What a way to finish a strong teaching year, full of roller coaster rides and grand adventures.  I woke up Friday morning after two uneventful flights to Cleveland via Baltimore on Thursday.  This is what I saw…

At first, in spite of how gorgeous the snow was, I thought, crap, 20 students and they are all going to have problems getting to the workshop.  I was assured by my lovely confident hostess Nora, that snow would not deter this group, and this is Cleveland after all, this is nothing.

We headed off to the venue, through rural eastern Cleveland, arriving at a spacious ag museum building and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t dreaming.  I’ve never seen such a spacious workshop space.  Nora and her co coordinator Nancy had provided a complete spread for each day for both breakfast and lunch, so we could work uninterrupted.  Ok, they weren’t NY bagels, but any port in a storm… 🙂

The 20 participants were mostly from the Cleveland Western Reserve Guild, with a few coming in from neighboring parts of Ohio.  I have to say in all my years of teaching, besides the space and details the coordinators put together, I was most impressed that 19 of the 20 students were there, on time, set up, and properly fed and caffeinated waiting to go when the first lecture started.  The last participant was approximately three minutes late, I heard she came from four hours away.  Ask any teacher what drives them nuts the most, and that’s having to repeat the entire preliminary lecture to students who roll in an hour late.  “I’ll catch up” doesn’t quite work.  This group was on time every day, staying to the end, no excuses like, “I have to leave three hours early because I have a dinner party tonight”.  They were troupers, and they were excited, and they asked amazing questions, offered amazing hints and tips themselves, and helped each other when I couldn’t get around to everyone.

The space was remarkable.  There was an area for each participant to have their own full size table… (Nancy even arranged to have additional event lighting brought in)

There was a space for each participant to have a seat at a set of  lecture tables, set up in a V shape…

There was a comfortable podium for my projection equipment and for me to “perch” on…

And of course the dining area, with mums and table cloth and a daily spread of food from local eateries.

The class was my three day Garment Construction for Fiber Artists, we started the first morning fitting jacket muslins, I bring those, and then each participant traces their custom changes from my master patterns so they go home with a basic jacket they can work with.  (Yes, I know that is the ugliest fabric but making a muslin from a woven plaid really helps show what grainlines are doing)

Participants learn all sorts of pattern alterations, some had minimum or none, others had extensive, all learned a great deal and were pleased to learn about fitting their own bodies.

I spent the remainder of the workshop teaching specific techniques for great looking garments, a basic sewing review, followed by creative seam and edge finishes, and great ways to close a garment.  Participants got to try out all kinds of techniques, Hong Kong Seam Finishes, French Seams, Bias Tricot Seam Finishes, Bound Buttonholes, and more.  It was fun to see all the samples lining up on the tables.

I think my favorite part of a multi day class like this is individual consulting.  Participants can add their name to a list and as I have time, I sit with them and go over things they’ve brought, mostly, “I have this fabric I wove, felted, created, etc. and I don’t know what to do with it…”.  One of the students Lisa, brought in a ratty Kilim rug, faded and falling apart in places, with some really lovely perimeter areas that could easily be cut into a jacket. 🙂

There were a number of feltmakers in the class as well.  It is always fun to work with felted panels or yardage, felt has wonderful organic edges that allow very creative hems and edges.

What amazed me most about this group, is they kept at it, even after the workshop ended each evening.  Saturday night, almost the entire class headed out to dinner, and the party class resumed in the restaurant.  And after the workshop ended Sunday night, about half the class tagged along to a private opening of a local lace making establishment called “The Lacemaker” a long standing supplier of tools and supplies to the lacemakers and needleworkers of the world.  Tracy Jackson, the lovely proprietor, opened the store especially for us, I hope we made it worth her while.  Sadly Tracy is closing the shop in December, so lucky for us, there were hefty discounts all around.  I wasn’t in need of many tools or supplies in lacemaking, I certainly have enough, including a couple travel pillows, although hers were beautiful, but there are always a few things one can pick up in a place like that  and I did instant damage to my credit card… 🙂

And so it is with very fond memories and a very successful workshop behind me that I hugged Nora at the airport Monday and hopped a plane, two more uneventful flights, this time through Boston, where I finished one knitted sock and am almost through the ribbing on the second one.  I arrived home around dinner time, met by my son at curbside pick up, and off we went to dinner and a beer.  Life is good.

Other than the malfunctioning toilet that greeted me, which I quickly fixed, re entry seemed to be seamless, until I woke up Tuesday morning and found out my business credit card number was stolen.  I hate when that happens.  What a pain in the butt.  And they did damage.  It happened some time on Monday while I was traveling, maybe it was the sandwich I bought in the airport?  The Cleveland Post office? Dinner at Applebee’s?  Do we really know what they do with your credit card when they take it away?  Within minutes hundreds of fraudulent charges were applied to my card, mostly online gift cards, and the credit card company fraud alert computers realized something was amiss and shut down the card.  So my new one arrived today, and now I have to go back and contact everyone who automatically debits my card, charities like public radio, Doctor’s without Borders, etc.

But, for now, I’m home, safe, unpacked, and heading out to lunch with a bunch of girlfriends I haven’t seen in awhile,  and I don’t have to get on a plane again for business until the end of February. 🙂

 

 

I’m almost done with the travel, one more trip next weekend to Cleveland and I get a nice long entertaining break in the studio, and boy do I have plans.

Note: I’m quite aware that life is what happens when you are making other plans, and that more than likely life’s little roller coaster rides will derail my best intentions, but I can pretend for the moment I’m going to do great new work in the studio over the long winter hiatus, so work with me here…

This past weekend was actually quite the wonderful diversion, I joined the Northeast Feltmakers Guild, which meets three times a year in various locations around the northeast. Coincidentally, the November meeting was to be held at WEBS, in Northhampton, MA.  If you have followed my blog at all, you will note that my lovely daughter is now a student at UMass Amherst, which is exactly 10 miles from WEBS.  🙂

First let me explain about this very wonderful group.  At least what I figured out from my weekend with them.  Like all fiber enthusiasts, the felters are tenacious, and resourceful, and love a good party, and they bring their creativity to the kitchen as well.  I’m especially impressed with this group, centering on the Western Mass area, because, if you have been following the news at all, the northeast got pretty slammed in the freak October surprise snow storm, and the worst hit was Western Mass, which reported as much as 30 inches of snow.  On top of trees that hadn’t lost their leaves.  It was a lethal combination…

The schedule for these weekend events starts out on a Friday night with some sort of pizza gathering, followed by a Saturday all day program/event and huge show and tell, followed by an evening pot luck affair at some generous felter’s residence, and ending with a Sunday morning business meeting.

The pizza party and Saturday presentation/program were organized by Flo,  an enthusiastic felter who lives in Amherst.  She coordinated all the housing for anyone coming from a distance, and kept the Yahoo group informed of any changes.  And there were a ton.  As of Friday evening, Flo still had no power, as did many of the felters who trekked to Amherst, dodging the traffic because UMass Amherst is actually in Amherst and this weekend was Homecoming.  I thought I’d seen traffic nightmares living my whole life in NJ.  Yikes!  20,000 students, plus parents and alumni, well you can imagine.  And I hear that Amherst College, also in Amherst had parents weekend.  There wasn’t a hotel room available in a 300 mile radius.  And yet, the local felters all took it in stride, including no power.

Pre pizza refreshments were served by candlelight, and the party headed down the street toting flashlights and food, to a different part of the neighborhood where Myra lived, because Myra had power.  It is the little things in life… (Note here that the storm was last Saturday, before Halloween, no power means no food, completely empty refrigerators, and often no water if the house has a well.  Also no heat.  Flo had city water and a wood stove, it was toasty and romantic…)

I arrived Friday afternoon at the UMass campus a couple of hours late, hitting traffic like I’ve never seen, and got to drop off a car load of “Mommy can you bring me XXX…” kind of stuff.  I gave Brianna the biggest hug, doing my best to stand upright because no matter how hard I hug, she can topple me off my feet, since she is bigger than me…  I invited Brianna to accompany Jenny and me to the pizza party, Jenny was my encyclopedic car company for the five hour plus trip, traveling with Jenny is like having the encyclopedia Britannica on the back seat. Brianna was thrilled to escape the campus if only for an evening.  After the party I got her back to campus so she could get some sleep since she had donkey watch at 3am.  One of the donkeys (she is a pre-vet major) is ready to give birth, and the club members take turns watching from their dorm room on a web cam, reporting any difficulties to the resident vet.

Brianna was so thrilled to be around all “those fiber people” again, she asked if she could tag along on Saturday.  So I agreed to pick her up Saturday morning and Jenny, Bri and I headed off to WEBS.

On top of all that organizing, Flo presented a terrific program on Shibori, both in terms of working with felt, and on silk, since a lot of felters use a laminate technique called Nuno, where the wool is layered onto a silk backing and then felted.  Shibori is the Japanese art of resist, and there are a number of ways to go about it.  For every Japanese term Flo presented to the class, Brianna furiously scribbled the actual Japanese symbols.  Her four semesters of Japanese language at the community college paid off.  Flo did an excellent job, she has taken many workshops and had boatloads of samples to share with the class of about 25. I think many of the samples shown here are from a Chad Hagen class.  And of course there was shopping built in because well, we were at WEBS, enough said.

In the afternoon, we all got to sample some of the stitching, clamping and assorted resist techniques on silk, and Flo, even though she had no electricity, planned to dye the samples that night during the pot luck supper.  Fortunately for her, her power came back on and the celebrating began.  My daughter was so thrilled to be able to spend the day with a bunch of fiber enthusiasts and she got a few contacts from members of the Pioneer Valley Handweavers, who meet at WEBS, and she is hoping to join that guild.  I took her back to the campus on the way to the pot luck supper, with a stop at Trader Joe’s for my contribution, since Brianna had an ice hockey home game to attend.  She is wicked into ice hockey.  Makes my husband proud. He is a long time supporter of the NJ Devils and had season tickets for many years.  Apparently UMass has quite an ice hockey team.  Who knew…

Anyway, Sunday morning’s meeting was in Springfield MA, at the Exposition Center there, in conjunction with the Third Annual Fiber Festival of New England.  It was sort of like a mini NY Sheep and Wool festival under one big roof.  Jenny and I decided, that we had way too much stuff in our studios, and she had already done her budget at WEBS, and that if we didn’t attend the festival, only the felter’s business meeting, we wouldn’t be tempted to buy anything.  Sad I know, but it was a wise decision and by lunch time we were well on our way home, crossing our fingers that the traffic would be minimal, which it was, and we made it to my driveway without stopping, in three hours.  🙂

So another grand adventure is crossed off my calendar, I have another group of fiber friends to connect with, and I’m looking forward to another road trip with Jenny in December, this time to a class we are taking in Vermont, Freeform Machine Embroidery-Design Techniques for Felt with Christine Fries at the Northeast Fiber Arts Center.  I suppose I’ll be driving up 91 through Massachusetts, which passes right by the University…  🙂

Cleveland, here I come…

This will be a quick post, no photos, I’m able to access my blog accounts with my MiFi which has thankfully started to work again.

We here in the northeast have experienced yet another weather related environmental disaster, if you haven’t heard, just turn on the news.  Over 1,000 trees destroyed in Central Park alone.  Many are still without power, living in shelters or with relatives, food spoiled, my son spent the last three days working at Target inventorying and tossing all the perishables, the second time in two months, they had no generator for keeping freezer cases cold.  He said he was assigned the freezer room since he was the only one who could tolerate the smell of rotting food.  Maybe his military training?

I miraculously still have power and never lost it, odd since just a block away, everything was dark.  But I don’t have cable, internet, and phone since all come from the same source, and apparently that source is without power.  No telling when it will be back.  So I am relying mostly on my Android phone, an absolute lifesaver, and since I do have power, I can keep it charged. It is the small things one doesn’t think about until times like this…

We did suffer some damage to our trees, our beautiful specimens, the baby sequoia I wrote about in a blog post a couple years ago, and my beautiful curly willows, raised from cuttings, all snapped in half from the cement like weight of the heavy wet snow that stuck to all the leaves of the trees that were just starting to turn fall colors.

Once again, my issues are minimal, but so many are just in shock and sad, many hadn’t recovered from the hurricane, no walls and floors and in constant fights with insurance companies.  It is hard to keep experiencing all these disasters with my husband in Saudi Arabia, hard for him as well to be so helpless.  But I’ve been blessed so far, I have my bottom feeders here to help, and we have been spared once again, any appreciable damage.  The only house issue was a fascia/gutter that spanned the front of the house which came down from the weight of the cement snow hitting the porch roof and careening off like an out of control snowboarder to land in the driveway inches from the back of my car.

So know I’m fine, and am able to print and package and get ready to ship stuff ahead to my last teaching job of the season, in Cleveland.  I’ve finished my book (Cutting for Stone), which was excellent, finished a pair of knitted socks, worked offline on building a website for my guild, and submitted multiple proposals for the ASG sewing conference for next year and spent a day submitting a calendar of new online classes for the next couple of months on Weavolution.com.  I managed to upload them right before we lost service on Saturday.

Stay tuned…

 

 

I do love the southerners.  In sharp contrast from where I come from, there are manners, and good old fashioned hospitality, and lots and lots of fried food!

I just finished a two day workshop near Huntsville Alabama, in the northern part of the state, closer to Tennessee than anywhere else, and I was completely charmed by the location and how different the landscape was from up here in NJ.

Flat farmland, and yet hills and wooded areas, river front, and cotton.  Lots and lots of cotton.  Apparently I hit it just right.  When the cotton is mature, and ready for picking,  I was told a defoliant was sprayed, which caused all the leaves to drop from the cotton plants, leaving stalks and huge puffs of beautiful cotton.  I’m not super thrilled to hear all my cotton clothing, towels, and household textiles started out with a defoliant, but we turn our heads to how a lot of things we take for granted are produced.

Anyway, rain was in the forecast, and since cotton can’t be picked in the rain, obviously, the cotton picker trucks were out in full force driving through the fields “vacuuming” up the cotton boles off the stalks and dumping the full trucks into large containers standing in the fields.  It was a pretty cool operation to watch.  This is probably something that is so commonplace in areas of the south, but from someone who is not from around these parts, and a textile enthusiast, I thought this was fascinating and beautiful and worth a post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the oddest things I noticed, was that during the picking operation and obvious carting away of the large storage containers, the roads were covered with cotton puffs, making them look like remnants of a snow storm.

My hostess Emily, who formally set the table for every meal, (note to self, I need to start doing that again, what a civil way to live) gave me some cotton plant stalks to bring home to add to my collection of display items for teaching.

We ate in some pretty typical southern establishments like the Greenbrier Restaurant near Decatur, where we could select from dinners “from the pond” and dinners “from the barnyard”.  And for really exotic cuisine, dinners “from the seven seas”.  Hooray for fried hush puppies, fried catfish and pulled pork!

My workshop ladies were lovely, though the class was small, I had a terrific time with them.  I took them on a roller coaster ride, filling them with as much information as I could about garment construction, fit, and handwoven cloth, in the two days we had together.  The classroom was housed in an old cotton mill converted to artists’ studios, I wish I had snapped a photo or two of the building, but I loved teaching in a space with so much creative energy.

There was Colleen, who worked tirelessly over the past year setting this workshop up and making it all run smoothly, and Lyna, who makes wicked from scratch yeast rolls from pumpkin and cranberries, and to die for from scratch brownies.  Note to self, check out the King Arthur Flour website, the brownies were a KAF recipe.

There was Susan, and her husband, Daniel who is a basket maker and weaver wannabee.  Daniel stopped in Sunday morning for a lecture in drafting.  Daniel was a quick study, and watching his face as the mystery of four shaft weaving and what that draft with colored boxes meant, was worth the price of admission. He was so grateful he gave me one of his “cobweb” brooms, for sweeping cobwebs from ceiling corners, (I know what I’m doing this morning after I unpack), made from pampas grass, hand twisted and plied yucca, and a bamboo pole.  You can see the “broom” in the last photo.

At one point, the class asked for a fashion show.  My garments had been hanging on a decorative rack in the corner, but they all wanted to take pictures and see the garments on me, instead of a hanger.  It was fun to dress up and show off my pieces, and my lovely hostess Emily shared some of her shots with me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so after a change of flights, and a detour through Charlotte, NC (thanks Emily, for waiting in the airport with me for half an hour while all this took place, I’m home.  I’ll be teaching again this afternoon at the Newark Museum, and I have some online classes scheduled for the later part of the week on Weavolution (check out the Calendar App on the right side of this page) and then a much needed weekend off.

So here is my class of students from the Huntsville Guild in Alabama, a state I’d return to in a heartbeat, especially during cotton picking season. Check out that cobweb broom!