Even though I travel around the country and lecture and give workshops to handweaving guilds, up until about two years ago, I hadn’t actually joined one myself. Way back in the late 70’s when I first learned to weave, I did belong to the Palisades Guild in Northern NJ, but once I became a professional weaver, selling my work in craft fairs, I didn’t really see how a guild would benefit me, and how I could even take the time. Once I started to teach, giving up the craft fair circuit in 1989, I still hesitated to begin a relationship with a guild, even though I knew many of the members from conferences and from lectures I’d given. How sad for me…
In 2006 when my fiber mentor mother-in-law Margaret Lancaster died, at age 99 (you can read about our fiber relationship on my website, look at the story called Circle of Threads), I felt like I had lost my fiber family, and as I traveled around, I felt jealous of guild members that had made the guild their family, the members watched out for each other, and when one died, the guild stepped in and absorbed their stash, keeping the fibers productive and the memory of the handweaver alive.
So I decided, 24 hours after the death of my mother in law, to attend a guild meeting as a member. I confused some of the members there when I showed up, they thought they might have booked me to speak and not remembered. But then they opened up their arms and welcomed me, and made me one of them and I have loved every meeting I have attended. I’m now a member of two guilds, one that meets in the evening, and one that meets on a Monday during the day. The meetings are well attended, by a variety of fiber enthusiasts, not all of them handweavers, some young and inexperienced (like my 16 year old daughter) and some very old, and whenever they manage to get to a meeting it is a cause for celebration.
Today was the January meeting of the Frances Irwin Handweaving Guild. There are some amazingly talented handweavers, fiber enthusiasts, and sewers in the group, and I feel blessed to be able to bring a project to them and have some real feedback. I love show and tell, it is my favorite part of the meeting. I learn so much. Even the most beginning projects, I learn from and I love the encouragement given to members who show their work.
So I put on my dress, even though not all of the handwork was finished, and there were still tailor’s tacks everywhere, and modeled it for the group. Many of them were following the blog, and were thrilled to be the first ones to see the dress. Everyone ohhhh’d and ahhhhh’d until I turned around. I could tell something was wrong. One of the difficulties of sewing a garment for yourself is not being able to really see behind you. I had Sally, one of the members, take a photo of me in the dress, and when I checked the images to see if I was happy with them, I was rather shocked. I called over another member Margriet, may I say an exceptional weaver and sewer, and asked if my butt looked like the beachball that it did in the photo? She admitted that it did, and we discussed the problem, which was basically the angle of the grainlines as they moved in on the bias line towards the bodice. I looked like I stuck a gargantuan pear into the back of the dress. So we talked about the fix, and I felt much better, ready to take the dress apart in the back, and rework the skirt under the bodice. I need to straighten out the skirt grainlines in the center back, and take small darts around to the side.
So what went wrong? Two things, one, the muslin fabric was a solid, not a stripe, so I couldn’t have foreseen this effect, and two, the drapey rayon fabric grew a lot as I sewed and pressed it, not unusual for a handwoven, and to get this to fit my narrow back snuggly, I had to take in about four inches in the upper back, changing the angle of the grainlines. So stay tuned to see how this all turns out, I will make an attempt to fix this, and do another quick photo shoot. Meanwhile thanks to all the Frances Irwin Members who had the guts to tell me when what I did wasn’t so great!
PS, you may want to check out the comment from Fran in the previous post. Fran asked for me to comment on how I accomplish so much, as a new weaver, Fran found it hard to get to the loom, life kept getting in the way. See what I shared, and please feel free to add your thoughts on how you find time to weave during your busy day.
Well I made the decision, and went with the pattern from the muslin. I played around with the layout for quite awhile today, I admit, I was stalling for time, not wanting to make that first cut. Once I cut, there was no turning back. Since there was no repeat over the length of the yardage, the center front seam would be critical and I would need to match colorways as best I could. I was reasonably happy with the way the darks carried through the two halves and I’m now working out the bodice part, which is cut in two halves, left and right, there is no shoulder seam and the pieces eventually become bias. What appears to be the shoulder seams on the photo above, are really the side seams on the bias. I transferred all the markings with tailor’s tacks.
I attended the opening of the gallery show in NYC tonight, of the Textile Study Group of NY’s member’s show, Economies of Scale. It was a beautiful show, very crowed, and I was thrilled to have a couple of my pieces in it. Details of the show and images of the pieces I had in the show are in the Upcoming events box on the right, it is up through January 31. No work in the show could be larger than 6 inches in any dimension, and it was amazing to see how the 48 pieces in the show in various textile techniques accommodated the constricting parameters. Bigger isn’t always necessarily better. Even in my own work, I was pleasantly surprised that the pieces I did, scaled down from larger works, were as effective as they were in that scale. The feedback was very positive.
And now for the update on Project 4. I went ahead and drafted a pattern based on the muslin I draped on the form. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be with all the pinning and the gathering and the pleating. I just transferred all the marks with chalk, and then opened the muslin out flat, and worked a pattern off of it. I cut the pattern out of a new piece of fabric, and sewed it up to check the engineering and the fit. I didn’t put a zipper in the back, just had my daughter pin me into it, and I love the dress. I just have to see if I will be able to get the patterns out of the fabric, and have it match reasonably well across the front and back. Stay tuned.