Blog Entries – Page 142

The Day Before…

Though I’m not completely packed, I’ve worked through much of my to-do list, and I’m desperately trying to keep the two conferences separate in my head. I leave tomorrow morning, really really early, to fly to Denver and then Durango for the Intermountain Weavers Conference. I will teach a three day class in making a jacket, moderate the informal fashion show, and then fly home on Monday, getting in sometime Monday evening. Then I turn around, after a quick load of laundry, and a repack, and fly to Michigan for the next conference on Tuesday morning. So, I’m trying to juggle information coming in fast and furious, making sure everything gets into the correct conference folder, and trying to pack for two conferences at once, hoping beyond all hope I don’t make a mistake! 🙂

The 62 pound box with all the handouts, monographs, and pattern paper is off to Michigan, and we noticed the shipper misspelled the address, one more thing to worry about! 🙁

There are massive thunderstorms in the area, so I’ve powered down my main desk computer, but my little puppy runs well on batteries and wireless, so I don’t have to worry so much about a power outage, which we’ve had a couple times in the last hour already.

I wanted to try blogging from my little puppy (if you haven’t been following my blogs, I just bought a new mini EeePC Netbook.) Before I take it on the road, I wanted to make sure everything is running smoothly, I’ve already run my presentations with the projector, I just need to download the latest versions of them from the network.

I’ve cleaned the house, partly because it was really neglected and no one else was jumping to do it, and because with just a few hours turn around next Monday, I don’t want to have to be wiping toilets and counters, and sinks.

I also finished re-working my design journal. I got so close to the end that I made a huge push to finish, since I couldn’t really travel with half of two separate journals. It was a great project, and I was able to retrieve a lot of missing information, and I think it all looks readable and fun. The first project featured here is one from 2004, called Rising Sun. It is a sleeveless shirt woven with HABU Textiles‘ silk and cotton yarns, and some metallic and eyelash yarns. I wove the fabric, which was suppose to be two scarves, to match the Southwest palette from one of my Handwoven Magazine Fashion Forecasts. My intention was to make a scarf and send it off to the magazine, but alas, I failed to take my own advice and sample first, and the scarf came out way to dense for a scarf. Not surprising since I am pretty good at guessing the sett for garment fabric. And to be sure, the sett for this lovely too dense scarf, was perfect for garment fabric. What to do? Plan B… Dive into my patterns and find something from the stash that could supplement the scarf width, and make a shirt out of it. Which I did. And I can assure you I got a lot more use from the sleeveless shirt than another scarf!

Just had another power hit! Fun working on my little netbook in the dark…

Have to wait for the wireless connection to find the wireless before I load in the next two images…

I’m back! Wow, was that a storm…

Anyway, I wove this 8 shaft shadow weave fabric a few years ago, but sat on it for awhile. I needed to update the pattern I use for my jacket classes, so I took advantage of this lovely graphic fabric and made a jacket just for me called Shadow Play. Turns out it is one of my most favorite things I’ve made, and it looks great with my very NY travel wardrobe in black. It will go into the suitcase for the class I’m teaching this weekend.

So, before the next thunderstorm rolls in, and I get even more distracted, I’m off to pack. Hopefully I’ll get an internet connection in Durango, and I’ll be able to blog once in awhile, the evenings are full of events, Friday night is the opening of the Fiber Celebrated exhibition, I have two pieces in that, and Saturday night, the fashion show.

Stay tuned…

Comb binding mania!

I am bleary eyed… All I’ve done for the last couple of days is laundry (smelly clothes from a week at girl scout camp) and print monographs and handouts for the Michigan conference, which is August 5-9. This is the conference where I have a 12 hour turn around, I arrive home from Colorado late evening next Monday night, and leave Tuesday morning for a direct flight to Grand Rapids Michigan. But that’s all happening on the 4-5 of August. Right now we are still in July, so my mantra for the day is, “Don’t project…”

The crock pot is doing its thing, I’ve done shades of bronze, olive, rose, and teal, and today we are cooking a canary yellow. I’m enjoying this explosion of color, and I can’t wait until fall when I can really play with this wool. I’m hoping to be inspired hanging around with all the felters for a few days in late August at the Felters Fling. I’ll be teaching a jacket making workshop, and one of my goals here is to make my own “Daryl Jacket” from my own felt…

So, I’ve gone through about $6-700 dollars in toner, and printed reams of paper. The monographs are stacked, and the handouts are so big, I’ve forgotten just how big this particular handout is, that I need more 1/2″ comb bind spines. My wonderful shopper husband is out at Staples as I write. So I decided to take a break and blog, because I am really bored just punching chads from all this paper with the binding machine… (Would that I could listen to a book on tape, but alas, I do have to pay attention here, I’ve punched handouts backwards and talk about awkward when you hand someone their handout and oops!)

I have so enjoyed reworking my design journal from the last nine years, that I’ve almost finished. I created a cover from a collage I didn’t end up using for my website home page, but it worked well here. I only have six projects left to redo, I’ve completed 18 of the projects, each with a two page spread. I’ve had to dig around in the attic to find scraps of companion fabrics, when I failed to include them originally. This notebook had mostly the weaving notes, not much was entered once the fabric was finished and I turned the fabric into a garment many years later. So I’m reconstructing all that, which is an organizational blast, and gluing everything in place. I took more detailed photos of two of the projects, in case dear reader, you are interested…

This project was called Softened Edges, and was an 8 shaft deflected double weave from rayon. I chose a pattern for a jacket that could be reversible since the fabric was two sided. I used felled seams and bound the edges with a lovely wine colored jacquard silk.

The second project was done on a dare. I attended the ANWG weavers conference in Pendleton Oregon back in 2003. It was my first time at that conference, and I had been asked to give the keynote address. It was a wonderful experience, and Pendleton is very charming, and plucked right out of the Oregon trail. The Pendleton Mill tour ranks up there with my top fiber experiences. They welcomed the conference attendees, and as a thank you for coming gift, we all got bales of the Pendleton blanket selvedges they cut off after fulling, before they bind the blankets. These were huge bales, and I talked them into shipping mine home after purchasing a lot of wonderful things from their outlet store. Some of the local weavers, sick to death of the Pendleton worms, sent theirs home with me as well…

So the dare was to come up with some piece of clothing, since that’s what I do best, made out of the worms. I ended up weaving a Theo Moorman inlay, where the backing was a wool combination of things in my stash and the inlay threads a 20/2 rayon, also in my stash. I wove in the worms, on the surface of the plain weave background, held down by the tie-down threads. I planned the colors carefully, matching up like “worms” from my bales. I loved the effect of the color changes, (calling the finished coat “Butterfly“), and ended up constructing the coat by cutting the worm fabric on the crosswise grain. Since the fabric was too fat and lofty to seam in the traditional way, I cut off the seam allowances, and used a wool jersey to bind all the edges, connecting the seams together with the jersey. It is one of the techniques I detail in my Seams and Edge Finishes Monograph.

So back I go for more endless punching of chads… My husband has returned from Staples. All of these have to be shipped on Tuesday. I am currently printing the last of the monographs, which is the newest one in the collection, Website Success. I will offer it for sale on my website, once I give the presentation to those that signed up at the Michigan Conference. I want to be able to tweak any thing that isn’t completely clear, and I won’t really know that until I give it to a room full of mixed levels of computer experience. Stay tuned…

Puttering days…

I love to putter around, when I’m not super focused on any one project, and I’m reluctant to get focused on any one project because I’m leaving in less than a week for two back-to-back conferences, with a 12 hour turn around time in between. (I’m trying not to think about the whole airline situation, and how one missed connection can snowball into a nightmare…)

Anyway, there is nothing I can do about any of that, just let go and hope for the best, so I’m just doing what needs to be done, and enjoying the little stuff. I’ve made such tremendous progress on the book shelves, they are pretty much sorted in my studio, with a huge bag of trash removed, I can hear the studio breathing a little sigh of relief. I still have to organize the fashion books in my bedroom library, some of those are so big, they wouldn’t fit on the proverbial coffee table if I chose to display them there. They could actually be a coffee table…

The crock pot is still cooking away, yesterday’s color was “myrtle green”, which is a pretty teal, and today I’m cooking Rose, and I’m getting to the bottom of the fleece. At this rate, I’ll have the whole fleece plus some other errant stuff I found, dyed by the time I leave for Colorado next week.

Yesterday afternoon I spent a couple of hours, cutting two yard packages of interfacings, some for orders, some to ship to the conferences, and some to refill my supply in the studio. This is a boring job, and it requires a complete clean off of my cutting table, because I need the room to layout 100-200 yard bolts of 60″ wide interfacing to be able to unroll and cut off two yard pieces. Then they have to be bagged and tagged, and ready for shipping. So I listened to the last couple of episodes of Weavecast while I unrolled and cut, tagged and bagged.

In case you are wondering what interfacings I’m cutting, I use two primarily, for a fusible underlining with handwoven fabrics, one is a fusible knit nylon tricot, and the other is a texturized inserted poly weft interfacing, both have a crosswise give. Each gives a different kind of support, the tricot gives a crisper flatter feel, and the poly weft gives a loftier fuller kind of feel. Both come in black and white. I encourage sampling… 🙂

Update on the reworking/salvaging of my poor design journal. I added the pages for the purple and green paraments and was pretty surprised to find out I had no notes on sett/size/yarns, etc. I’m going to assume I just used all the information from the previous paraments, and there wasn’t much to figure…

Now I get to the fun pages, these are ones where I took all kinds of copious notes, and figures, and I’ll be damned if I can decipher half of what I wrote. I spent an hour or so earlier today, just trying to recreate what I actually did, what I didn’t do, and what information I needed to actually transfer. I added photos of the finished item, and I was able to beautifully recreate the notes for my infamous Evolution piece, that appeared in Issue 111 of Handwoven Magazine. (Sept/Oct 2002).

I thought I took great notes, but if there is anything I’ve learned, it is how important note taking is, and how important it is to label what every number is. Never just write a number, always identify what the number is, like 3200 yards per pound, or 20 e.p.i. This is a great exercise in note taking, and recreating old work. I’m glad I’m taking the time to do this. I also found a copy of the inkle draft I used (my design) to weave the inkle bands that made up the neck trim. The fabric for this vest was an 8 shaft shadow weave which I found in the now defunct Weavers Magazine, Spring/Summer 1999, pg. 48.

And last night, I spent a number of hours playing with my new puppy. No, not that kind of puppy. The electronic kind. I got my new EeePC yesterday, a little mini laptop NetBook. It is sooo cute, and sooooo tiny. It will slip in my Vera Wang purse. I’m trying to load in all the software I need, and figure it all out myself. I do rely on my techie husband way too much, he is so good at what he does, but I don’t stay with something and try to figure it out, like I would with the loom or the sewing machine. I usually quit too soon and just ask him. And I won’t ever be any good at this if I don’t keep trying. So this morning, I managed to figure out how to manually configure my email account into it. And it worked! 🙂

I’ve got Photoshop Elements loaded in, and I transferred my PowerPoint presentations over manually, because I still haven’t figured out how to access the in house network. But I’m working on that…

Quiet rainy day…

I knew this summer was going to be tough, since all my teaching this year was condensed into about three months. I was having stress attacks last spring just thinking about it. Now that I am in the middle of it, I’m kind of enjoying the fact that I didn’t really plan anything else, just to do what I had to do between trips, and go easy on myself. I am not trying to keep up with the yard or the house, I clean when it gets really bad, which isn’t ideal, but my sanity is more important at the moment.

So, I went on a lunch date yesterday. You may recall I have a standing lunch date on Thursdays, during the school year, with a group of women whom I adore, all teachers from the middle and elementary schools in my town. Years ago, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, one of the things I encouraged friends to do, since everyone wanted to help in some way, was to have lunch with me. It got me out of the house, and focusing on something other than my health issues. Some seven years later, we still meet during the school year, on Thursdays, even though 2 of the 5 teachers are now retired. We call ourselves the Thursday Philosophy Club, and we talk about all kinds of global issues, literary choices, our kids, grandkids (though I’ve nothing to contribute to those conversations yet…) and anything else that comes up in a luncheon with 6 interesting women. (These are art, music, and gifted program teachers!)

So, we all got together yesterday, for a summer luncheon, great food, and a dip in the pool. What a great treat, and what great friends!

I’m making progress on the book sort, today I tackled the Bobbin Lace books. This is a tough section, because it is disproportionately huge, many of the books were my mother-in-law’s, since she was a master bobbin lace maker. I did bobbin lace for many years, because it was her specialty, and I enjoyed that bond with her. I have more lace pillows than I know what to do with, and I have a large shelf of Bobbin Lace books, many of them in Swedish, since she spoke that language. I can’t part with them. Though I know I’m moving away from lace making, it will take many years before I can even think of reducing that group of books.

One area I do need to address, is my slides. I have binders full of my images from when I did craft fairs, in the 1980’s, and had to have 10-15 sets of duplicate slides. I need to cull down the copies, one slide is enough, especially since there is a digital version saved in about 15 places. But that’s for another time. I cleared three slide carousels off the shelves, putting the slides in archival slide sheets, and I’ll dump the carousels. No need for those anymore. (Please don’t tell me that there is an installation artist making sculptures from old slide carousels!) 🙂

I got the crock pot going again this morning. And I found more fleece to dye in a bag in another cabinet I cleaned out. This time I am using an olive green.

And, I started to tackle a project I’ve needed to work on for some time. My sketch book/record book/project notebook for all the woven pieces I’ve done in the last 9 years, is in a small journal that is bulging at the seams, falling apart, and losing all the contents every time I pick it up. I try to travel with it, because I’m always asked for drafts and details of the work I show, and I need to rely on my little journal because I can’t keep it all in my head. When someone asks what sett I used, I can look it up!

The whole book needs to be taken apart, and carefully recreated in a larger format, with a spiral bound notebook. And I want to be able to add the photos of what the fabric turned out to be.

So, I tackled the first two pages, which were for a set of paraments I did for a couple churches in the area. The first page was for the white set where I used a doup leno technique with a gold thread. I found the photos of the minister from one of the churches, wearing the stole, with the pulpit banner and communion table runner. So I glued that into the new book with the fabric, draft, and notes.

The second page was for the red set of paraments, an altar cloth for one church, two stoles, and a pulpit banner and communion table runner for the other church. These were done in plain weave 5/2 cotton with black crosses inlaid in a Theo Moorman technique.

I am feeling encouraged by all the comments and support as I sort through, weed out, make decisions to toss stuff that doesn’t need to be in my life anymore. And though I’m happiest when I am learning new things, I’m even happier when I’m organizing. There is something very satisfying when I stand back and see something organized and tidy, and I can view with fresh eyes. And I get inspired by finding stuff I didn’t know I had. ( I’ve been looking for a copy of Anita Mayer’s I Don’t Do Guilt, and guess what I just found on my shelf?) I’m really looking forward to some down time in the fall to just sit in my studio and make stuff, and enjoy my newly organized library!

Books everywhere…

I got some help from my daughter today, and tackled the wall of sewing books. This is by far my largest collection of books, since I inherited many of them, not only from my mom, but from a retired home economics teacher as well, who taught garment construction and textile science for more than 30 years. Her book collection from the 40’s and 50’s was incredible.

First, I managed to find a way to fit all the weaving, spinning and natural dyeing books on three shelves. Of course more are on their way from the Interweave Press hurt book sale, but I’ll figure that out when they arrive. I am impressed with my collection, and would be an amazing weaver if I actually read them! 🙂

But my sewing book collection, along with pattern design, draping, textile science, tailoring, and social issues in clothing (which is a really fun category I can assure you) is huge. On top of that, I have almost 15 years of Burda World of Fashion Magazine, which is a BIG magazine, and each issue contains all the patterns for some 30-40 garments contained in that issue. And I get it every month! (Thanks mom!) I took all the ones from 1995-2000, and discarded the actual magazine, and just kept the patterns. I may regret that decision, and it really didn’t make a huge difference, since most of the bulk was the patterns, but it was an attempt. They are all on the bottom shelf of the bookcase on the right, two deep on the shelves.

I also have my mother’s collection of clippings. She carefully cut all the Dale Cavanaugh and Eunice Farmer clippings from the evening papers, they use to have sewing columns, right along with Dear Abby, and my mother always clipped the articles. And years of sewing articles from Vogue Patterns Magazine, are in there as well. There are ten binders, plus one for all the unsorted clippings, they take up a huge amount of room. Right now they are perched precariously on the shelf in front of all the back issues of Sew News. (Along with my tension box for sectional warping, yes I know that isn’t a sewing tool…)

I found all sorts of wonderful things, including two copies of the original Singer Sewing Book from 1949, that had the wonderful quote that circulated around the internet for awhile. In case you missed it:

“Prepare yourself mentally for sewing. Think about what you are going to do…never approach sewing with a sigh or lackadaisically. Good results are difficult when indifference predominates. Never try to sew with a sink full of dirty dishes or beds unmade. When there are urgent housekeeping chores, do these first so your mind is free to enjoy your sewing. When you sew, make yourself as attractive as possible. Put on a clean dress. Keep a little bag full of French chalk near your sewing machine to dust your fingers at intervals.

Have your hair in order, powder and lipstick put on. If you are constantly fearful that a visitor will drop in or your husband will come home and you will not look neatly put together, you will not enjoy your sewing as you should.”

There is a lot more where that lovely wisdom came from, I can assure you. I also have this wonderful collection my friend Karen found for me. They are small books, only about 5″ x 7″. They are a series of books from the Woman’s Institute, of Domestic Arts and Sciences, Scranton, PA and they were copyrighted in 1924, and again in 1931. In the Harmony of Dress Volume, I especially liked the chapter on Restraining Garments! And then there is a wonderful pull out chart on Colors That May and May Not Be Worn by Blonde Types of Women! And I’ve made a wall chart from Table VI that gives a Guide to Correct Dress for Social Functions-All Seasons. I know I’ll be consulting this on a regular basis…

Seems this series was actually written by the founder of the woman’s institute, Mary Brooks Picken in Scranton PA . She authored 96 books on sewing and fashion, was the first woman trustee of FIT and a founder of Fashion Group who’s 60 years worth of fashion archives can be found at the NY public library. She also authored the Singer Sewing Manual from 1949, that contained the excerpt I quoted above. I got the bio from a blog I found, Not Enough Thursdays. I’m totally fascinated by this woman, Mary Brooks Picken, and her substantial influence in dress and social norms of the early part of the 20th century. I am anxious to do more research myself.

Along with all these archival wonders on my sewing book shelves, I had a couple of trophies. What does one do with trophies when they are no longer wanted and taking up too much space? Right now they are sitting on the floor in the hallway.

Side Bar: I got the smaller trophy as a first place award in 1971 for the High School History fair. I made a 30″ tall civil war soldier out of chicken wire and sewed a uniform for him. I don’t have the soldier any more, (though I actually haven’t looked in the attic, who knows…), but my dad took a slide of him and that was in my archival slide files! Ok, he is a bit creepy, and I made the hair from real human hair. But, I was only 16, and I did this completely on my own…

The other trophy I’ve held on to because I was really proud when I got it. I attended the award ceremony just before my High School Graduation in 1973, and I was given the principal’s award for outstanding citizenship, or something like that, all I knew was it was the biggest trophy on the table! Back then they gave trophies instead of money. So I’ve had this huge trophy all these years, stuck in the corner in my studio. It has shrunk somewhat over the years, partly due to my toddler son, who thought it was pretty and proceeded to break the upper section clean off it’s base. I managed to salvage some of it, but I think now that he has graduated HS, and I’m over 50, that it is time to retire this thing.

So do I throw it out? Is there any use for old trophies? I suppose I could take it apart and use the marble base for something. But I really just want it gone. Along with other lovely things I’ve saved for way too long, like my report cards from Catholic School in the 60’s. Do not begin to ask what possessed me to keep those. They are now in the trash can in my studio. It is time…