Quiet Times…

I stood for awhile with my hot cup of morning tea, wrapped in my warm well worn bath robe, enjoying the quiet of the house, watching the beautiful softly falling snow over the stark winter landscape.  Those are the moments in life that recenter us.  I have no where I have to be today, my husband is gone, back to Saudi Arabia for the month.  And my daughter made it to school, a few harrowing slides, but in spite of the weather, my young driver got there OK, though I expect an early dismissal.  The snow fall isn’t expected to amount to much, just a few inches, unlike the blizzard post Christmas.  So for now, I am just enjoying the quiet, the pretty snow, and the fact that I am plowing through the to do list at break neck speed.

I haven’t posted this week because, well frankly, there hasn’t been much to post.  I worked frantically over the weekend trying to get everything photographed and shipped to Handwoven Magazine on Monday, and I lost a whole day of the photo shoot because I couldn’t get the new Nikon SLR, to sync with the strobe lights.  Good thing it wasn’t actual film.  My husband wasn’t around to help figure it out, I tried for hours, and finally gave up and switched to a lesser camera and got OK results.  When my husband came home Monday night from the office, I told him about the problem, knowing he had a lot on his plate getting ready to leave for Saudi, he hates when I hit him with technical problems at the last minute (actually “hates” is a strong word, he is really very good about things like this and tries hard to keep things working, like upgrading my Skype as the limo sat in the driveway, so we could talk while he is away…).

Anyway, after dinner, he went online and checked some forums, and in about four and a half minutes he had the answer, turns out the new flash unit I bought him for Christmas was so high tech, it threw out a pre-lite that allowed the meters to accurately read the light, and that caused the strobes to fire too soon.  By switching to manual, all was well.  Though it was too late for the shoot, everything had already been shipped to Colorado.  Still, I got a couple of shots that clearly reflect the complexity and beauty of the weave structure and faux ikat effect.

The scarves came out lovely, I was pleased.  They are a bit complicated to warp, but worth it I think.  The plan is for Cotton Clouds to put together kits to make the scarf, I designed a four shaft and an eight shaft version, and I’m beginning to rethink the wisdom of kit development, which I fought for a long time.

Truth is, it makes no sense to buy huge cones of yarn when all that is needed is a couple hundred yards of this and a few hundred yards of that.  There are five different yarns in the warp alone, and to be able to buy the quantity necessary to make the scarf and not have a pound and a half left over of each yarn, makes a lot of sense.  This is new territory for me, and I’ll let you know how it goes…

Meanwhile, Madelyn also asked if I would write the End Notes column, so I penned one of those Monday afternoon, along with writing up all the detailed directions for both scarves and the yardage.  I always give way more information/word count than will ultimately be used, but it is easier for them to edit down than go back to the drawing board.

I had a stack of contracts on my desk, so I worked on them all day Tuesday and Wednesday.  I’ve been asked to teach at the American Sewing Guild conference in LA next August.  I am thrilled since I had such a blast in Atlanta this past summer.

And the New York Sheep and Wool Festival scheduled for October 2011, sent me a list of more than ten different lectures and workshops they are interested in, sort of an ongoing, four day marathon of topics, many suited to kids of all ages.  Great move on their part.  I spent most of Wednesday coming up with a more concrete proposal for them.  No one knows how long all this paperwork takes behind the scenes, the tough part like any self employed contractor knows, is there is no pay compensation for the hours of paperwork, unless the job comes through, and then, the job is so far down the road, it is hard to see the relationship between the two.

Speaking of paperwork…

It looks like the Fibers class I’m scheduled to teach at County College of Morris for the spring semester will run, and it starts in less than two weeks…  (Breathe deep, no pressure…)  I spent all of yesterday slogging through stacks of employment paperwork, detailed syllabus paperwork, scheduling the Hazardous Materials training, etc.  I have to say, as annoying as all this paperwork is, I’m so impressed with the behind the scenes stuff from CCM, especially the HazMat requirements.  Providing the HazMat department all the required documentation and MSDS sheets of any dye stuff I bring into the class room, whether I intend to open the jar or not, is something I am thrilled to do, as annoying as it is, because thirty years ago, when I got my fine art’s degree, no one knew of the hazards of chemicals in the work place or in the arts, or in a simple box of paint. Cadmium red is a known carcinogen.  Some of the mordants for natural dyeing are extremely toxic.  And thirty years later, artists and educators who spent their lives around these toxins are paying heavily if they are even still alive.  None of this was in place when I taught this class ten years ago at Montclair State University.  So a huge round of applause  to CCM for staying on top of current regulations, they may seem oppressive, but incredibly necessary.

Anyway, I’m an organized paperwork kind of person, and I got into a rhythm over the last couple of days, including writing contracts for programs for my weaving guild.  I’m just committed to getting all this stuff off my desk.  Snowy winter days are perfect for the task.

And I hired my friend’s daughter, who is home from college for a couple more weeks, to wind skeins and thread a loom for me.  She puts on her tunes, and stands in the corner, and furiously winds skeins for my dye adventures, and that alone has eased up on my work load giving me a couple of additional hours to spend in paperwork.  And it is great to watched an unskilled young adult, who is not by nature a meticulous technician (she is an accomplished vocal performer in an arts degree program at Muhlenberg) struggle in the beginning to accurately thread the heddles on the 900 end linen and sewing thread warp, starting with a 90% error rate and now threading perfectly.  There is a silent sense of job well done one gets from not only learning to do a task well that isn’t instinctive, but finding the joy and rhythm of threading the heddles.  Her speed grows with each inch…

My dye adventures continue.  I’m running out of room on the shelves I allocated for all the pretty skeins coming from my daily adventures.  Yesterday though, I had an interesting twist occur, it was one of those “what the hell?” moments and then a personal moment of triumph when I thought I knew what the problem was and got confirmation that yes, I actually knew something…

So, here’s the story.  I did my usual rinse of the color du jour, in this case, Phlox Pink, an internet special MX dye I picked up on sale in December from Pro-Chemical.  I bought more than a dozen jars of dye, and have had fun seeing what colors they turn out to be.  This should have been a bright neon pink, but I thought something was up when I first put the yarn in the dye bath the day before, and there was an odd smell, and they yarn looked like I had it soaking in grape Kool-Aid.  I left the dyepot overnight in it’s little corner on the heating pad, and yesterday I started to rinse.  The more I rinsed, the more alarmed I got.  All the color was rinsing out of the yarns except for one skein, the silk, and that was almost black.  Huh?

The rest of the yarns, all cellulose, were slowing returning to their white state, and the silk remained black as coal.  There was something seriously amiss, and I had a suspicion that this wasn’t a fiber reactive dye at all, but possibly an acid dye though the label clearly stated MX fiber reactive.  So I called Pro-Chem.  They put me through to the lab, and I had a wonderful conversation with Nancy.  I will say right up front that my dealings with Pro-Chem have always been really wonderful, they are amazingly helpful and great to work with.  I ran the situation by Nancy, and it was pretty clear she thought the whole thing quite the mystery as well.  Nancy immediately went off to the lab to see if she could figure out what went wrong after asking me all kinds of questions about my process and agreeing that something was amiss.

Nancy called back to profusely apologize, it didn’t take her long to discover that there were two Phlox pink internet specials in their lab, one a Fiber Reactive dye and one a Wash Fast acid dye and a mistake had been made, they rarely happen, but nevertheless, I did indeed have an acid dye in the jar, and that would explain the dye results.  A new jar of Phlox pink is on its way, and I’ve re-labeled the offending jar to clearly state it is an acid dye, and will try it later on some wool I have around in the studio.  Meanwhile, I processed the silk skein to stabilize it and set the dye by simmering it on the stove with vinegar.  I’ll just re-dye the other skeins today.

We all make mistakes.  I make lots of them.  Mistakes are an incredibly necessary part of the learning process.  If I never made mistakes, I’d never grow as an artist, as a craftsman, as a person.  And I adore problem solving.  If there were no problems to solve, I’d be looking to create some…  🙂

I’m going back to watch the snow fall, it is so pretty, and maybe build a fire in the wood stove.  It is that kind of day.  And the I’m going to start on the next round of paperwork.  I have a seminar to build on Warping from Front to Back (the images are shot, I just have to put it all together in PowerPoint) and there are the days and days of paperwork for tax preparation and my 2010 books.  I am woefully behind, having been too busy this year to keep up with it they way I should have…

I wish all of you in the north east safe travel on this snowy day, and a quiet productive January.

Stay tuned…