And she’s off…

The new year has hit with a bang, and though there aren’t trips coming up on the near horizon there is much to keep me busy.  Lots of proposal writing and lots of contracts to complete.  Note to self: update schedule for the year, lots of new venues to add…

I laid in bed Monday morning, dreading what I knew I really needed to do, which was haul everything out of the front half of my studio and set up gobs of equipment and lights and do a long overdue photoshoot.  The shoot itself is fine, it is the prep and set up that always makes me cranky, but the photos once I do them make me really happy.

So I started to haul everything out of my studio, into the spare room and the hallway, and it went a lot easier than I remembered.  Then I remembered that last December 2012 Brianna and I rearranged my entire studio, changing what was in the front half, as I recall, so it would be easier to move things out for a photoshoot.  Well it worked.  Suddenly I was setting up lights, and a backdrop support that my husband got me more than a year ago, that I’d never used, which made hanging the backdrop a breeze.  Everything was in place and I just had to retrieve the Nikon SLR from my husband’s cave, along with the flash unit, and recollection of the settings we needed to change because something about the prefire flash triggering the strobes too soon, and anyway, the stress started to build.  The flash unit wouldn’t turn on.  I assumed it was the batteries and when I opened the unit, well, lets just say I made a note to self, DO NOT PUT SENSITIVE ELECTRONICS AWAY FOR AWHILE WITH BATTERIES IN THEM.  The leaky batteries basically destroyed the Nikon flash unit, stupid I know, but now I’m sort of pissed because I went to all this trouble to set up the studio for this shoot, and I need that flash unit.  While my husband scampered off to see what could be done (turns out nothing but ordering a new unit) I looked at my trusty little point and shoot Canon I bought last year for travel and taking blog shots, and realized I hadn’t ever tried using it for a formal photo shoot because I hadn’t done a formal photo shoot since I bought it.  So I stuck it on the end of the tripod after switching everything to manual, and it worked.  Perfectly.  Sigh.

Once I started shooting, things went quickly.  I dug out everything handwoven I’ve done in the last year or so that hadn’t been photographed properly, and fired away.  It felt really good to see the images up on the screen, and everything was packed up and the room set back to right within an hour after completing the shoot.

I sent off a group of images to an exhibit, deadline was today, and crossed that off my list.  The parts came in from Alabama (thanks Nancy!) and I finished building and prepping the 13th little Structo loom for the beginner class tomorrow.  I’m all packed and ready to load the car.

And I managed to almost clear one loom on my New Year’s quest to get some of this stuff off my looms that has lingered way too long.  Except I ended up with a runner nearly 50″ long, probably too long for my table, and there is still extra warp.  What could I have been thinking when I warped this loom for the workshop a couple years ago?  I’m going to be taking on an intern for the next 15 weeks from the local community college, so I think I’ll let her finish the warp, nothing like trial by fire, a brand new weaver doing an 8 shaft double faced Matelassé! It will be great for her portfolio!

And so the next loom up for clearing is one with an undetermined amount of remaining warp (originally 5 yards of which I’ve done a sampler about 18″ long) from the Diane Totten crimp cloth workshop way too long ago.  Again, I gave myself some major angst thinking about how I was going to figure out what I had done, but once I looked at my notes, and pushed a couple of treadles, I figured it out in about 40 seconds.  So I’m happily weaving away, and when I finally dragged a floor light fixture over since it was getting a bit dark in the room, I was shocked to find that there were little skips in the warp all across the 10″ or so I’d woven.  Seems that dust on a loom can build up and cause dense warps to stick?  Note to self, Swiffer Dusters apparently don’t pick up dust on unused loom warps…  Anyway, I undid everything I’d woven and am now carefully moving in a forward direction again.  The photo on the left is the sampler from the workshop.

Stay tuned…