) and I’m proud of her confidence and poise.

Anyway, back to me, sitting in the background on the bench weaving on an inkle loom. Some of the supermarket workers, who didn’t speak English, and were obviously from a country where weaving is an important part of the culture, seemed thrilled to stand and watch me weave, it was probably the first time they saw a woman sitting outside a marketplace weaving, since they left their countries. There was an unspoken bond there that was pretty recognizable.

So I finished my Key Fobs, and this morning, I cut them off the loom stitched across the top and bottom of each band, and sewed them to the key rings.

The Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association is working hard updating their website to be useful to its members, and they now have a resource page, where you can find projects and techniques. The directions for these key fobs will eventually make their way there, but you can find the directions for the conference project from two years ago, a tissue pack holder for your purse from handwoven fabric in the projects page.

The rest of the weekend was spent trying to catch up on some things, and my daughter started weaving her first of eight placemats, she did a really good job for a new weaver, her edges were straight with no draw-in, but she did have a few difficulties with broken threads, the 10/2 warp is a bit finer than her first couple projects and she is a bit aggressive when throwing the shuttle. She isn’t having any problem following an overshot sequence, as I suspected, and the great news is the friction brake seems to be holding and there is no slippage of the beam as she beats.

And my next big project to tackle, besides finally getting the lining and interfacing cut out for the Arctic Sky jacket, is redesigning my website. I spent a lot of hours this weekend, working on a logo, and what I wanted the home page to look like. I also decided I wanted a Spry drop-down menu under the header, and never having done one before, I spent a lot of nail biting, hair ripping moments trying to get it work. And of course my lovely husband comes in so I could proudly display my accomplishment, getting this puppy to work properly, and formatted properly, and he takes one look at it and says, “You forgot a tab for the blog…” So more hours were spent trying to figure out how to edit my now gorgeous drop-down menu to add a tab… Dreamweaver for web design, is a powerful program and the learning curve is huge, and it isn’t very intuitive, but then again, I’m not hugely computer literate either… Stay tuned.