Houston We Have a Problem…

First, I want to update everyone on the Designers’ Fashion Challenge Presentation CD.  It is up on my site, available on the page with the monographs for sale.  The CD is $30. plus shipping, and has both PPT (PowerPoint) and PDF formats on it.  The presentation was designed for a guild program, this can work for handweaving guilds as well as sewing guilds.  I got the OK from the HGA to market it, and I’m really proud of the work I did, the whole experience, and I think the presentation is a great overview of the whole design process as well as the step by step journey Loretta and I took to pull this off.

Well we all survived the weekend.  My husband flew back from New Hampshire Friday evening, and he spent Saturday fertilizing the roses, and spread Holly Tone, and did some general yard work, in the rain, all while I was happily at my American Sewing Guild meeting making a spa coat out of two bath towels.  I sort of felt sorry for him.

Sunday, my mom, who lives in Maryland, just off the beltway, invited the whole family there for Easter dinner.  That’s great, except it is three hours away.  On a good day.  Which if you’ve ever driven I-95, or the Garden State Parkway, or the NJ Turnpike, you know there is never a good day.  Still, we made it down in good time, had a lovely dinner, and then turned around and drove home.  It took us about an hour just to get to the Delaware state line.  And another three hours to drive home to north Jersey.  We arrived home with just enough time for my husband to throw his clean clothes back into the suitcase, and catch a few hours sleep, he was off to the airport by 6am this morning.  I really felt sorry for him.  My daughter started her spring break today, so she reluctantly got out of bed because I wanted to drag her along to my daytime guild meeting.  I love the Frances Irwin Guild, there are some amazing weavers in this group, and today’s program was a pleasant surprise.  I hadn’t planned to stay long, because I had a 1:15 appointment with my daughter’s pediatrician for her physical, which she needed so she could compete in a track meet on Wednesday, even though this is spring break.  Last year’s annual physical expired on Friday.  Timing is everything…

Who knew I’d love the speaker so much I’d be really wishing I’d been able to stay longer and be able to participate in the workshop that followed.  Rabbit Goody has been in the textile world for many many years.  She has a studio called Thistle Hill Weavers, that specializes in custom woven historic reproduction carpet, fabrics, trims, bed hangings, etc.  All I can say is, WOW!  I’m not really interested in historic textiles the way I am interested in fashion and garments.  But Rabbit’s presentation was fabulous, it talked mostly about Venetian and Geometric Ingrain Carpets, which I didn’t think interested me, until she started the presentation.  She is an excellent speaker, full of stories, incredibly knowledgable, and it was really hard to leave the meeting early to get my daughter to her appointment.

Meanwhile, it is sheep shearing time.  No, I don’t have sheep, nor do I want any, nor do I think my town would even let me think about owning sheep, but many members of my guilds do.  One of the members, Carla Kostelnik just had her sheep shorn, and brought the fleeces to the meeting to give away.  Mostly Corriedales, I came home with three fleeces, because the ones I’d had for years, were mostly used up in demos and classes, and I have this day of demonstrations and lectures at an area elementary school next week.  So now I have to figure out the best place and best method to store them.  I have them in plastic ziplocs in the garage for now, the jumbo kind, but I’m thinking they shouldn’t be sealed in plastic.

So I got my daughter to her physical, and dealt with some emails, and got her to her trombone lesson, and got her to girl scouts, and I was going to try to get another mat finished from the placemat exchange, which was going along fine, until suddenly the beam stopped holding tension.  This seem to be the problem I was having earlier which I blogged about awhile ago, and now that I had a rosin bag in hand, courtesy of Sally, on Sandy Gunther’s suggestion, I tried to blow a little rosin dust in there, and realized, to my complete horror, that the problem wasn’t warp slippage, the screws that hold the beam to the end cap that supports the brake had sheared off, and I could turn the brake drum all I wanted but the beam wasn’t going anywhere.  The beam had separated from the brake drum.  So I unscrewed the main  bolt that holds the beam in place and dismantled the beam as best I could, desperate to not lose any of the 12 yards of warp I put on.  We’ve only done five of the 16 mats for the placemat exchange.  My daughter, who has been taking a woodworking class in HS, ran to the garage and scrounged until she found some weapons of mass destruction, and expertly wedged some glue into the actual beam that was splitting and clamped it overnight.  I’ll go to the hardware store tomorrow, and see if I can replace the screws that sheered off.  I have to say that this is an unfortunate thing, I rarely have trouble with any of my equipment, the sewing machine gods and the loom gods usually are my friends.  This loom usually has a sectional beam on it, but I replaced the sectional beam a couple of months ago, with the standard beam I’ve had laying around for 20 years, thinking it would beam finer threads more consitently, and it did, but this standard warp beam has some design issues I never knew about since I’ve never actually used it before.  It couldn’t take the stress of warp tensioning.  So I won’t panic.  I’ll make a trip to the hardware store, and see if my daughter and I can’t get this beam back together and working.

So, if you are keeping placemat exchange score, Brianna 3, mom 2 1/4.  And holding…