June 2009 – Page 4 – Daryl's Blog

Deconstructed Screen Printing

I will admit, I am exhausted. It is hard to believe, this time last night I was somewhere over Kansas…

I promised you photos of my studio, after my bout of jealousy with Joy’s studio floorspace. There really isn’t any in mine. But it is what I have to work with, and it serves me well, and it stores a lot, and if I keep it picked up, I can actually function in it. And I’ve often said, though this is really just a justification for my 350 square ft oversized bedroom, “It isn’t the quality or quantity of space, it is what you make in it that counts”.

My studio is actually an old 10 x 10 bedroom where we knocked the outside wall out and extended over the downstairs den. There are beautiful floor to ceiling windows at the far end, but I keep the shades drawn for fear of fading of all my yarns and textiles. The loom in the foreground is my big 8 shaft 45″ Tools of the Trade Loom.

I have a great cutting table, that my husband built for me, and there are old kitchen cabinets

above the sewing machines and the computer desk. I do have a lot of storage for such a little room. The hardest part is keeping the cutting table cleared. 🙂

You’ll notice I have stuff stuck all over the face of the cabinet doors. I put up cards, notations, quotes, sketches, things that inspire me, small cartoons, and photos of classes or people I love. It is a happy wall to look up at as I work. Robyn had the same sort of thing in the form of a bulletin board next to her desk, and on it was a great quote, one I have to add to my own wall…

Powerful Woman’s Motto:

Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders and says,… “Uh, Oh, she’s awake!”

Well, damn, I like that. It left me with a big smile, and isn’t that what inspirational things are suppose to do?

After getting to bed last night after 1pm EST, I woke up at 7am, to throw on some grunge clothes and pack up the car, and drive an hour west, almost to the New Jersey border. My guild, Frances Irwin Handweavers, was having it’s end of the year one day workshop, free to members, and I was thrilled I made it back in time to finally get to take one of Kerr Grabowski’s seminars. First, I’ve known Kerr for 20 years, I met her when she first came to Peters Valley as their fiber resident. She is amazingly talented, creative, and a wonderful teacher, and she lives in the Surface Design World. It is odd that I’ve never been able to take a workshop with her, as a matter of fact, back in 2001, we both taught together at Montclair State University in their fiber department when the department found themselves without instructors for a couple of semesters. I handled the structural fiber classes and she taught surface design.

So it was with great anticipation and excitement that I finally got to spend the day with Kerr, learning deconstructed screen printing. She has a wonderful DVD of her class, available for about $40. and you can preview it on her website. Of course I bought the DVD…

(That’s Kerr in the red apron)

She showed us some very playful and spontaneous things, and I can’t wait to build a screen surface for my cutting table, and get a couple screens. I have everything else. A cabinet full of dyes, all the materials for dyeing, even the fabric, which I picked up on Friday in Seattle. My head is spinning with possibilities.

Here are a couple of my attempts at the medium, the silk chiffon scarves are still curing in a black garbage bag in my car in the heat.

I’ll take a photo when they are rinsed and dry.

One final note as my excellent adventure winds down, I picked up a birthday card in one of the galleries in Bremerton, WA during our Art Walk Friday night. It was actually a belated birthday card to me. It featured the artwork of a local artist Amy Burnett, who was actually there to sign the cards. In addition to the artwork, the year 1955 was written. She has a series of cards for all different years, as a celebration to women. Inside is a list of all the special things that happened that involved women in the year you were born.

I didn’t realize that Rosa Parks, refused to move to the rear of the bus in December of 1955, the same year I was born, and I didn’t realize that Rosa Parks was a seamstress. I didn’t know that Doris Humphrey founded Julliard’s Dance Theatre in 1955. I didn’t know Louise Boyd at 67 years old was the first woman to fly over and around the North Pole in 1955. I knew Annette Funicello was one of the original 24 Mouseketeers in the Mickey Mouse Club, but I didn’t know it debuted in 1955. It was one of my favorite shows. And most importantly, I didn’t know that Lenore Tawney, weaver and sculptor, exhibited nonfunctional weaving in shapes departing from the traditional two dimensional fabric form, thus introducing a new range of artistic expression, fiber art, in 1955. I feel like I am surrounded by women who made a difference.

“Uh, oh, she’s awake!…”

I don’t usually do commercial announcements, but I know two of the brave souls who have worked tirelessly on the project below. I did a brief bit of alpha testing, and the site has real potential. Of course I’m still hoping you’ll stop by my blog after getting your fill of online technology! 🙂

Today at noon, Weavolution the much anticipated new online gathering place for handweavers launched, and I have a brief press release here:

JOIN THE WEAVOLUTION

Weavolution.com, an online social network designed to meet the unique needs of handweavers, launches its beta test on June 8, 2009. Designed to bring handweavers together from around the world, Weavolution.com is a one-stop resource for every type of handweaver.

From hobby to production, from peg to dobby, Weavolution provides a place for weavers to meet, discuss and participate in moderated user groups and forums.

Members may post projects, looms, yarns, books, and accessories to share with others and solicit feedback from other members.

But you don’t have to be a member or even a weaver to explore the site and learn about weaving free of charge.

Weavolution aims to become an inclusive, global community that encourages weavers by enabling them to discover and follow trends in weaving; find local, national and international resources; and find businesses catering to their needs. Weavolution members can search the site’s databases to view items, group postings and research information catalogued by others.

Weavolution’s goal is to provide a website for handweavers that is useful, fun and helpful, and to be a resource for shops, products and ideas from around the corner and around the world.

The project began in 2008 when three weavers from across the United States, Claudia Segal, Tien Chiu, and Alison Giachetti, met online and formed Weavolution. Working together with a host of dedicated volunteers, the team forged Weavolution.com into a website with the potential to become a community.

Come, take a look. Weavolution.com is available for anyone to explore. You don’t have to sign up to see our site. But if you do, we hope you’ll decide to JOIN THE WEAVOLUTION

Robyn and Daryl’s Excellent Adventure Day 2

Grab another cup of coffee and have a seat! Day two was a whirlwind. We started early, leaving around 8am to head south, to Portland, Oregon, which was about a three hour trip, sort of like me driving from where I live outside NYC, down to Baltimore for the day. (Which would never occur to me to do, silly me…)

On the way we picked up another weaving buddy, Joy Winther. OK, I’m not the jealous sort, but not only is Joy’s property situated in a spectacular setting, with a gorgeous view of the Columbia River, but her studio gave me a serious case of studio envy. Usually when you enter a weaver’s studio, the loom is the focal point. It is really big, and hard to make inconspicuous. It took me a minute to even find the looms the studio was so large and spacious. Oh for that kind of floor space. I’m guessing I’ll have to take some pictures of my studio at some point, so you can all see what I’m talking about!

Anyway, in Joy’s studio, the looms were tucked between the columns and you could actually walk around them.

So we set out from Joy’s home in southern Washington State, and hit our first stop in Portland, Oregon, Ruthie’s Weaving Studio.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Ruthie’s Weaving studio is a warehouse looking space, filled with so many looms my head spun. Apparently anyone can rent a loom, by paying a monthly tuition, there is always an instructor on the premises when the studio is open, and you can come in, learn to weave, and be part of a community of other weavers, sort of like stopping by the gym after work, except much more creative. And you don’t have to worry about who is looking at your thighs! Most of the looms in the studio are Bergman looms, a brand I’d never heard of, manufactured in the Pacific northwest, so they rarely made it to the east coast, but Melody gave us a demo of how it folded up to slip through a door, that would be the loom in the front.

A quick lunch at the Original Taco House, a Portland favorite, we headed off to fabric heaven. First stop, the Mill End Store, which they claim has more fabric than anyone else in America.

OK, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. And oddly enough, there was so much to look at I was overwhelmed and I didn’t come home with anything. The remnants were very picked over, and nothing jumped into my hands and said take me home. But just being around that much fabric made me long to get into my studio and make stuff.

Across the highway, we hit the Pendleton Woolen Mill Store. I’ve been to the Pendleton Woolen Mill, in Pendleton, OR, one of my top ten fiber adventure experiences in my life, but there are outlet stores scattered around the country, and this one was in a brand new space. When I visited the actual mill, back in 2003, I remember finding a bin of zippers, for a quarter each, and stocked up. Funny, but last month, I was just thinking that my zipper stash was getting low, and I wish I could revisit the mill again. Well wouldn’t you know, back in the corner of the store were bins of 9 inch invisible zippers and I just scooped up a handful. And they had little bundles of wool in pretty colors for needle felting, well they just jumped in my basket as well.

Next stop was The Fabric Depot. Now I must say that it is incredibly unfair that you have two behemoth fabric warehouse type places within 10 miles of each other in the same city. The Fabric Depot claims to be the largest fabric store in the nation. OK, so I live near NYC, the fashion capital of the world, but that’s different. You’d think they could spread the wealth a little?

I loved the Fabric Depot, and spent a little more time there. The remant section had some beautiful fabrics, but there was no indication of fiber content, you had no idea what you were looking at. I asked about that, and they told me they never put the fiber content on the remnants. That makes it tough if you are looking for things to dye. They’d probably have me escorted out of the store if I whipped out my matches and tweezers for burn testing.

While we were there, the infamous Outdoor sale was happening, they haul all kinds of notions and fabrics and trims out to a tent and that alone would take up a city block. I found a beautiful decorator fabric for $5./yard that I think would work for reupholstering a rocker I have that is fraying and in sore need of tender loving care. I’ll take a photo of the fabric with the rocker when I get home. And there was a sale on thread and notions, so I picked up some things I was low on in the studio, like black thread.

Next stop, Powells Books. OMG.

This was a veritable city of books. They hand you a map when you walk in. Again, this was overload. So we headed right to the Orange room, and the weaving/fiber/fashion book section. I didn’t find used copies of anything on my list, but did order Marion Powell’s Thousand Patterns in 4,6, 8 Harness Shadow Weaves book, to have shipped to NJ. I knew they had it in one of their stores for $12.95. The book was apparently in one of the other stores a mere 20 minutes away. Was this completely unfair or what? Not only does Portland have more fabric than anywhere else in America, but more books as well.

Our last stop was for Margaritas and some Mexican food (I know, we did Mexican food for lunch too), at the Santa Fe Taqueria.

I had the ceviche, and it was excellent, along with a fish taco. And of course, a pitcher of Margaritas!

We headed home to Seattle, watching the sun set on our excellent adventure. The three hour trip was long, but Robyn and I never ran out of things to chatter about. This was an important trip for me, Robyn helped me sort out and rethink new directions for my work and my teaching, and my head is sort of spinning. With a summer of conference teaching starting in a couple of weeks, I ‘ll have to wait until fall to begin implementing any of my ideas, but that’s OK. So much to weave, sew, felt, design and blog about, so little time…

Tonight I head back to NJ, and tomorrow, a guild workshop with Kerr Grabowski, stay tuned…

Daryl and Robyn’s Excellent Adventure – Day 1

Wow, make sure you get a large coffee and pull up a chair, you are all in for a real fiber treat. I did some real damage to my Master Card, but this was sooooo much fun. I’ll try to keep the words to a minimum, and let the pictures speak for themselves (Hah! like that’s going to happen…)

Day 1, Seattle: I got up early (I’m still on East Coast time) and made my morning tea. I heard gurgling water and went to investigate. This is Harlow. Robyn has names for all her fish.

Robyn lives in a small town on the other side of Puget Sound, and it is necessary to take a ferry into Seattle. This is a lovely skyline, but I will say, I am pretty unimpressed, I live right outside Manhattan, now that’s a skyline. But it was beautiful approaching it on the water, and I enjoyed the lovely long ferry ride where Robyn and I discussed some possible joint creative ventures.

Our first stop on our excellent adventure was Weaving Works, a very popular knitting/weaving store, I’ve taught there in the past, and Carol Jorstead is an absolute delight.

When you first walk in the door, you just stop and inhale deeply. A feast of color and texture, and you just want to dive right in. Since we plan a number of fiber stops on our excellent adventure, I noted the books I wanted to have in my collection, for my wish list, and checked out the sale bins. I picked up four balls of “tapey things”, ribbon yarn, and then spied the buttons. I’m running low in my stash, so this was a perfect opportunity to refill.

No, I didn’t buy all the yarn under the glass counter top, just the buttons and the balls of “tapey things”.

We met up with another favorite weaving buddy, Dorothy Day, who is actually an amazing dyer, with a PhD in Chemistry. It is amazing how educated weavers/dyers can be. We had lunch in one of Robyn’s favorite haunts, a middle eastern restaurant called Cedars. We had an appetizer of the house “nan”, a middle eastern flatbread.

And of course we all had the chai tea latte.

Next stop on the excellent adventure was Nancy’s Sewing Basket, also in Seattle.

For the second time today, I walked in and inhaled and smelled the fiber!

I will admit, I get pretty overwhelmed in places like this, where to even begin. Each fabric was prettier than the next, so what do I do? I jump right into the remnants. I love remnants, the decision on how much to buy is basically made for you. They are a bargain, and it narrows down the choices significantly.

So here I am, sitting in the middle of piles of linens, wools, silks, rayons, cottons. I picked out some pieces that I thought had great potential for dyeing and for discharging.

Then Robyn took me to the back of the store and the “Ribbon Room”!

Here is Susan of “The Ribbon Room”, a back room in Nancy’s Sewing Basket that is just filled to brimming with all sorts of vintage ribbons and flowers and trims.

Feast your eyes!

Some Edwardian trims.

On the right, vintage trims made from fine metals.

On the left, vintage trim made from Aluminum.

Gorgeous trays of hand dyed silk ribbons.

And all around the room were these beautiful framed vignettes of Cockades, folded ribbon accents. There were classes available as well.

Driving back to the ferry, I was struck by how much random artwork appeared in the oddest places in Seattle. On the hillside along one of the highways, was this grade school eraser!

We had a lovely trip home on the ferry, and stopped in Bremerton for the First Friday Art Walk, I’ve been to things like this in other towns around the country, all the gallerys and museums in an area are open late one night a month, with openings, and “potent” refreshments, and Robyn and I hit a couple of interesting galleries, and then found the vintage clothing store, ish.

We found a Marsha Brady dress.

And this lovely combo from the 70’s. I remember wearing something like this in High School.

And then we found the rack of shades.

We ended our excellent adventure with delicious sandwiches in the lounge of the Boat Shed, nestled on Puget Sound under the bridge, margaritas, friendship, and lots of fiber purchases, it doesn’t get any better than that!

Tomorrow, we head to Portland, Oregon!

Placemat Exchanged!

Grab your coffee, this is going to be a long one!

Wow, what a meeting! Bri and I attended last night’s last Jockey Hollow Weavers’ meeting for the year. We start up again in the fall. We had a lot to accomplish. There was the stash sale, unload what you no longer want. There are a number of retiring members of the group, who are de-acquisitioning and moving to smaller digs in a far away location. Since we have a number of new weavers with paltry stashes, this is always a good thing. Equipment, yarns, books, and back issues of weaving magazines, all find good homes.

Next there was the Pot-Luck. Weavers are always terrific cooks. The food was excellent. The only group who edges out the handweavers for first place in the pot-luck catagory are the lace makers. I’m not sure why this is, but suffice it to say, no one went home hungry!

Of course there was the entertaining show and tell, we had the supplemental warp workshop scarves to show off, and we have a couple of outside of the box creative fiber members who never cease to impress me with their energy and creativity. One member crocheted a spiral rug from plastic grocery bags, and started making curtains by randomly stitching colorful halves of zippers in a haphazard way on a bedsheet. I love show and tell!

But the highlight was of course, the placemat exchange. It is always a bit disappointing when not everyone finishes on time, and we had one in the group of 16 who dropped out at the last minute, and one of the guild members graciously stepped in to try and weave her set over the summer. But no matter, I’m amazed at how many of the participants were new weavers, including my daughter, who wove a set of overshot placemats, this being only their 3rd or 4th project ever. I’m so excited to see the passion these new weavers throw out into the group, infusing it with youth and creativity, and enthusiasm. It is sad to see older members retiring and moving away, but happily there is some new fresh talent to keep the guild going.

So here are the results. Bri was able to get seven of her eight purple placemats, and they are beautiful. They still need to be washed and hemmed, but she is so excited. The eighth one is as I understand, on the loom as I write.

I only came home with four, but two more will be exchanged at Monday’s meeting of the Frances Irwin Guild, members of that guild graciously jumped in to give us two groups of 16. One member dropped out at the last minute, and her mats, picked up by another member, and the mats from the other member who wasn’t finished in time, will be delivered in September. What a beautiful collection of overshot patterns!

We had a special guest at the meeting, Alison Giachetti, who is a partner in the new Weavolution, a web gathering place for handweavers, which is scheduled to launch next week. I did some brief alpha testing, and posted some project notes on the site for my Frosted Florals dress, and talked to Alison briefly about moderating a handwoven clothing forum on Weavolution, but that won’t happen immediately. There is a lot of buzz about this, so stay tuned…

Coffee Break! Lots to cover today before I leave for Seattle….

I spent the day yesterday tying up loose ends. I got two pieces of work accepted to the Fiber Celebrated 2009 exhibition, at the Center of Southwest Studies Gallery at Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO. The show opens July 27th and runs through September 20, 2009. So yesterday was the paperwork day, artist statements, technical information, all that had to be back fairly quickly. I struggled with the artist statement. The limit was 70 words. Can you imagine? I can’t say anything in 70 words. 🙂 My average blog posts are over 1000 words. I’m already at 647 words in this blog alone! And I had a lot to say about these two seemingly unrelated pieces of artwork. So, I’ll just use my blog to tell the story that I couldn’t say in 70 words.

The first piece is one of my small artworks, woven in an inlay style, with strips of silk cut from a digital print on treated fabric. I’ve blogged about this technique in past posts, just search ‘Big Sister’, and you should find the technical stuff. I want to talk more about the inspiration.

Many of us have had the privilege of staying with someone, holding their hand, keeping the vigil as we wait for their soul to depart from their old frail, used up body. In 2006, I had the privilege of the long vigil watching and waiting for my mother in law to pass. I adored this woman. She was one of my fiber mentors, and I wrote a piece about our relationship, which you can read, titled Circle of Life. I was so moved by the grace and beauty of a dying woman, the angle of her head on the pillow, eyes half open, yet not seeing. I sketched her profile on a small notebook I keep in my purse. Later I scanned in the sketch, and printed it on silk, cutting the silk apart and reweaving it back together, a metaphor for her life, connecting each row of her profile, until she was whole again. I titled the piece, Watching Death Come.

The second piece, which seems unrelated, (I entered both the nonfunctional 2D and the Wearables catagories), is actually an extension of Watching Death Come. After the death of a loved one, there is the awesome and overwhelming job of disposing of a lifetime of collected treasures, household goods, the cleaning up of one’s life. My mother in law lived to be 99 years old. It was a long life and she had a stash!

I did my best to merge her fiber stuff with mine, but she was primarily a spinner, and lacemaker, so I have more lace pillows than I know what to do with, as I rarely make lace anymore (can you imagine no time?). And everytime I opened another box with a Romney Fleece inside (her sheep breed of choice as a spinner), I groaned. I do spin, and have two wheels, which I also mentioned in a previous blog, but I’ll never get through all these fleeces and don’t really have the desire to…

Enter felting. Boy is this a great way to use up wool. OK, I know Romney isn’t the sheep breed of choice among the felters, but it was free, and it was my mother in law’s. So, I began to carefully card the washed fleeces into individual gallon ziploc bags, layering the thin carded strips of wool. I wish I had taken photos of this process, it was such a scream felting on my kitchen counter, but alas, I hadn’t started blogging yet, so that didn’t occur to me. I added hot soapy water to each bag and started the felting process, first rubbing, and then rolling, occasionally heating up the wool in the microwave to aide the felting process. Since everything was sealed in a ziploc bag, there was no mess. 🙂

I eventually ended up with something like 18 8″ x 10″ rectangles, in white, of lovely felted Romney. I took my glass 9 X 12 baker, and put each rectangle in one at a time, sprinkling some powdered Cushing Dyes, random colors, I just grabbed a packet and started sprinkling (yes I was using a filtration mask, outside when I did this), added some salt to the felt which was still wet and soapy from the ziploc bag, and covered it in plastic wrap, venting a corner.

I microwaved it in 2 minute increments, and honestly, I can’t remember how long I did this, I just sort of did it by feel, maybe a total of three 2 minute sets, turning the baker each time, until I thought it sufficiently cooked. Once I had this riot of colorful felt rectangles dyed, I cut them apart into random shapes and called Bri into the room, who is a master puzzle maker, future geneticist, who sees patterns where no one else does. I had all the garment sections cut from a fusible knit interfacing, laying out across the table, and let Bri start assembling the pieces in whatever way she liked.

After trimming and fusing the pieces to the backing, I carefully stitched the butted together edges of the cut felt, with a decorative feather stitch on my machine, and where the natural edge of the felt occurred, I used my Janome Expressions needle felting machine to needle felt the overlap.

Then I assembled the jacket, adding a creative buttonhole, and some buttons. I call the piece Stepping Stones. Each component in our life, each experience, builds on the next and paves the way for the next part of our lives. We are all a series of chapters, and no one chapter should be the one that completely defines us. My mother in law was a lot of things to me and the people who loved her. She is missed every day, but her stash lives on!

Finally, I shipped out another one of my pieces to Peters Valley Craft Center, for their summer faculty show. I am scheduled to teach a Fiber Boot Camp, basic fiber techniques, great for those wanting to get into fiber as a medium, learn some of the techniques we all know and love, spinning, felting, kumihimo braiding, tapestry, and inkle loom weaving. This is a great class for art teachers who want to bring fiber to the classroom. I’ve taught it a number of times now, last year I had a full class. I’m not sure if the class is running at this point, the economy has taken its toll on a number of art centers, but the class is suppose to run over the 4th of July weekend, and when it does, I really enjoy being out at the Valley. They offer a number of fiber workshops, in all disciplines, as well as wood, blacksmithing, metals, clay, photography and related topics. I’ve supported the Valley for years, and am always happy to send them a faculty piece for the exhibit.

So the piece I sent is a collage titled Surviving Words. This is a very personal piece, I collaged together images printed on silk, with themes of breast cancer, I am a survivor, and that chapter in my life, though behind me, and by no means the one that completely defines who I am, is still an important one and only now, are the themes from that chapter showing up in my work. I glued all the collage components down with gel medium, and once dried, I went back in and stitched all those horrid medical words that defined my life for a year. It is a celebratory piece, colorful, yet feminine, and I hope it is well received in the exhibit.

Whew, thanks for reading this if you made it to the end. I think this is my longest post. I’m off to pack, and hope to blog along the way during my quick mini vacation to Seattle. Happy weaving, sewing, or whatever it is that gets you up in the morning!

Placemats Finished!

First, let me welcome all the ASG members who have just joined my blog, following all of my creative escapades. There has been a flurry of subscriptions for email notices for when I post a new blog, and many of them have signed on after my blog was mentioned in an ASG (American Sewing Guild) posting. Thanks Marcia Russell from northern California for the mention. Marcia has written for the ASG publication “Notions”. For all of you out there who are new to my blog, you may be interested in a podcast I did for Weavecast, about a year and a half ago, though Weavecast is a podcast for handweavers, it crosses over into so many other fiber communities it is worth noting. I was episode 26, “Sew Your Weaving“, and I approached the podcast, not as a weaver, but more as someone who has sewn for most of her life, and has a lot to share about the body and the spirit and the sewing machine.

After much angst, and frustration, we are finally finished! A bit of background, for those who are new to my blog. Exchanges are a fun part of weaving guilds, and they come in many different forms. Last year, one of my weaving guilds, Jockey Hollow Weavers, which meets the first Wednesday night of the month in Mendham, NJ (Morris County) does an “Exchange” each year, starting it in September, and finishing up in June. Last year, we did a crackle exchange, crackle is a weave structure, everyone did samples of a specific design in a Crackle structure, and at the end, participants had a notebook of all different designs.

My then 15 year old daughter had just joined the guild, and was anxious to participate. No matter that she hadn’t really ever woven before, actually correct that, she hadn’t ever set up her own loom before. There is a difference. So, being 15, and not knowing how to plan ahead, leaving everything to the last minute, she learned how to wind a warp and set up an 8 shaft crackle the weekend before the exchange was due. That was last June. In all fairness, she pulled it off, wove the samples beautifully, and delivered them finished and mounted, and stood before the group explaining her draft and how this was her first warp all on her own. Everyone, including her mother, was very proud.

Fast forward to September. My 15 year old enthusiastically raised her hand when a poll was taken to find out who was interested in a Placemat Exchange for the 2008-2009 guild year. The theme was “Overshot”, all mats had to be woven in an overshot pattern. Each participant gave the other participants 2 ounces of 5/2 perle cotton in their pattern color, and all of us chipped in and bought large quantities of 10/2 perle cotton in white for the background. As it worked out, there were more than eight participants, but not enough for 16 (two groups of eight), so we invited a few members of an adjacent guild, and ended up with two groups of 8 each. My daughter joined one of the groups, and I joined the other. So my daughter, Brianna, started the set up, gently prodded by me, during her Winter break last December, and has muddled along, weaving when she could, hampered by school activities, broken warp beams, broken threads, and a major threading error, which she painstakingly took out and re-threaded because in weaving, there is nothing else to do but take it out and re-do it.

Bri and I selected the pattern “Dog Tracks” which was from an 18th century weave structure class I took with Barbara Miller in 2000 at Convergence Cincinnati. I liked the name since Bri works on Saturdays at a local kennel and her clothing looks a lot like muddy dog tracks when she comes home at night.

So those that have been following my blog since January, know I’ve posted a running score, and for the most part, we were steadily neck and neck, I’d weave a mat, and Bri would weave a mat, until Bri got so busy with a major school competitive event (that involved a lot of glitter) that she fell behind. She was about 10″ from the end of the last placemat, and the warp beam broke again. I was able to fix it, and Bri finally finished the last mat on Saturday morning, but discovered a mistake about 5 inches back and had to get to the High School for the final production of this all consuming event, so like the kind mother that I am, and wanting to get this bloody thing finished so I could weave all the samples that went along with the drafts for the placemats, I unwove the 5 inches, corrected the mistake, and finished the mat. I spent the day today, weaving about fifteen 5″ x 5″ samples, and printing all the drafts for the samples, which will go along with the mat. The point of an exchange is to have lots of different patterns, having just the finished mats would never satisfy your average weaver, we have to know how it was done. So there will be a notebook of all the patterns along with all the finished mats. Each participant will have, if all goes well, 8 different overshot design placemats, all in their pattern color. Bri chose purple, and I chose a lovely soft celadon green.

Every weaver loves to see the knots coming up over the back of the warp beam, this means you’re almost there. After 12 yards of fine cotton warp, and almost six months of time and gentle prodding of a now 16 year old, this was a welcome sight. There are two photographs here, the next swing of the beater after I shot the image on the left, the apron rod which holds the knots at the end of the warp, broke clean off the cords holding it to the loom. The problems I’ve had with this poor loom…. So I turned the loom around, sat down on the floor, my favorite position with this loom, and changed the apron cords to Texsolv, which I’m really hoping will hold for awhile. Most weavers know about Texsolv, and it is available on rolls through most weaving suppliers. Not cheap, but it does the job from treadle tie cords to apron cords and heddles better than anything else on the market.

This is such a cool shot! I am so excited. Winding off six months of work to really step back and look at it gives me such satisfaction for a job well done.

I spent the next couple hours, stitching carefully between the mats and cutting them apart, and doing all the paperwork and samples for the drafts (Photo right). So now we have a huge stack of placemats ready to take to the meeting on Wednesday night. The next two days will be a whirlwind of getting things done before my mini vacation. Yep, I’m heading out west!

Continental has a promotion allowing me to fly for double Elite qualifying miles, a great bonus when you are trying to maintain Elite status. So I decided to hop on a plane on Thursday and head to the other side of the country, specifically Seattle, just for a weekend, to hang with my special fiber buddy Robyn Spady. We are planning a weekend of fiber adventures, wine, and friendship. And I get bonus miles too! Such a deal…