Comb binding mania!

I am bleary eyed…  All I’ve done for the last couple of days is laundry (smelly clothes from a week at girl scout camp) and print monographs and handouts for the Michigan conference, which is August 5-9.  This is the conference where I have a 12 hour turn around, I arrive home from Colorado late evening next Monday night, and leave Tuesday morning for a direct flight to Grand Rapids Michigan.  But that’s all happening on the 4-5 of August.  Right now we are still in July, so my mantra for the day is, “Don’t project…”

The crock pot is doing its thing, I’ve done shades of bronze, olive, rose, and teal, and today we are cooking a canary yellow.  I’m enjoying this explosion of color, and I can’t wait until fall when I can really play with this wool.  I’m hoping to be inspired hanging around with all the felters for a few days in late August at the Felters Fling. I’ll be teaching a jacket making workshop, and one of my goals here is to make my own “Daryl Jacket” from my own felt…

So, I’ve gone through about $6-700 dollars in toner, and printed reams of paper.  The monographs are stacked, and the handouts are so big, I’ve forgotten just how big this particular handout is, that I need more 1/2″ comb bind spines.  My wonderful shopper husband is out at Staples as I write.  So I decided to take a break and blog, because I am really bored just punching chads from all this paper with the binding machine…  (Would that I could listen to a book on tape, but alas, I do have to pay attention here, I’ve punched handouts backwards and talk about awkward when you hand someone their handout and oops!)

I have so enjoyed reworking my design journal from the last nine years, that I’ve almost finished.  I created a cover from a collage I didn’t end up using for my website home page, but it worked well here.  I only have six projects left to redo, I’ve completed 18 of the projects, each with a two page spread.  I’ve had to dig around in the attic to find scraps of companion fabrics, when I failed to include them originally.  This notebook had mostly the weaving notes, not much was entered once the fabric was finished and I turned the fabric into a garment many years later.  So I’m reconstructing all that, which is an organizational blast, and gluing everything in place.  I took more detailed photos of two of the  projects, in case dear reader, you are interested…

This project was called Softened Edges, and was an 8 shaft deflected double weave from rayon.  I chose a pattern for a jacket that could be reversible since the fabric was two sided.  I used felled seams and bound the edges with a lovely wine colored jacquard silk.

The second project was done on a dare.  I attended the ANWG weavers conference in Pendleton Oregon back in 2003.  It was my first time at that conference, and I had been asked to give the keynote address.  It was a wonderful experience, and Pendleton is very charming, and plucked right out of the Oregon trail.  The Pendleton Mill tour ranks up there with my top fiber experiences.  They welcomed the conference attendees, and as a thank you for coming gift, we all got bales of the Pendleton blanket selvedges they cut off after fulling, before they bind the blankets.  These were huge bales, and I talked them into shipping mine home after purchasing a lot of wonderful things from their outlet store.  Some of the local weavers, sick to death of the Pendleton worms, sent theirs home with me as well…

So the dare was to come up with some piece of clothing, since that’s what I do best, made out of the worms.  I ended up weaving a Theo Moorman inlay, where the backing was a wool combination of things in my stash  and the inlay threads a 20/2 rayon, also in my stash.  I wove in the worms, on the surface of the plain weave background, held down by the tie-down threads.  I planned the colors carefully, matching up like “worms” from my bales.  I loved the effect of the color changes, (calling the finished coat “Butterfly“), and ended up constructing the coat by cutting the worm fabric on the crosswise grain.  Since the fabric was too fat and lofty to seam in the traditional way, I cut off the seam allowances, and used a wool jersey to bind all the edges, connecting the seams together with the jersey.  It is one of the techniques I detail in my Seams and Edge Finishes Monograph.

So back I go for more endless punching of chads…  My husband has returned from Staples. All of these have to be shipped on Tuesday.  I am currently printing the last of the monographs, which is the newest one in the collection, Website Success.  I will offer it for sale on my website, once I give the presentation to those that signed up at the Michigan Conference.  I want to be able to tweak any thing that isn’t completely clear, and I won’t really know that until I give it to a room full of mixed levels of computer experience.  Stay tuned…