Author: daryl

The best way to learn how a garment is engineered on a body, is to take it apart.  When I was 15 years old, my mom had me tailoring my own coats, and some of the more affluent citizens of the township where I grew up, began asking me to do some basic alterations to their clothing.  My mom was always nearby if I had a question, but I had quite a lucrative business going, for a 15 year old, doing alterations, basic dressmaking, and learning how to deal with clients, and with deadlines.  I did that for a few years, through High School, and a bit while in college, and then life after college got in the way, and I swore that I’d never do alterations again.  I considered it tedious low pay work, and I hoped with my new degree in art, that I was quite above that sort of thing. (I know all of you are snickering uncontrollably here…)

Fast forward many years.  The current economic crises is what it is, no one is immune, in fact, where I was once booked a couple of years in advance for lectures and workshops, other than the fiber conferences where I am scheduled to teach this summer, there is no contracted guild teaching work at all now and in the foreseeable future.  And there are rumors of lay-offs at my husband’s company as well.

So, though I am very busy inventing things, and creating things, and learning new things, like any artist would be doing with the gift of time, I got my arm twisted to some “minor” alterations to a “dozen” dresses, for a local High School production of Footloose.  They are paying me, which helps, but I was quite unprepared for the volume of work that was waiting for me when I went to pick up the work this afternoon.  Two hours of fittings, and at least three dozen garments, most of them prom dresses, with huge 2 and 3 layer full skirts, at least a half a dozen need to be completely redesigned in the shoulder area.  I can do this kind of stuff in my sleep, though the challenge will be for me to do speed work for costuming, not handwork for couture.  The show is in 28 days, and I gathered from the conversation that this may not be all I have to do for them.

I am grateful for some paying work, and I’m not complaining, I can do this work easily.  But it isn’t what I really want to be doing.  I’m sure everyone reading this would rather be doing something else than what life throws at you.  After all, I promised four more projects if you were counting.  Plus the Irish Handwoven Fabric I got for Christmas which I blogged about in December.  Sadly none of that will produce any income, only experience, and publicity, and the thrill of the process.

So I’ll hunker down, get organized, and plow into this pile tonight, and keep track of my time since they are paying me by the hour.  Stay tuned…

Even in Camelot they had to pay the bills.  I have all my bills due around the same time of the month, so I only have to deal with paperwork for the most part, once a month.  I have a large “inbox”, on my desk, and any mail I have to deal with goes in there, and the last day of the month, or thereabouts, I sit down, and go through the stack, tossing junk, filing what needs to be filed, sticking things in a folder that need to be dealt with, but not today, (and here is where I put the deadline on my to do list, so I don’t forget about them), and sort out the bills by which account pays for them.  Though I work every day, I haven’t had a paying job since the late fall, so my pile of stuff to pay for the business was small.  I didn’t spend anything.  But the Christmas bills were all there, and I had to clear the 2008 files out of the file drawer and make way for the 2009 files, so it was a morning where I was, tea mug in hand, spa music playing in the background, in the zen zone of paperwork.

I have most of the accounts online, where I can do my bookkeeping once a month for my business, and I noticed that my business charge had some odd things happening, so I called my charge company and experienced the frustration of first, not being able to get a live person, and endless loop of automotive technology, and no way out, stuck on a ride with no end, pushing “0” on the keypad, only to be told by an electronic voice that that entry was invalid.  Finally in frustration, I screamed into the phone, “HELP”, and do you know, I was immediately transferred to a person.  Go figure.  No matter that the person was in India.  After giving him all my particulars, I was put on hold for 15 minutes and then got an English speaking person in some other continent, I traveled the world and didn’t leave my desk.  Turns out, they decided that my card might have been compromised and without telling me, they transferred all my purchases in the last week to a new number, but I don’t know the number.  (It was probably the sari’s my husband purchased in India that did it…)  So I’ll have to wait until my new cards come in the mail, and then call all the people who have the card on file.  I got a lot of eye exercises in for all those crow’s feet I’m developing, with all the eye rolling I was doing.

So that was my day.  Not creative, but a necessary part of running a business and a household.  I paid all the bills, and cleaned off my desk, took care of a number of conference emails, and then left to take my daughter to Volleyball practice.

First let me say that I have two nearly grown children.  I took them when they were in pre-school to all the town sports, soccer, t-ball, and I was NOT a good sports mom.  I didn’t have the right chair, scream out the right encouragements, I always winced when my kids were up for their turn.  I didn’t have star athletes, I didn’t even have average athletes.  My daughter lasted one season of soccer, she largely sat and played in the sand when the ball wasn’t near her.  My son wasn’t very coordinated back then, part of his ADD, he has made up for it now, he is a fantastic freestyle skier and snowboarder, but I didn’t know that back then, and I would largely hide in the back of the stands, bringing my inkle loom, or kumihimo on a plate (I actually brought a floor marudai once and sat cross legged on the side of the field.  I didn’t do that again.)  The other mom’s sort of tolerated me, and would be kind enough to tell me when I should look up because my kid was about to do something that I might want to observe.

Fortunately my kids took to music and the arts with much more skill and creativity, I never missed a concert or show, unless I was traveling, and would cheer them on with the best of them.  My son plays a fabulous jazz flute, Ian Anderson is his Idol, and my daughter plays the trombone.  So it is rather ironic that my daughter has developed a passion for Volleyball.  It is a sport that I understand, starts when a child is older, and I found a local club in a nearby town for her to play a couple times a week.  There is no Volleyball offered in her High School, so this is her only opportunity.  She is a pretty powerful hitter, and is beginning to develop control over her body and mind, working them in sync. So here I sit, two nights a week, three this week with the snow make up practice, for a couple hours, the club is too far away for me to drop her off, go home, and then try to head west again to pick her up in rush hour traffic.

About four years ago, my son took an interest in Fencing.  I found a local adult school that allowed teens that had a fencing class, and he did this for a couple years.  Watching your kid fence isn’t as bad as watching them play T-ball, and for the most part, you only had to look up when they were actually in a bout.  So I picked up some knitting, a pattern I found in Piecework Magazine, the Jan/Feb 2005 issue, for a tank top with beaded Trompe L’oeil Cables.  It was very cool in the photo, designed by Lily Chin, from her book, Knit and Crochet with Beads, published by Interweave Press in 2004.  I dug around my studio for some yarn, found a shrimp colored acrylic/wool, and found a whole pile of beads that would work, though I didn’t have enough of any one color, so I just tossed them all together and began to pre-string them onto each skein.  This took quite a few fencing classes, and then I could start knitting.  I actually finished the back of the tank top.  Then my son quit fencing.  So the tank top sat in the tote bag, as a UFO for four years.

Back to Volleyball.  I dug the UFO out when my daughter started this season of Volleyball, and I’m determined to finish it so I can wear it this spring.  I’m half way up the front now, and my gauge is a little off from four years ago, but no matter, I am determined to move forward.  The beads are pretty, and I like following the grid for their placement.  And I look up every once in awhile to see what my daughter is doing, and then quickly get back to work.  I am a very bad sports mom, but at least I am there, and I am encouraging, and I am determined to get a sweater out of this.

This coat/dress ensemble was made in 2007, and exhibited in the Tampa Convergence Fashion Show.   It is a colorful piece, and I especially love the Inkle Band I made, which wasn’t made to actually go with the coat, but happened to go with it, and made a lovely trim.  The dress is a raw silk that was sitting in my stash, courtesy of a student who passed on some leftover fabric.  The original photos had my daughter modeling the piece, but I wanted the photos I am submitting to the SDA Fashion Show to be consistent, so I took the opportunity to reshoot the piece.

I actually don’t like the way the piece fits me.  I made it using one of my jacket patterns, but did nothing to alter the pattern for my specific body.  I do that occasionally, just make the piece, I don’t care who it fits.  But now I’m sort of caring, because I really like the coat and dress, and as I was putting it on my dressform, I’m thinking that I might add to my list of projects a remake of the shoulder/armhole/sleeve area to actually work on my body.  What’s one more project in the pile?!?

But I’ve finished the photoshoot, and I’m going off to lunch with some girlfriends, this week we hit the sushi bar.  I’ll enter the show when I get back, and then start working on all the bills and paperwork due at the end of the month after I put my studio back together.

The coat was actually more difficult to shoot, because shadows appeared, and the dark quality of the fabric really absorbed the light.  But I am happy with the way it photographed, and I think this is a true rendition of the fabric/color.  The direct flash shots in previous posts were much too saturated, and really didn’t represent the subtelty of the coloration.  I love the details of the coat, and you can’t imagine how warm and wonderful the coat feels on the body.  I am truely sorry for anyone living in Florida or Texas, or the southwest, where you don’t get the opportunity to wrap yourself up in something like this wonderful fulled wool coat.  It makes all the driveway shoveling worth it!

It took the better part of the morning to move everything from the front half of my studio, that would be three looms and various weaving equipment, into another room, or pushed out of the way, so I could have the space to properly photograph the garments.  Since they are full size garments, it is more complicated to do a photo shoot set up, and I always dread it, because I hate when things are out of place.  As I suspected, this is a two day job.

I woke to about 5 inches of snow, and classes were canceled both at the college and the high school, so both my kids did what every self respecting teen would do, they slept in.  I’m talking after lunch.  So I went out to clear the front walk for the post woman, by myself, throw down some rock salt, bring in the garbage can so the plow wouldn’t run over it, and find the newspapers in the snow.  It started to rain by about 10am, and it rained the whole day, an icy rain, which made travel less than ideal but the trees were spectacular.  I still had to head out around 4:30 to take my daughter to volleyball practice, and it was hard making it up the little hill on my street.  The main roads were OK, but I was glad to have spent most of the day, tucked safely in my studio, even if I did tear it all apart.

I wanted to use the graduated backdrop for both garments, it looks more professional, and I think more dramatic.  I used my dressform as a prop, unfortunately the graduated backdrop is only 67″ long, so to get the whole dress in, I had to do some creative Photoshop work erasing the base and pedestal.  But I’m really really happy with the results.  I think the dress is beautiful in the photo.  I’m very proud of it.  I’m working on the coat, have photos I like, but want to do one more round of shots to clean up some areas I still am on the fence about.  Little things like a ripple in the fabric I know shouldn’t be there that I can’t erase in Photoshop.

I’m including a wide shot of the back of the dress so you can see the set up in the studio.  I’m also planning to reshoot something from last year, since I can enter three garments for the SDA show, and I want the photos to be consistent.