Quiet and focused…

My mom always calls and asks when she doesn’t get a copy of my blog in the mail, if she missed something.  My 92 year old mom, who taught me to love fibers, sewing and garment construction, has no internet access, no cell phone, nothing electronic.  By choice.  If you want to talk to her, you call.  So I dutifully make a paper copy each time I blog, and send it to her in the mail.  The old fashioned way.  She always calls when she gets it and tells me how much she loved reading it, over and over, and how lovely the pictures are, and we always have a good chat about it. 

I of course haven’t blogged in a couple weeks, so she was wondering.

Truth is, I’m hyper focused.  I always have good intentions that in the spring, I’ll start making stuff for my guild sale, and actually I did somewhat this year, with the 18 yards of mohair, netting me seven mohair blankets, a run of hand dyed scarves, and some mats woven with water iris leaves from my garden.  But still, just a few weeks before the sale, I found myself once again, locked in the sewing studio, churning out whatever I could with whatever leftovers I found.  And I am always stunned at how many, or how much scrap I have tucked away.  That’s one of the benefits of weaving yardage.  Once you make the garment, you have lots of smaller hunks of fabric to just play with.  I have a whole guild lecture I do on what to do with leftovers, and of course there is my digital monograph of the same name…

I did craft fairs, for 10 years. By 1990, I was done and swore I’d never sell my work again. But the guild show and sale, is somehow different. It is actually fun for me to make a bunch of zippered bags…

…tote bags…

…greeting cards…

…and something new I tried this year, really fun to make, from a Simplicity pattern, #2450, I made a half dozen of these mug buckets, adapting the pattern to handwoven fabric, because actually, this is a fund raiser for the guild.

Ultimately what doesn’t sell of the 132 items I tagged, (don’t be too impressed, 40 of them are greeting cards) will either be donated to causes I support, for their fund raisers, or as gifts, not that I go many places that require hostess gifts… but I do have friends…

The guild sale is a great place to move-on stuff that can be loved in other people’s homes. I just have fun making it all.

So everything is tagged, we are using bar code tags now, and I’ve written and printed a custom hang tag with the story behind each piece, and what garment the leftover came from. That was a lot of work, but fun for me to go back through the archives. And I even learned in a class during Spinning and Weaving Week with the HGA, how to print my own sew-in labels, because no two are alike. And I know by law I have to have the percentage of fiber content, and country of origin of the fiber, but that information isn’t possible to know. I use too many different unknown yarns, and this is from leftovers and that’s as best I can offer. I didn’t have any poplin inkjet treated fabric, but I had a number of packages of 10mm silk habotai, which honestly is better for wearables, since it won’t be pokey and itchy. The Daryl Lancaster labels are from a stack I had left from the 1980’s. They still work. Did I mention I am a pro at sewing in labels? From my days working in a high end exclusive department store during college, we took out manufacturers labels and sewed in our own. In between customers, I was the best at sewing in labels. And I still do it volunteering in the costume shop at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ.

If you live anywhere near the north Jersey region, the Jockey Hollow Annual Show & Sale will be at Brookside Community Center in Mendham on November 5th and 6th, 2022.  Please check www.jockeyhollowweavers.org for more information.