Puttering days…

I love to putter around, when I’m not super focused on any one project, and I’m reluctant to get focused on any one project because I’m leaving in less than a week for two back-to-back conferences, with a 12 hour turn around time in between.  (I’m trying not to think about the whole airline situation, and how one missed connection can snowball into a nightmare…)

Anyway, there is nothing I can do about any of that, just let go and hope for the best, so I’m just doing what needs to be done, and enjoying the little stuff.  I’ve made such tremendous progress on the book shelves, they are pretty much sorted in my studio, with a huge bag of trash removed, I can hear the studio breathing a little sigh of relief.  I still have to organize the fashion books in my bedroom library, some of those are so big, they wouldn’t fit on the proverbial coffee table if I chose to display them there.  They could actually be a coffee table…

The crock pot is still cooking away, yesterday’s color was “myrtle green”, which is a pretty teal, and today I’m cooking Rose, and I’m getting to the bottom of the fleece.  At this rate, I’ll have the whole fleece plus some other errant stuff I found, dyed by the time I leave for Colorado next week.

rollsYesterday afternoon I spent a couple of hours, cutting two yard packages of  interfacings, some for orders, some to ship to the conferences, and some to refill my supply in the studio.  This is a boring job, and it requires a complete clean off of my productcutting table, because I need the room to layout 100-200 yard bolts of 60″ wide interfacing to be able to unroll and cut off two yard pieces.  Then they have to be bagged and tagged, and ready for shipping.  So I listened to the last couple of episodes of Weavecast while I unrolled and cut, tagged and bagged.

In case you are wondering what interfacings I’m cutting, I use two primarily, for a fusible underlining with handwoven fabrics, one is a fusible knit nylon tricot, and the other is a texturized inserted poly weft interfacing, both have a crosswise give.  Each gives a different kind of support, the tricot gives a crisper flatter feel, and the poly weft gives a loftier fuller kind of feel. Both come in black and white.  I encourage sampling…   🙂

purple_paramentsgreen_paramentsUpdate on the reworking/salvaging of my poor design journal.  I added the pages for the purple and green paraments and was pretty surprised to find out I had no notes on sett/size/yarns, etc.  I’m going to assume I just used all the information from the previous paraments, and there wasn’t much to figure…

evolutionNow I get to the fun pages, these are ones where I took all kinds of copious notes, and figures, and I’ll be damned if I can decipher half of what I wrote.  I spent an hour or so earlier today, just trying to recreate what I actually did, what I didn’t do, and what information I needed to actually transfer.  I added photos of the finished item, and I was able to beautifully recreate the notes for my infamous Evolution piece, that appeared in Issue 111 of Handwoven Magazine. (Sept/Oct 2002).

I thought I took great notes, but if there is anything I’ve learned, it is how important note taking is, and how important it is to label what every number is.  Never just write a number, always identify what the number is, like 3200 yards per pound, or 20 e.p.i.  This is a great exercise in note taking, and recreating old work.  I’m glad I’m taking the time to do this.  I also found a copy of the inkle draft I used (my design) to weave the inkle bands that made up the neck trim.  The fabric for this vest was an 8 shaft shadow weave which I found in the now defunct Weavers Magazine, Spring/Summer 1999, pg. 48.

eeepcAnd last night, I spent a number of hours playing with my new puppy.  No, not that kind of puppy.  The electronic kind.  I got my new EeePC yesterday, a little mini laptop NetBook.  It is sooo cute, and sooooo tiny.  It will slip in my Vera Wang purse.  I’m trying to load in all the software I need, and figure it all out myself.  I do rely on my techie husband way too much, he is so good at what he does, but I don’t stay with something and try to figure it out, like I would with the loom or the sewing machine.  I usually quit too soon and just ask him.  And I won’t ever be any good at this if I don’t keep trying.  So this morning, I managed to figure out how to manually configure my email account into it.  And it worked!  🙂

I’ve got Photoshop Elements loaded in, and I transferred my PowerPoint presentations over manually, because I still haven’t figured out how to access the in house network.  But I’m working on that…

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susan m hinckley
July 23, 2009 2:21 pm

Daryl, I’m so envious of your clean studio! Mine is coughing and sputtering right now because neither of us can breathe — I’m getting ready to move to a bigger space in a month or so and as much as I’m dreading the work of going through everything, I’m also looking forward to a little organization around here. My brain works better when I’m not drowning in stuff.

And your work journals are IMPRESSIVE. Wow.

Nancy JC
July 23, 2009 7:20 pm

Ohhhh…sweet new puppy!

We’ll just know that the air flights will work smoothly and w/out any hitches. Just in case, pack some chocolate. I’d hate to find out you’re stuck in Chicago August 4th or 5th. But, if you do en

Katie Lacewell
Katie Lacewell
July 23, 2009 9:38 pm

You mention loading software on your new netpad. I’ve been looking into them, too, since my laptop took a final, heaving dive, but I thought that’s one of the features of these small netpads, is that they don’t have any external drives. How are you loading software, on a flash drive?

Sally
Sally
July 23, 2009 10:48 pm

I have a year-old passport drive that holds 250 gig and I LOVE it. Holds my client photo files with room to spare. (Each client equals about 500 images at 30 MB apiece.)

And it’s just about the size of a passport, hence the name. With a rubbery outer skin (your choice of color) that protects it from bumps, it would fit in your Vera with the netbook, and could be color-coordinated, too!

Sarah
July 24, 2009 1:30 am

I love my asus eee pc, I’ve had it almost six months and now can’t imagine life without it. I went with the ten inch because size wasn’t a huge issue. It’s still much more convenient than a 15 inch one, fits in a bag with my spindle, sock in progress, and book.

Sherri
July 24, 2009 7:45 pm

Since I’ve been thinking about one of these smaller computers, I read with interest about yours. What size HD does it have? I looked on Amazon, and that’s one of the way to choose.

Kevin
Kevin
July 24, 2009 8:53 pm

The eee PC we got is the 1005HA model with a 160Gb hard drive. Many of the netbooks are very similar, one of the driving factors for this one was the ergonomics and the way Daryl felt comfortable working with it.

We got it at zipzoomfly.com and it came with a 2 Gb ram memory stick, but a friend of ours got hers at amazon.com.

(ps this is the techie husband)

Kevin
Kevin
July 25, 2009 7:05 pm

just saw that zipzoomfly, now has it on sale for 330, with a 30 rebate, just about the best price I have seen for this model.

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Quiet rainy day…

Easy summer days, just puttering in the studio, organizing, sorting, and discarding. The trash can is overflowing...

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