Resolutions…

I know it is a week early for such things, and honestly, I make a conscious effort never to actually make New Year’s Resolutions, but there are a few lurking in the back of my head that I’ve been trying to make happen this year, and this is a good time to make a real commitment.  Plus we can all laugh when I fail miserably…

It was of course, a crazy busy week, but all good.  I don’t get seasonally frantic since I don’t entertain, I don’t bake, I don’t buy a lot of gifts, I shop online when necessary, never go to the mall, and make what gifts I can for those who really really appreciate them.  My last post showed the dishtowel run on the loom.  The towels were off the loom Sunday night, washed, dried and hemmed on Monday, thanks Brianna for your help, and wrapped and ready for delivery for Christmas day.  My mom and sister’s loved them.

I managed to scan, process and create an album page for every event in my children’s lives through 1997, I started updating the digital album right after the storm in November, around year 1992.  I added more than 200 pages, and worked late Christmas Eve trying to print the last 40.  Except my lovely trusted HP Color Laser Printer failed me.  I was devastated.  No matter what I tried, the printer was spewing out saturated streaky, weird colored photos, and this is the printer I use for all my monographs and handouts.  I know I’ve pushed it beyond it’s life expectancy, the warranty ran out in 2008, but Christmas Eve was not the time to break down.  I called my personal tech support in at 11:30pm and I will say, in his defense, that wasn’t the kindest of things to do, and he was pretty cranky about it, and he ran some simple diagnostics, and they all checked out, and he threw up his hands and walked away.  I was sort of devastated, because I couldn’t finish what I had worked on for the last couple months, and I always meet deadlines.  I took it pretty personally…

And I didn’t sleep.  I worked another hour running more diagnostics, finding out things about my printer and its functions that I never knew…  Nothing helped.  I laid in bed thinking of options…

And so we come to resolution #1.  See, my husband would probably tell you I have many faults.  I like a tidy house, not necessarily clean, just tidy.  I hate clutter. So I get cranky when I see it everywhere.  I like things just so.  I talk too much and take too long to tell a story.  I’m a workaholic…  The usual kind of stuff.  But he said something to me recently that made me stop and really think  about this.  He said that I always stop short.  In the art/design world this is a huge issue, and one I push my students on, don’t settle for the obvious, keep pushing the envelope and see where it takes you…  And I pride myself on following through and pushing that envelope.  But my husband wasn’t talking about art/design.  He was talking about trouble shooting electronics.  He said I give up too soon, stop short of one more step that would give me the solution I need.  And he is right.  If he wasn’t around, in my defense, I would probably stay with it, but it is too easy to walk down the hall and ask.  It’s like me getting annoyed when he comes in and asks, “What’s for lunch?” He is perfectly capable of cooking and making his lunch, and mine while he is at it, and likewise I’m perfectly capable, or so he thinks, of doing Google queries and finding out the source of the trouble.  I appreciate his confidence, but of course it is still much easier to just ask him.

Except he wasn’t playing on Christmas Eve.  Which left me to follow every lead I could to get this poor printer to cooperate, and as I finally went off to bed and laid there frustrated, I thought, gee, could it be that the last cartridge I replaced went bad?  I vowed in the morning to replace the newly replaced black cartridge (These babies cost a couple hundred a piece, so this is only a last resort) and I thought as an interim I could actually print the remaining 40 pages for the album on my ink jet, which was actually dying, I just wanted to use up the ink I had for it, the replacement was sitting on the floor still in the box.  The print quality isn’t that of my laser, but any port in a storm.  Ok, bad analogy…

It took most of the morning while we opened gifts to print the last bunch of pages on my dying inkjet printer, but I managed to complete the album in time to take it to my family’s for our holiday gathering in southern NJ.

We had a lovely lovely time with my crazy wonderful family.  I adore all of them, quirky and caring, and silly and funny, and opinionated, and we laughed the hardest over my mom’s rum cake, she inverted two ingredients and put 1 cup of rum and half a cup of sugar in the glaze instead of the other way around.  One sniff and you were under the table…

Those are my two sisters to my right, and my husband and two children are to my left.  My mom and my step dad are below me, and my sisters’ families are to the right of them.  It was amazing to see us all together.  It has been a couple of years since my son has been able to attend a family event.

Anyway, I’m going somewhere with all this…

This morning my husband came into the studio and asked what progress I’d made on the laser printer issue.  I showed him all the diagnostics and what I had deduced, and why, and that I wanted to replace the new black cartridge.  Meanwhile he had been on the phone with HP about getting a new printer and had all the costs.

I changed the black laser cartridge.  It worked.  This whole time it was a defective black cartridge.  That’s never happened in the years I’ve owned this printer.  Go figure.  I stayed with it, and figured it out.  I feel like I won!  I called HP to see how to get a replacement black cartridge for the defective one, and it is on it’s way.  I actually followed through and figured it out.  So resolution #1 is not to stop short and call my local tech guy, even if he is only down the hall.

Resolution #2 is to always have a garment in process on the sewing machine.  I tried to institute that last fall.  And I’ve been sort of keeping up with it.  This is a sleeveless V neck top from a floral poly organza remnant that goes with the skirt I just made and the jacket that is out for photography at a magazine.  I’m going to underline it (since the poly floral is a bit too sheer for my tastes).  I’ve got all the underlining pieces pinned on and ready for mounting.

A brief tutorial…  To mount an underlining, first pin the two layers wrong sides together lengthwise down the middle of each garment section.  Fold on the pinned line with the outer fabric on the top.  Pin one long edge carefully letting the underlining peak out from below the outer fabric.  Then flip the whole thing over and work the other side, again with the outer fabric on top.  This allows the underlining to pin in just a little bit smaller in circumference than the outer fabric which allows it to lay smoother when circling the body.  With the garment section opened out, you can see that the edges curl up towards the underlining, meaning that the underlining is slightly smaller than the outer fabric.

Resolution #3.  I’ve got to clean out some of the surplus debris and stash that I will never ever use and neither will my daughter who will probably inherit all of it when I’m gone.  Poor thing…  Plus, I discovered when I put on the last scarf warp, that there was birdseed stashed underneath some of the skeins.  Which means that somehow, mice or some other critters were getting into the studio and squirreling away birdseed from the yard, two stories below, and they were climbing up my shelving units and making little hideaways in my yarn stash.  Time to clean off the shelves…

So Brianna and I dove into this task today.  She is a super organizer, and we rearranged all the yarn stash, I found things of course I didn’t know I had, we sorted by fiber type and yarn type.  We cleaned all the shelves, disposed of all the birdseed that was stacked up in some of the cones.  And I set a couple traps.

Meanwhile, I pulled hand dyed skeins for another round of scarves.  Brianna is winding them all onto pull balls with the electric ball winder.  And she even stopped to get us a snack, a lovely spread of crackers, cheeses, meats, and spreads, fig and a caramelized onion balsamic spread that is to die for…

And so resolution #3 is already in motion and resolution #4 is that I always have a run of scarves waiting in the wings because I really really like weaving these scarves. They are colorful and fun,  and I have sooooo much dyed yarn.

Which brings me to resolution #5, to start cranking up the dye pots again.  It has been a couple years, and I still have a lot of white/natural yarn and lots of containers of dye, and some colors of yarn on the shelf that could use some serious overdyeing.

I’ll keep you posted on how I do on all these resolutions which really read like a never ending to do list, and meanwhile, to all my readers, I hope whatever you celebrated and whomever you celebrated it with, brought you great memories, special moments, and lots and lots of fiber stories.

For those who are really interested, I am one of those who write an annual Christmas missive, I’m sure you figured that out…  Here is the 2012 version in PDF form…

Stay tuned…