Blog Entries – Page 152

Another Dreary Day

I feel like I should stop reading HTML manuals and start doing a Google search for information on building Arks. The rain poured steadily all day, what was a beautiful spring green is now looking a bit waterlogged. And it is a cold, bone chilling rain. I was really glad when I woke up this morning that I work from home. Going to work means a pit stop in the kitchen, unload the dishwasher, reload all the dirty dishes that appeared in the sink after midnight (don’t ask, I have a 19 year old), making breakfast and tea, putting on garden clogs to wade to the front of the driveway to get the morning paper, removing two layers of protective bags from two different papers (we have his and hers papers), and thinking as I am throwing the plastic bags away, that I should be weaving some kind of throw rug or tote bag with them. Then I wander upstairs, throw in a load of laundry, dress in real clothes instead of pajamas (sometimes I skip this step) and wander into the studio, power up the computer, look around, and decide what adventure needs my attention most.

Today it was hard to get motivated. Monday morning blues? Not so into a project that I lose sleep at night on what direction to go next? The interminable weather? Hmmmm….

I largely puttered, trying to quell the overactive brain I have, which hasn’t traveled since the beginning of March, trying to keep motivated, working alone all day long, especially with a couple of cancellations, and lack of teaching opportunities. It didn’t help that my favorite columnist, Anna Quindlen, just wrote her last “Last Word” Essay for Newsweek, stepping aside for newer younger talent. I’m feeling that way myself. I’m struggling with the idea that I’ve peaked in the area I’ve been working in for a long time, teaching what I know, and that there isn’t the demand for what I do like there once was. As an artist it is important to constantly reinvent oneself, but I’m not sure what the next step is. At almost 54 years old (birthday in a couple weeks), starting all over again doesn’t sound appetizing, plus I have two kids to put through college, I don’t have a masters degree, only a lowly bachelor’s, and I don’t have teaching certs, nor do I want to start teaching in a school system at this point in my life. I like what I do, and to find a steady paying job will prevent me from being able to travel to teach, anyway, you can see what a cranky cluttered mood my brain was in for most of the day.

So I sat down to finish sewing the dress. Should have been a simple job, n’est ce pas? I only needed to seam finish the side fronts and the front panel, put the dress together, and then cut the lining. 🙂

Sadly, I forgot I was working with handwoven fabric. Silly me. The first thing I teach in any garment class is the major fact that handwoven fabric, without a reinforcing backing, will grow from here to Trenton. Even though the fabric is quite stable, it is a quirk of handwoven fabric, that it will continue to expand until it is a couple sizes too large. So I almost always back my fabrics, but in this case, because I was making a summer dress, that step wasn’t desirable. So I used the same pattern as the muslin which was made from a non yielding brocade, which fit me like a glove. So why was I surprised when I sewed up the same pattern from the handwoven fabric that I could slip it on without even undoing the zipper and it hung like a sack? 🙁

So, I took a break, spent more time with my nose glued into my HTML manual, and then surfed the web for awhile, looking at websites for Regional Weaving Associations, Guilds, other artists, and looking over the HTML codes for each of the pages.

Later on in the afternoon, I decided to bite the bullet, and undo all the main seams, remove the zipper, and take in the dress more than 3 inches. I’m much happier with the result, but I could probably take it in even more, I’m not sure how much the fabric will continue to grow, and it still has to fit the lining which I can’t take in, since it won’t yield the way the handwoven does. It is a drop lining, so it is only attached around the neck and armhole edges.

A quick look at the radar shows more steady rain through tomorrow, partly sunny by Wednesday. My guild meets Wednesday night, so that should bring some cheer into the gray days. Thursday and Friday I have a workshop to attend, so that should be a great diversion as well!

I did manage to do an outline for my Website Success Seminar, which I am debuting at the Michigan Conference in August. Having an outline means I can now begin the tedious process of filling in all the content, but at least I have begun……

A Dreary Day

UGH! The weather was awful today. So cold and rainy, and dreary. I managed to slip between the raindrops this morning, and check on the garden. The weeds have taken over, mutant size, covering everything. The rain is so important for the growing season, but the weeds love the rain as well. Well there is nothing else to be done but wait for the sun, and get on my knees, and start pulling!

My poor husband went into Manhattan this morning, to do his annual 5 Boro Bike Tour, with his friends. The loop, starting in lower Manhattan, and finishing up in Staten Island, taking the ferry back to the starting point, is about 42 miles. He looks forward to the tour every year. He called me from the ferry, soaked through to the bone, with both knees frozen in pain. But he was happy he finished and it was worth every minute on the bike. So he is warm now, both knees braced, I made him his favorite dinner, and he is watching the hockey play-offs, life is good. The photo above shows the Queensboro Bridge, and to the right is the route through the five boroughs of Manhattan, at this point he was in Brooklyn.

MEANWHILE…

The mice played!

My daughter took advantage of the dreary day and finished another placemat, so we are now tied at four each! We are at the halfway point! It was a joy to watch her effortlessly throwing two shuttles one after another, and whipping through an overshot structure at 16. No more broken threads, total control of the loom, lovely rhythm, and while she wove on the placemat warp, I sat next to her working on my other 25″ floor loom, and finished off the tencel warp left from my class last fall with Bonnie Inouye. The class was on complex structures, called “Advance”. Most who took the class were intermediate to advanced weavers, and most had 8-12 shaft looms. Sadly I only had eight, which was just fine, and I must say I was shocked at what I got out of an eight shaft loom. The samples were gorgeous, we explored network drafting, advancing twills, all sorts of complex stuff, and I ended up with about a yard of additional warp, which had to be cleared by Thursday when I do another workshop with Barbara Herbster on Supplemental Warp.

The specs on this might be of interest to the weavers, I am using 8/2 tencel from Webs, sleyed at 36 epi, 3 threads/dent in a 12 dent reed. I am including the draft below, the technical term would be, “An 8 shaft advancing curves threading (from Bonnie) with an advance of 3, twill tie-up, and an expanded advancing points treadling for 8 shafts.” Whew! That was a mouthful.

The black on teal tencel is pretty, and wove up fairly quickly, unlike the placemats, this is only one shuttle. The hardest part was keeping track of where I was in the draft, which I had sort of memorized, with my daughter weaving about 2 1/2 feet away from me. When she stopped, or her rhythm changed, I looked over, and lost my place! 🙂

I also managed to squeeze in some time to start sewing on the dress. It is really pretty on the form, the color placement, purely chance, is lovely, accentuating the curves of the garment. The dress really does look like the “Splash” yarns it is based on, and I can’t wait to finish it, and wear it when the weather gets warm.

In case you were wondering about the odd color combination of the blog, the background is now mauve, I am trying to change the code of the template I’m using, to get the blog to look more like my website, until I figure out how to actually build a blog using my own logo and color scheme. I found the code for the background, but can’t seem to find the code in the CSS style sheet for the header background, so I can changed it to the dark purple. So, be patient while I search…

Connie Crawford

What a lovely day, not only was the weather delightful, but I had the privilege of spending the day with members of various neighborhood groups of the North Jersey American Sewing Guild Chapter at their annual Spring Fling, which was held in a ballroom of a restaurant in Sussex County, NJ. The speaker for the day was Connie Crawford, a mega sewing industry personality, who came from the fashion industry, taught Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and is a licensed designer for Butterick, published numerous textbooks, has a whole line of patterns, and is a terrific enthusiastic speaker.

The room was filled (around 50 people) with participants eager to find out how to fit their bodies, the actual title of the seminar was “After the Perky Body is Gone: Fitting Solutions”. Now, I will say (and please don’t send me hate mail) that due to some genetic roll of the dice, I’ve been blessed with no fit issues, I can basically unfold any commercial pattern and with little tweaking, get it to fit, even after a mastectomy. But I teach this sort of stuff, and my students are demographically over 50 and now have bodies that they don’t quite know what to do with. And I am always interested in how someone teaches, or approaches these issues.

Connie actually has her own pattern line, as well as the designs that are selected by Butterick. I am a bit embarrassed to say I wasn’t really familiar with them. Largely her lectures are designed around her line of patterns, which have their own sizing, and from first glance, halleluia, they actually fit real bodies. To give you an idea, I am actually her smallest size, and she goes up from there, another 11 sizes, to a 6x, which has a 76″ hip. I was truly impressed by the way the patterns fit the couple of fuller figured women she pulled from the audience, right out of the package. She did a bit of tweaking, no more than I would do with a Vogue size 12, and these women, who clearly hadn’t been able to fit into any commercial pattern on the market, probably hadn’t even tried, had well fitting slopers or master patterns to build on for all kinds of great styles. I give Connie a lot of credit for tackling this very forgotten demographic.

Connie was funny, and entertaining, but I will say, I was a bit uncomfortable with the way she dismissed much of the home sewing market, what’s being taught in fashion schools, what’s being written in books, others teaching in the fashion and sewing industries, and the way those of us who weren’t trained in the fashion industry, sew. I think she is too good at what she does to resort to dismissing everyone else, and maybe she is right, but still, there are ways to present materials that are new or innovative without making everyone else seem invalid.

If you are fortunate enough to attend one of her seminars, be prepared to spend! I think her books are good additions to my library, I have a number of pattern making and drafting and draping books, but not hers, and I actually did pick up a few tricks. But her books are actually college textbooks from Fairchild, and are priced accordingly. I did a quick check on Amazon during the lunch break, and her class discount was a lot better than the best price on Amazon, which for one of the books soared upwards of $125 for used copies. I did buy her books, Patternmaking Made Easy and The Art of Fashion Draping, and am excited to go back and remember what I learned, way too many years ago in my pattern drafting classes in college. She also sold her patterns, and pattern drafting supplies, she has 5 sewing DVD’s, and for most of the seminar, people were lined up with their credit cards while her husband played shopkeeper in the back of the room.

For me, it was fun to be surrounded by people that do what I love so much, I met some great new friends, and reconnected with someone who has come in and out of my life many times over the years. That’s always a treat!

On another note, Thursday and Friday I am taking a two day workshop with Barbara Herbster, a great weaver from the New England area. Barbara did a lot of terrific work for me for the Color Forecast Column I use to write for Handwoven Magazine. She is coming down to our guild, to teach a workshop in Supplemental Warp, and it is always fun to get together with my guild buddies and play. BUT! I just realized I have to clear the loom, with the remainder of the warp from last October’s two day class with Bonnie Inouye. So, I think I know what I’m doing tonight!

Big Splash!

After a day of bill paying, paperwork, printing monographs, and errands, I made myself clear my cutting table and dive into getting the next project underway.

You may recall I had pulled out the leftover handwoven Splash fabric from the Design Challenge Project I worked on all last year for the HGA Tampa Bay Convergence fashion show. The Design Challenge has been on my mind in recent days, because the latest issue of SS&D is out and the next group of designers have been selected for the 2010 Convergence Albuquerque Challenge. The yarn is gorgeous, I’m a bit jealous, because these are my colors, I sadly had to contend with a Floridian palette. And the yarn for the latest challenge is bamboo and tencel, not the fat cotton knitting yarn, we were given. So maybe I’ll just have to order me up some of this great yarn (at $100.00 a pound!) and see what I can do with it, without the pressure of the challenge hanging over me. Then again, maybe I’ll open up my dye cabinet and see what lurks there…

Anyway, my best west coast weaving buddy Robyn Spady is one of the designers, she lives in Seattle and I’m going to visit her the beginning of June. I know she will have the same trouble I had keeping everything top secret! Congratulations Robyn! What a ride it’s gonna be… (Don’t worry Sally, you’re still my best east coast weaving buddy!)

Anyway, I digress…

I had made up the dress in a brocade to make sure I liked the fit. I did some additional tweaking to the pattern pieces, and then laid out the two panels left from the original Challenge Fabric, side by side on the cutting table, so I could get a feel for how the colors would run from one panel to the other. There are two widths of cloth on the table, both with the same magenta running through the upper portion, which I’ll have banding the bustline. Though the pink was my least favorite part of the yarn and subsequent fabric, (which is why I had it leftover), it made sense to cut it out this way. I couldn’t have fit the pattern pieces any other way. As it was, I technically didn’t have enough for the center front and center back shoulders, and I didn’t even try to match them, but I was able to use my famous trick of butting selvedges together to achieve a wider width of fabric in that area. I try when designing fabric, to have the selvedge edges contain half a design motif, so when they are butted together, which happens more often than you would imagine, the pattern runs flawlessly across the garment.

I carefully cut out the pieces, cutting each pattern piece singly, using a single strand of embroidery floss for the tailor’s tacks, and then flipping the pattern pieces to get the second half. That way I could really control the grainlines and color.

When I was finished cutting out, I had the smallest pile of scraps, some of them should probably be tossed, but this little pile represents the remainder of a year’s worth of work, and a grand adventure, and I’m going to save this little pile, that started out as 10 yards of 36″ wide handwoven fabric! I know I can still use it for something else!

Now I really should go clean my dreadfully dirty house, make dinner, and read another 50 pages in my HTML manual…

A Creative Lull

I’m getting letters again. I know. But stay with me, I promise I’ll get back to some creative work, but there are other things calling to me, that I can’t ignore, and oddly enough, some of these things have taken me back to some very early chapters in my life. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. More fuel for my work.

Anyway, Monday and Tuesday, you might have read in the newspapers (or experienced if you live in the northeast, was brutal. I was saved by the 90 degree heat wave over the weekend, since I was at the Jersey shore, but Monday and Tuesday I couldn’t have blogged if I had wanted to, my dripping fingers would have short circuited my wireless keyboard! 🙂

We didn’t turn on the airconditioning. Pointless really, since we knew within a few days we would need the heat on again, and sure enough, it is back to 60’s during the day, and 40’s at night. Back to the winter jammies. So mostly on Monday and Tuesday, I sat in the shade, with my ice-tea, and read my HTML manual, preparing to write my new seminar on Website Success, which I will debut at the Michigan Conference in August. I’m loving this book, Ian Lloyd is a Brit, with a wicked sense of humor for a techie, and I understand what he is writing, and much of what I wasn’t completely connecting with before, is all coming together. I almost have a feeling I sort of could possibly know what I’m doing? I think that’s being overly confident, I have so much more to learn, but I have a foundation to start writing the seminar. Talk about putting the cart before the horse…

Wednesday, yesterday, was a really special day. First, the temperatures dropped about40 degrees to where they should be in April. It was a beautiful day, and with the heat, my entire yard exploded in color, EVERYTHING was blooming! But yesterday was a different kind of special day. It was my 31st wedding anniversary. Whew, it is hard to imagine we made it this far, there’s no turning back now!

Sidebar: I married my husband Kevin on a similarly beautiful April day in 1978, at a little church in Southern Jersey where I grew up. There were two Kwanzan Flowering Cherry Trees in front of the church, and we had our official wedding portraits taken in front of the trees. I can’t look at a Kwanzan Cherry without thinking of my wedding. So we planted one in the front yard of our house when we bought it in 1982, and since we still live in that house, it fills the front yard with spectacular blooms every April 29th.

Every year for 30 years, on my anniversary, my husband would send me a bouquet of roses, one for every year we were married. Last year the bouquet was almost unmanageable! So I highly encouraged him, sweet and romantic as the gesture was, he could retire the concept and just get me a lovely vase of spring flowers, they usually last longer than roses, and I’d be perfectly happy.

This is what arrived at the door yesterday. A huge explosion of color now sits on my cutting table, and it still has a couple of token roses, but the palette makes me want to open my dye cabinet and get cracking! All in good time.

For an anniversary treat, fueled by my stepsister’s love of Bruce Springsteen, the three of us, all loaded in the car yesterday afternoon and drove to the old Spectrum in Philadelphia. Now, it hasn’t escaped my coincidence radar, that I was married in Southern NJ, and our wedding night was spent at a Philadelphia airport hotel, since we were flying out in the morning to Disney World for our honeymoon! So last night, we were back in Philadelphia on our anniversary for the first time in 31 years. And what did we see? Bruce Springsteen’s 31st appearance at the Spectrum, his last before it is torn down in September. As he said during the concert, these old arenas have such character, the perfect venue for a rock concert, it was filled to capacity, which was pretty obvious during the half hour wait in line for the woman’s room, where some enterprising women decided they could hurry things along by passing the roll of toilet paper ahead down the line, so it would speed up the visit to the stall, having your toilet paper in hand before you entered. Gotta love those Springsteen fans.

The building was rockin’, and I will admit, after the opening chords of the three hour non-stop concert, I put in ear plugs, which was actually great, because it filtered out peripheral noise and allowed only what was being projected from the complex speaker system through at a decibel level that wouldn’t damage my sensitive hearing. We had great seats, as you can see from the photo, because we were high enough opposite the stage to see the mass of humanity and the wash of color lights as they flooded the crowd with fabulous palettes depending on the song. My favorite combination was the persimmon color followed by aqua. You can be sure that my next dye project will somehow incorporate that combination!

Anyway, it was a great evening, and Bruce Springsteen is a brilliant musician, showman, and song writer, and it was a privilege to listen to him, and watch him, and the E Street Band. The drummer for more than half the show was an 18 year old prodigy, son of his regular drummer. To watch the close-ups on the monitor was to watch raw talent exploding from the stage.

We got in very late, you can imagine, concert until 11:15, an hour to exit the arena parking lot, and a two hour drive back to Northern Jersey. But it was worth it, it brought back great memories, and as my husband and I opened our cards to each other, waiting for the concert to start, I knew in a heartbeat I’d do it all over again, when we both realized we had picked out the same card for each other.

PS. Placemat exchange score, Mom 4, Brianna 3. Loom warp beam is holding!