Blog Entries – Page 8

Seems like old times…

What a couple of weeks. I knew Mid-September through Mid-November would be jammed packed with all kinds of cool events, teaching opportunities, guild meetings, and general calendar must do’s but this is really crazy. I have vague recollections of just three years ago where the calendar controlled my life, instead of me controlling the calendar. Back in the spring, and even last winter, it seemed perfectly reasonable to book a couple of weekend workshops, since I’m not leaving the house to teach anymore, how difficult could this be?

Nothing here is difficult. And don’t get me wrong… I chose to participate in everything I put on my calendar. It’s just that the world opened up all at once, guild meetings started up again, a music group I once played for asked me to come back, Spinning and Weaving week, which is a weeklong series of weaverly events, all online, but like a conference all day long; teaching remotely every weekend, three weekends in a row for the same guild, and of course theater events, because those seasons started up as well.

By mid-November, this should all be quieting down, but for now, I’m tightening up my seat belt and hanging on tight!

Meanwhile, I taught remotely three weekends in a row for the Chattahoochee Guild in GA. A lot of old friends were there, and we had a great time. Last weekend we did a remote hands-on workshop and Leigh, a friend and workshop participant took this shot of the classroom, and there I am, larger than life. I of course couldn’t see what they saw, as I was viewing the classroom from multiple cameras strategically placed around the room. It was sweet when someone had a question and wanted to show me what they were working on, and they would go up to the screen to talk to me… We are all still getting used to this technology.

Meanwhile, I did manage last week, before the start of Spinning and Weaving Week, sponsored by the HGA (Handweavers Guild of America) to actually make a couple of pieces. I wove a fabric last year, all rayon, and it was sitting on the shelf just calling to me. There are a lot of competing voices in the studio, and sometimes the cacophony of who wants to be noticed more gets a bit loud!

So I wanted to see if I could draft this swing vest, based on a commercial pattern, using one of my own patterns. And I’m really happy with the results. I used my 1000 Swing Dress pattern and created this variation. I wanted to be able to use the selvedge of the cloth for the center front edge, and have it fall away in lapels. And fringe the bottom edges, so no hems. Eventually I’ll take my notes and recreate what I did and see if I can document it in a video.

I had extra fabric, and I thought it would lend itself to a bias top, so my 900 Bias Top pattern came in handy.

I still had extra fabric, and so I made this tote bag using my piecing technique, which I documented in a four-part video on my YouTube channel, The Weaver Sews. And there is still a stack of leftovers…

Meanwhile, while I had some free moments in the studio, I took a leftover section of the towel warp I showed last time and made this zippered bag.

So Spinning and Weaving Week is/was a lot of fun. Events all day long. Some really great speakers and studio tours. They featured me in my studio during Spinning and Weaving week two years ago. How I wish the re-play was available. I often meant to film my own version to put on YouTube myself. It is on the list. Which is growing exponentially…

I was one of the panelists Tuesday night, for a session about getting into juried shows and the basics. It was great hearing the other panelists and their perspective on things. Friday night was really really special. There was a viewing party of the Convergence 2022 fashion show, where I had five garments as an invited artist, but I did not actually attend the conference, for many reasons, mostly because I was at a wedding in Virginia for the son of someone who has meant a great deal to me over the years. I had hoped the fashion show would be recorded, and I wasn’t disappointed. Seeing my five works walk the runway was just the highlight of my week!

And this morning, I set up my messy office, because I have sixty different things going on at once, into a video studio because this afternoon was the Strut your Stuff fashion show, and of course I registered for that. Meaning I would be modeling one of my garments for it. I pulled out the video lights and set up the good webcam camera, the one we use for taking videos.

And I was first up for the actual fashion show. So here I am modeling my double weave jacket I made earlier in the year. I included the second image because the running transcript was just too hilarious, Artificial intelligence just doesn’t get textile terms. “Devil Weed” should have been double weave, but Devil Weed works… I sort of got that vibe when I was trying to weave off the sampler last January with one arm…

And Friday, in between sessions from Spinning and Weaving week, I took an online class through my guild with a weaver from AZ, Deborah Jarchow, on Clasped Weft. For some reason that technique has never crossed my path. It was fun, I sort of felt like I was dancing with the shuttles. I had set the loom up on Tuesday while watching Textiles And Tea, an online weekly interview, also sponsored by HGA.

And remember I mentioned the cacophony of looms and fibers and fabric and yarns calling to me? I had cleared all of the floor looms I’d been weaving on except for two. They reached out every time I walked by in the studio, as if to say, “Please won’t you sit down and weave with me?”

So I did sit down, whenever I had a few minutes. This is the ice dyed fabric I started earlier in the year, and I have no idea how much there is still to weave, because I started with 10 yards and it doesn’t look like anywhere near that on the cloth beam.

And my favorite loom (don’t say that too loudly, there will be a revolt) has a fabric I spent a long time working out last year, and I think I put on 8 yards of 10/2 cotton warp. So I’m probably over half-finished this very cool pattern called “Drunken Squares”. It has been that kind of a week.

Don’t cry for me dear readers, I’m having a blast. I just wish the blast was a little more like a pop, and less like an explosion! This will all calm down as the winter draws near. I have someone working on my yard clean up, nice to have people for that, and I was finally able to get my alarm system company to come and upgrade/replace and add additional smoke detectors, especially in the garage weaving studio. They had rate of rise detectors, appropriate for a garage, but not appropriate for a weaving studio with yarns stacked to the ceiling. So those finally got upgraded, but there have been workers in and out for the last week, and they will be returning yet again on Tuesday. We all just step around each other…

I teach next weekend for two days in Canada, again remotely, I’m still so amazed that this technology even exists. So it will be a busy week prepping for that hand’s on workshop. Wednesday night I have two different fun events happening simultaneously, which is unfortunate, but I can still do both, because one will be recorded…

Stay tuned…

A productive week in limbo…

So far, I have not been called in for petit jury duty, I call every couple days to see my status, and I will call again tonight, but because I blocked out this time just in case, I created an almost mini get away to my sewing room, in the basement, to just play. I did little else, which was sort of a treat. (I even slept in the guest room to pretend I was on vacation, which really confused the animals.) So it has been a really productive week, if you measure productivity by how much stuff you made. Which I tend to do, and always feel accomplished with a nice stack of my efforts.

I did spend a stupid amount of time trouble shooting a Back-up Service for my 900+ blog posts. There were suddenly a number of errors, which caused the service to not be able to back things up, but going back and forth doing screen shots and copies of logs, between my tech support, the back up service tech support and my hosting company caused me untold grief, have I ever mentioned I hate technology, and lost studio time. Yet, when things finally work, and I had something to do with the resolution, I’m inordinately proud of myself. I still hate technology, but I wouldn’t be able to leave a digital legacy without it, and so I carry on as best I can.

Meanwhile. My garden was odd this year. Lack of rain, and intense heat, I have a good deal of leafy greens to eat, but almost no peppers, beans, basil, and almost no large tomatoes, which is odd because this time last year I was making quarts of tomato sauce and pesto for the freezer. But for the first time in years, the cherry tomato plants took over the garden. I almost never get cherry tomatoes. So I dutifully dried a couple of trays in the oven, and popped them in the freezer for bursts of flavor throughout the winter.

And remember those Water Iris Leaf Mats I wove a couple blog posts ago? So there are a few left from last season’s batch, and I’ve been wrestling with whether or not to harvest this year’s. Meanwhile, my daughter Brianna has been fooling around with what to do with the prolific amount of Smart Water bottles she has saved, because all sorts of trash is treasure to a creative person. She made this adorable basket, actually a whole series from sea grass and a stripped Smart Water Bottle (she has a tool for that) last year. I immediately bought one.

She came to me the other night, after asking how to reconstitute the Water Iris leaves, and popped this on the table.

I’m blown away by what she comes up with. So that adorable basket was what prompted my handyman to harvest all the Water Iris Leaves in the yard and lay them on the patio table. I gathered them into bundles with zip ties and hung them under the gazebo for temporary storage, and they will ultimately move to a shed to dry over the winter.

Meanwhile, on vacation in the basement, I hemmed the dishtowels I cut from the loom the week before.

And I washed and cut apart the five scarves from the warp I made last winter with a broken shoulder. That felt really good. These are called “A Winter’s Tale”.

I cut out and sewed the little summer shirt from the Turned Overshot warp. Originally I had front waist darts, but I didn’t like how they competed with the overshot stripe. So I took them out.

And I started rooting through leftovers and scraps and played around. First I took some of the test samples from my Eco Printing experiments last year, and cut some into a zippered bag.

I was so happy with it, I did three more, using a suede microfiber skirt, which no longer fit me, as the base, and a cut up lavender silk skirt from a weaver’s estate sale as the lining.

I gave a lecture to a couple of guilds, one in Austin, TX, and one in GA, on what to do with leftovers. Every time I give this lecture I get inspired to go make something.

So I dove into my bin of thrums, leftover warp waste, of which I have a lot, mostly hand dyed yarns and ribbons, and grabbed a piece of micro-suede that I bought from a friend, fused onto fusible fleece, and started to assemble those thrums as a collage. I tossed them on, and covered each panel with Sulky Solvy.

Then I used a twin needle and a quilt bar and started to create a window pane effect to keep the thrums controlled.

Once I had all four panels completed, and washed to dissolve the Sulky Solvy, I started to assemble the bag.

Add this one to my collection, this is really fun.

And remember awhile back I played around with tying those same warp thrums together into what’s called Zanshi, a Japanese technique of wasting nothing. I wove those balls of tied together warp thrums into a fabric, which I hadn’t done anything with up until now.

So I cut out bag panels and made a tote out of those as well.

It has been a really productive week, but I fear that will come to an end. I really don’t like having my life a giant question mark, but ask anyone who goes through a tragedy, health issue, natural disaster, whatever, this is what being an adult is, and trying to stay focused and in the moment. I work best when I’m busy, and it keeps my mind from going into overdrive. Of course I fear that I’ll get called in the last day of my two weeks of jury duty, and be put on a case that could last weeks, because it is federal, but I can’t think that far ahead, and just do whatever I need to do today. I think another zip bag from the leftover scarp warp from the Winter’s Tale scarves…

Stay tuned.

Moving Forward but Looking Back…

I almost missed today. It has been 21 years, and I almost forgot. I saw references in this morning’s paper to 9/11 and I picked up my phone and looked at the date and realized that I almost forgot. There is so much happening in the world, that we aren’t remembering the really important stuff, the stuff that keeps life in perspective.

I looked back over my blog posts of the last 14 years. I referenced this day a few times, but the one I’d like to re-share was from 2009, less than a year into my new blog, where I talked about a letter I wrote to the editor of Handwoven magazine, actually the editor requested that I write it, on September 12th, 2001. She had offered me the position of features editor and I said, though I was honored, I lived 20 miles from ground zero and we weren’t even sure yet who in the town had died. Could I get back to her? She encouraged me to write how I felt, and what it meant to be an artist in uncertain times. September 11th was supposed to be my first day of the new semester where I was a substitute adjunct at Montclair State University in their Fiber Department. So here is the link to that long ago blog post with the letter I wrote for Handwoven Magazine. Thank you Madelyn van der Hoogt for the privilege of being able to write about grief, the unknown, and the pain of living through that time.

Moving forward I have spent an exhausting last couple of weeks doing the impossible. I cleared four looms and am working through a fifth. Turns out I don’t have to report for jury duty the next three days, I call again Wednesday evening, so I get an extra three days, but still, I needed to tie up loose ends and have things ready in case I am put on a case.

So, the first one I cleared was the last of the 7 mohair throws on 18 yards, I wove from all the mohair I had accumulated over the years. That loom is empty and waiting…

The next loom I cleared was the run of towels I had done to specifically explore a structure for an article I was writing. Those towels are washed and just waiting to be cut apart and hemmed.

Then I cleared the warp from hell, actually the warp was fine, the way I threaded it, with the plain weave all on two shafts made each shaft stick and I had to manually push each shaft down for every row. 30 picks per inch. It was painful. But the fabric is beautiful. Simple, elegant, and washed. With a couple of unexpected free days, I’m hoping to maybe make up a summer top so I can wear it before the season comes to an end? This is a turned overshot on 8 shafts with a 20/2 cotton ground.

And then I went to the Macomber I had set up early in the year, with the broken shoulder. Brianna helped me with that one, beaming 15 yards with a broken shoulder was challenging. I only had two scarves left to weave, so I hunkered down and polished off that warp. They still need to be washed. I called this run A Winter’s Tale (with apologies to Shakespeare), because really, this past winter was quite the tale…

And now, I’m happily weaving off the ten yards of a rayon ice dyed warp woven in a crackle structure. It is really pretty, and with a 5/2 cotton weft, it weaves so much faster than the turned overshot!

I continue to chip away at entering books into LibraryThing.com. I’m working on the sewing books, finding all sorts of treasures and vintage textbooks. I just hit 1,126 and still have lots more to enter. I opened this vintage sewing manual to check on copyright date and publisher info, most of those have to be entered manually and I got the biggest surprise of the year. There, across a two page spread and into the next page, were beautiful sentiments from my students from my first or second class at Sievers School of Fiber Arts, September 2007. This was a year before I started my blog. I have no recollection of being given this book, but what I really don’t think I ever saw, were the beautiful sentiments carefully written inside. I read through them all and because I’m still good friends, after teaching there for 12 years, with many of my former students, I immediately sent them the photo, and we all had a good sharing of memories.

Last weekend, while I was happily weaving away clearing one of the looms, I took a break and came into the living room to find that the cushion in the window seat was, well, a picture is worth a thousand words.

One of the dogs, there is no way to know who, somehow got his nose in the zipper and found the foam stuffing and well, I had a time cleaning the foam out of everything. One of the dogs (probably mine) had already chewed up the cushion and I had repaired it twice. I gave up, drove to Joann’s for new foam and a new zipper, and with some fabric from one of my recent weaver estate sales, I remade the cushion.

It didn’t take them long to adjust to the new cushion.

Crossing my fingers it lasts for at least a few months. It is their favorite place to hang out, letting me know about whoever dares to walk down the street. There are actually dogs who when the walk by my house, stop and sit at the curb to watch the show of these two maniacs barking their fool heads off because they are elk hounds and they are bred to find an elk and hold it at bay by barking annoyingly for up to 8 hours until the hunter can come and claim his prey. Sadly they’ve never seen an elk, so they think that everything that walks by, including baby strollers is potential game and I should be duly informed.

It is raining all day and will into tomorrow I hope. We are having a severe drought, after flooding rains all spring. I welcome the gentle rain. There is lots to do inside. I vacuumed my house and put to bed a 36 page issue I wrote for Heddlecraft magazine. I’ve been working on that for a number of months. I wanted it finalized before I am potentially placed on a jury.

One of the structures I wove to potentially be used in the article was one from Dr. Bateman, mentioned in a number of publications. This is draft 110 and I was able to weave two versions, get it washed and photographed, and get the loom reset. A couple of repeats a day, should get me through what remains of the three yard warp in no time. I have a lot of practice clearing looms, one repeat at a time…

Stay tuned dear readers, hopefully lots more to come… And more looms to clear… And get warped again… Winter is coming…

One Day at a time…

For many many years, in my early adulthood, I spent time in a 12-step program. One of the key slogans in that program is One Day at a Time. It is basically how you get through life, and I am absolutely convinced it is how I got through the pandemic, which sad to say, is still not over.

But One Day at a Time, as important as it is, doesn’t or never did help me to deal with life as an artist/educator/writer, etc. It is in that role that I always always had to look ahead and plan ahead and make sure deadlines were met. There is nothing that I do that I can blow out in a sitting at the last minute. Trust me…

At this point in my life, most of the stress of traveling, planning ahead by applying to conferences, sending proposals, updating content, shipping workshop materials ahead, and meeting deadlines is mostly behind me. And yet, as I approach the fall, I’m kind of shocked at how parts of that former life have reared their ugly head. And I’m sort of OK with that. At this point in my life, any stress I put on myself is my choosing and I can’t tell you how much that makes a difference. Artist’s never really retire. They just change the focus of their creativity. My focus isn’t dependent anymore on earning a living at what I do. That is a huge deal. So, the hours I spend during the day are juggling all the cool things I’m inventing, investigating, and exploring.

It occurred to me though, in the past week, that I have a very busy fall, all doing stuff that I chose, but stuff nonetheless. And I find myself making lists, printing a weekly calendar and making an assigned schedule (which for me is really critical to reduce stress since it is all written down).

I have a couple of remote workshops and lectures to teach in the fall, which will need some tweaking and updating. One is a 260-slide presentation, given over two days. I can’t do that update in one sitting. So 45- 50 slides a day will get me there.

And I’ve been asked to rejoin an early music group. Which means practicing daily to get back up to speed on the recorder.

I’m in the middle of an extensive article, for a weaving publication, which isn’t completely contracted, but I’m writing it anyway, and I’m up to 30 pages. If the article doesn’t happen, I’ll just self publish it. But it is intense, requiring a lot of samples, and I have several looms currently filled with projects/yardage/samples for this particular article. I won’t get the final OK to move forward with all of it until mid-September, which is when I have Petit Jury duty. I will be on call in Newark, a dreadful city to drive into and park, for two weeks, which takes out half of September. And I’m not happy that NJ has just dropped its masking requirement for jury duty. I would really hate to have avoided Covid for 2 1/2 years only to get it while serving on jury duty. Please don’t tell me all the ways I can get out of it. I really don’t have a good reason for an excuse, and if I ever needed a jury of my peers, I’d hope that reasonably intelligent people would step up to the plate and give me an unbiased judgement. But I can’t be editing a 30 page article, with captions and 50 drafts and images while I potentially will be sitting all day in a jury box.

This requires some substantial planning ahead, just in case, and I’m doing my best to look ahead. Best case scenario is I won’t get called or will get excused. (I once was excused because the defense attorney didn’t want an artist in the jury… still laughing over that…)

One of the drafts I wanted to sample, is one from the Dr. Bateman collection, draft 110. It occurs in several publications, and requires some pretty varied yarns, which I searched through my stash to procure. That was a lot of fun.

I put on a short warp, 3 yards, which for me is pretty short, so I decided to use my small warping board. The sample was 16″ wide, but with a sett of 30epi, it was more than 400 ends. Leaning over the table to wind this warp, which changed with every end, was getting old fast. So I wandered around my house to see what I could invent to help make this more efficient.

I am a hobbyist musician, as noted above, and have a lovely wood music stand in my dining room with all my recorders and the piano.

The warping board fit perfectly, and I could put cones on a cone holder, changing them out with each pass, and the whole process was indeed more efficient.

I changed ends using tape, instead of spending the time tying the ends together. Since I warp front to back, I’m cutting the warp at both ends anyway.

Once beamed, I was ready to tie onto the front and dive in.

This is a pretty intense warp combination of varied cottons, from 20/2 to 20 weight pearl to floss, whatever that means. The weft is a merino tabby, and a 2/8 wool, so I’ll cut a sample and see how it looks washed. I still have another treadling sequence to try so I’ll keep working on a couple inches a day.

This is done on one of my 8 shaft table looms, which is slow going, but one of the treadling sequences requires 14 treadles, which my looms don’t have. So a table loom it is, but with two shuttles, there isn’t any place to put those shuttles because the depth of the weaving area in the front is so shallow.

So I wandered around my house trying to be resourceful. I found a rusted planter on the deck which fit perfectly, gave me a bit of a footrest, and held a plastic shoe box which gave me a place for the shuttles. I’m so clever!

Meanwhile, my guild is having its annual show and sale the beginning of November. That’s basically less than two months away, because the inventory sheets have to be in by the third week in October since we are moving into bar code tags. No last-minute entries.

That’s all fine, but I basically have to start thinking about what I have to sell, and what I can make between now and then. This is not the time to embrace One Day at a Time. I have several mohair throws, and some items left from last year’s sale, but I seriously need more zippered pouches from leftovers, tote bags, and greeting cards. I usually do really well with them, and God knows, I do have leftovers!

I pulled the Zanshi fabric I wove last year, made from all my thrums tied together. That will make great bags, and I pulled the samples from the eco print workshop I did last summer. I can do something with that as well.

My goal right now is to start clearing looms. I’m thinking that I can clear a loom a week. And I have a half dozen cuts of handwoven fabric I’m sitting on, and if I plan ahead, I might be able to produce a number of items to sell. The difference between now and back in the 80’s when I did this for a living, was trying to guess the market and having stuff to sell because I needed the income. Now, anything I make, if it doesn’t sell, I will either use myself, (what a concept) or give it as a gift. Or in the case of the really expensive items, donate them to an arts organization’s high-end fund-raising auction.

Meanwhile, I wove off three towels on a draft experiment, and then pulled the warp from the heddles, and rethreaded the entire thing in a new pattern.

This pattern is one from a book on my shelf, A Handbook of Weaves, a Dover reprint, from a weaver named G. Hermann Oelsner. I couldn’t figure out his draft notation, but a friend told me that all the drafts in his book were transcribed into handweaving.net. Which I have a subscription to… Jackpot!

I probably have about 1 1/2 more towels to weave on this warp, so it should be cleared in the next couple days.

I have my work cut out for me. Literally and figuratively. No rest for the creative soul, and that isn’t a complaint, I can assure you.

Stay tuned…

Puttering…

As the summer comes to a close, the stifling heat and lack of rain, makes going outdoors depressing, I just hang in my studio, where they like me, and I have just a bit of control over something, and all is well.

The interesting thing about control in my studio is that, I’m in control if I know what I’m doing and I’ve done it a number of times before. But I’m crossing into some uncharted territory these days, doing things I haven’t done before, trying out structures and theories and even though things go wrong, the point here is to learn.

I designed a draft, to explore turned overshot. I had finished and delivered a half dozen overshot placemats for a friend, and wanted to explore what happens if you turn a draft. For those who aren’t weavers, this means nothing, I’m sorry. But I know enough about drafting and have weaving software that does the job for me, so that worked fine. I wanted just a narrow band of overshot across one side of my body in an easy summer shirt. No problem. Except, since the turned overshot took up 6 shafts, I had two left for the plain weave on either side of the band. And I’m working with 20/2 cotton sett at 30 epi. Which means that each of the front two shafts has 15 inserted large eyed heddles per inch, making things really dense.

So dense that the warp doesn’t separate when I step on the treadle. So I have to manually push down either the first or second shaft, each pick. Tedious and annoying. And I could have just redesigned the draft to have completely fixed this issue, but that’s why I’m in uncharted territory. To learn.

For a brief moment I considered pulling all 700+ ends and starting over, with a corrected draft that spread the heddles over four shafts instead of two, and just decided to carry on and deal with it.

I’m making progress…

Meanwhile, I cleared the loom of the Iris Leaf Mats I’ve been weaving, cut them apart, and hemmed each one.

Then I trimmed all the stem ends from the back.

I washed each mat in hot water to get the warp to shrink, which it did, and then I hung each one to dry. I pressed the first one, the others are in a stack on the ironing board, and I’m so happy with this experiment. I have to decide if I should harvest another batch for next year…

Tomatoes from my garden in a berry bowl made by my weaving buddy Limor Johnson.

Of course now that I have an empty floor loom, I have to put a warp on it. I’m playing around with combining drafts, which I do all the time in my regular fabrics, but I wanted to see what I could come up with on only 4 shafts. The last fabric I did like this was on the 12 shaft… Since I have a ridiculous amount of 8/2 cotton, and this is going into fall, I thought a small run of dishtowels wouldn’t hurt.

So I wound, threaded and beamed cotton warp for a run of towels.

I played around with a draft combination and worked out an easy treadling.

I finished off the first towel and now I’m starting the second one in blue with a different treadling pattern. The draft is part of a potential article, so I am not at liberty to share it yet.

And there is the mohair that just seems to keep on going. I put 18 yards of mohair on my 45″ loom, actually I squeezed out 46″, but who’s to know… I just finished blanket number 6.

And of course I always have an assistant.

So I’m starting blanket number 7, and this will be the last one, and I’m hoping I can squeak out 60″.

Because…

The knots…. The sections aren’t all the same because I pre-wound the 18 yard warp in two inch sections and then wound them directly onto the sectional, each section at a time. Some of the loftier mohairs packed slightly differently, so they didn’t all start in the same place. Still, I’m pretty close. I may have to squeak the short sections by adding a dummy warp to them. Not sure how that will work in mohair, but I’m willing to try anything, because, well, I’m here to learn…

I’m trying to get out a bit more, I met with a knitting group this week, and I did give a remote lecture to an American Sewing Guild chapter in Kentucky. Lovely group. And Friday was the final finishing up of some of the most fabulous costumes I’ve ever worked on for a production of Metromaniacs, at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, which opens in 4 days. The costumes are 18th century with an over the top contemporary twist. Lots and lots of handsewing… I hear the production is hilarious. My tickets are in a couple of weeks.

Enjoy what’s left of the summer dear readers. I thought about pulling a couple of my little Structo’s out and taking them outdoors to weave. Instead I just sat in my cozy studio and wove instead. I made some progress on the 8 shaft Shadow Weave on Sisko…

…and the 4 shaft overshot gamp on Riker.

And finally, each morning I grab a small stack of books to enter in my Librarything.com database. My library is called weaversew if you are on Librarything.com. I just hit something like 995 books. I’m working through my dye library and then will start on the sewing books. I look at each book carefully and want to try/do/experience it all. And then I find a gem like this…

Maybe not… My weaving buddies decided that to make a full bust adjustment on this pineapple apron they would probably need five motifs…

Stay tuned…