This and That…

What a couple of weeks this has been.  Last Thursday, I was on a plane to Cincinnati, to give a lecture to the Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati, followed by a two day workshop on fit.  The workshop was everything I hoped it would be for a number of reasons.

My flight was uneventful, which was important because I left as a major nor’easter was brewing in the North Jersey region, so I missed the brunt of that storm.  I am teaching this particular class at Convergence Reno in July, and wanted to get a feel for the timing and what would happen if I added the additional silhouette, which I killed myself creating all of February.  I made 10 sample vests, wrote the handout, and made multiple copies before I flew to Cincinnati last week.  I blogged about that in my last post.  The vests worked well, and a number of students traced the silhouette in addition to others, I have a lot of options, and right before I left, my trusty office assistant Cynthia helped me upload all of the directions for my patterns onto my eShop, they can be downloaded as PDF’s for free.  Don’t get too excited, they won’t help you because they don’t include the pattern, which you have to take a workshop with me to actually be able to get, but the directions are there, which will cut down on my printing costs, and those who traced an early version of the collared vest last year, can actually see how it is put together.

I did get a feel for the timing, and though I’ll have a lot more students in Reno than I did here, 20 vs 13, I know how much pattern paper to bring, and having the directions for free in my shop will help with printing costs.  And I reconnected with a guild I haven’t worked with since 2005.  Back then I did a jacket class, and Judy Dominic, one of my favorite people, and an outstanding fiber artist, came to that class with a basket of odd things and declared she wanted to make the jacket out of what was in the basket.  It was and still is one of the most challenging jackets I ever had to help a student through in the course of a workshop, and I was thrilled to see it again, it still looks great on her.  The back and fronts were tapestries that she had woven, too thick to seam, and the sleeves were painted cotton, which I had her quilt to counter the weight of the tapestry.

Before leaving for Cincinnati, I spent hours updating my website.  When I was in Cuba the end of January, one morning at breakfast, I was talking with a potter who was on the tour with me, and we were taking advantage of having internet access and he was showing me some of his work.  I went over to my website to show him some of mine, and it was to my complete embarrassment that I hadn’t updated the garment part of my gallery since 2015, and the artwork part of the gallery hadn’t been updated since 2011.  And the opening collage of me and my work, on the home page, though it looked pretty, was of work that was more than 10 years old.  It has been 10 years since I did the Convergence Fashion Challenge. That piece didn’t need to be front and center.   So I freshened everything up, I still have to upload photos of my paintings because when I’m out and about, that subject occasionally comes up and it is nice to be able to go to my website and show them off.  I’m going to train my assistant in updating things on my website and I’ll have her work on the paintings.

My daughter has come home to live for a few weeks while she does an unpaid externship for school.  She went back to school to get her vet tech license, a two year associates degree program, which is stretching into three, since we all lost a year or more with my husband’s illness and death.  She brought her cat home with her, which has been an adventure, he is adorable and constantly in your face, and all over my studio, which is just the best place to hang out.  I love him but will be glad when she goes back to her apartment.  Everything takes a lot longer when there is a cat involved.

In addition, she brought her dog with her, mostly he is boarded because he can’t really live at her apartment.  Though he got along mostly with my dogs, they are all the same breed, it took much of my day to deal with crowd control while she was at work.  I told her that it wasn’t realistic for me to have all three dogs, and she would have to make other arrangements.  I’m sure there are those who think I’m a bad mom, but I was getting nothing accomplished, on deadline for Cincinnati, and not in any kind of mood to train another dog.  But the picture of my daughter and the three of them in my living room is the picture of domesticity.  Trust me it was not.  My Ranger is in the window seat, and my princess Saphira is on the couch to the left.  Brianna is petting her dog Trygve.  They are Norwegian Elk Hounds

Did I mention that though I missed the first nor’easter that happened last Thursday into the weekend, I didn’t miss this one.  Fortunately we never lost power.  I don’t know why we were so lucky.  There was close to two feet of snow, 26″ recorded in the next town over.  It felt like it.  But this snowstorm was gorgeous.  Heavy, wet, damaging to trees and shrubs, but gorgeous. 

Storms like this are mother nature’s way of saying, I’m cancelling everything on your calendar and you are getting a much needed rest.  Yes, there was a lot of shoveling.  But the kids were here to help, and it wasn’t icy, just wet and heavy, and we did it in stages, a half foot at a time as it came down.  Meanwhile, with all my meetings cancelled, guilds, knitting groups, lace groups, etc., I decided to sit at a loom, it has been so long, and weave.  This warp has been on the loom since last October, it was from the Kathrin Weber workshop I took with my guild.  I’m hoping to have enough fabric  to make a collared vest, shown above, Kathrin and I have been trying to collaborate on a silhouette and I think this will really work.  Stay tuned for that.  The color was a lovely antidote to the whiteout of the storm.

Meanwhile, the latest issue of Threads Magazine arrived and in it was my four page article on putting in a centered zipper.  I made the dress last fall, from a coral stretch denim, they chose the fabric and the dress, and I got to keep the extra material and made a lovely skirt, my new favorite, which I wore in Cuba.  I had my doubts when I was making the dress, but it looked great in the photo with the article.  I’ll take a photo of my skirt and a lovely charcoal linen top I knitted to go with it, eventually.

And I just got word today that my next article, for issue 197, will be 8 pages.  It is a complete step by step to make a bound buttonhole.  I worked all of January on the jacket and some 25 step by step samples, and I can’t wait to see it.

Stay tuned…