Daryl's Blog

One of the seminars I attended at the American Sewing Guild Conference in LA in August had nothing to do with the art of sewing, rather it had to do with organizing and Photoshop.  Because the class was so unusual, I figured what the heck.  The class was taught by two incredibly enthusiastic women, Pixeladies, who have this terrific comedy routine and use it to help students understand technology.  They teach online classes so check them out, especially for designing fabric in Photoshop.

Anyway, the point of the seminar, was to show a way to easily organize your sewing patterns.  For anyone who sews, and who has been sewing for quite awhile, this is truly an issue.  I have probably 500 patterns lurking in all kinds of places in my studio, and absolutely no sense of organization to any of them, and this has come to haunt me in the last month or two when on more than one occasion a student has needed me to reference a pattern I used maybe 6 years ago, to help answer a construction question.  I was able to locate one of the patterns, but I’ve yet to locate the second.

This whole organizing thing involves Photoshop Elements’ Organizer, which comes with the Elements package, about $80, and it is a helpful tool to keep your photos organized.  I haven’t bothered, because I have about 30,000 photos, and wouldn’t even know where to begin.  Oddly enough the loose system I have for keeping track of my photos works for me because I can usually locate a photo within about 15 minutes which is pretty decent considering they can be in about 6 different hard drive locations.  Course there is the possibility the image I’m looking for is still in slide form and I have about 20 binders full of them as well.

Anyway, back to the pattern situation.  It takes about 15 seconds to scan a pattern into the computer.  The Pixeladies used their digital camera, but I found just laying them on the scanner worked better for me.  Course I actually have a scanner.  And I don’t actually like the Elements organizer, I prefer to work with Adobe Bridge which is the organizer that comes with the CS4 Creative Suite including the full version of Photoshop.  The whole point here is that once a pattern is scanned in, I can rename it with the company and pattern number like V1234 for Vogue, and it will automatically sort by pattern company, and then I can assign keywords, like what shelf or box the pattern lives in, and what’s actually in the pattern, like, jacket/skirt/pants.  You can add as many keywords as you want in any category you want, and it took about five minutes of the class to realize how valuable this is.

I’ve finally had an opportunity to actually try it out, and I’ve scanned a couple hundred patterns so far and I have to say I’m pretty embarrassed, I had no idea how many I owned, where half of them came from, how many I’ve never actually sewn, and what my garment tastes were back in the 1980’s.  Some of these patterns are pretty scary.  This is a perfect thing to do on another rainy day in the northeast, I know the western part of the state is already experiencing more flooding, I fear NJ will eventually be underwater and the Poconos in eastern PA will be beach front property…

Speaking of organizing, I nearly wet myself from laughing so hard when I came across this article in Real Simple magazine.  Real Simple is probably the only non textile magazine I subscribe to other than Time or Newsweek, largely because I am inspired by the food.  The article is called Micro Organizing, and there are a number of “I Spy” like photos that show junk drawers that have been converted to organized little compartments.  They all look wonderful in the photos, but realistically, the time spent on this kind of task would be disproportionate to how long the contents would stay in that state, at least in this household.

The image though, that caused such apoplexy, was this one.  Specifically the bottom shelf, where resides the complete collection of this particular writer’s craft/fabric stash.  Enough said.

A rare and unusual Saturday morning with nothing on the calendar except give the dog his heartworm pill.  Has the defunct satellite crashed into the earth yet?  Quite the sobering thought.  What amazes me is that no computer model can tell where the pieces will make landfall.  Surely we are technologically advanced enough to predict this sort of thing…  There is also a rare break in the weather here.  It isn’t sunny, but it isn’t raining, for the moment.  Front page of the morning papers, the pumpkin crop is completely wrecked by all the rain.  They are all rotting in the fields.  No Jack-O-Lanterns this year.  What is this world coming to, hurtling satellites and rotting pumpkins?

Meanwhile in my own corner of the world, I’m going through my to do list, tying up loose ends.  For starters, I decided to make use of the little plugin on the side of my blog, I use to keep it up but with everything, got lazy.  This is a busy month with lots of local learning opportunities, so rather than fill your in box with subscriber notices about everything I’m teaching which doesn’t help you if you live in Alaska and I’m teaching at the Newark Museum here in NJ, I decided to just post the upcoming learning opportunities, over there on the plugin on the right, that says upcoming events.  I think only five are posted at a time, but the convenience here is once the event is finished, it automatically goes away.  Something I don’t have to maintain. 🙂

So, there are lots of learning opportunities for the month of October if you live in NJ, then I’ll be flying to Alabama the end of the month and my teaching for the year starts to slow down.  I’m already like a kid awaiting Christmas morning thinking of how I’m going to use the next few months and get the most out of my studio time.  I briefly thought of moving my studio contents out to repaint the room and replace the floor where the dog did some unmentionable damage in my absence, but I quickly discounted that as the stupidest idea I’ve ever had.  More crap on the walls and a small area rug will just wonderfully hide a worn paint job and stained floor.

I’m teaching a debut workshop for my guild, Jockey Hollow Weavers, called Weave a Memory, the details are over on the right in the event box, and I needed to get the loom going with a new inlay piece for demo purposes.  So I spent all day yesterday playing with images, and getting the Epson software loaded along with the printer into my laptop so I can do image processing and printing on location.  In this case it is only Mendham, a mere car ride away, so I don’t have to invest in a portable printer and scanner yet.  $$$

I love the new images I did, using some filters in Photoshop to define edges so they really pop off the silk habotai fabric.  I forgot how much fun it is to weave these little post cards.

While in California I made great progress on my knitting projects, I finished the little cotton and linen tank I was working on, and have almost finished a Kaffe Fassett sock.  I know the sock looks oddly proportioned but I can assure you the 1×1 ribbing is really stretchy and it fits my foot perfectly.  The first socks I made would give so much on my foot they were baggy by the time  I’d worn them all day.  I re-scaled the pattern for my slender ankles and long narrow feet.  I love the colors.

I also taught an online class last night in pick up on the inkle loom through Weavolution.  It was great fun, and I even had a student take the class while on vacation in a hotel lobby, on her laptop, mini inkle loom by her side.  What a terrific venue this is, and I encourage everyone to check out the classes on Weavolution, the Webex conferencing software works well and it can only get better.

That got me to thinking that I never posted a photo of the supplemental weft trim I started on the little Inklette inkle loom that I took to the ASG conference in LA in August.  It involves an unusual use for pick up techniques, and it is how I did the trim on the metallic suit I made last spring.  I’ll be teaching Pick up and supplemental warp/weft at the Complex Weavers Conference in Washington, DC next September 2012.

I got this great idea I’d spin up some alpaca from my mother-in-law’s stash, to increase the yield on the angora/silk I bought for $3. a skein in California.  I think in the blog post I mentioned it was alpaca.  It isn’t, it is angora.  I have eight soft luscious colors, and I’m thinking of a fair isle vest, but I really needed a base to extend it and there is this alpaca sitting in a bag on the floor of my bedroom by the spinning wheel, which means I had to empty it. The spinning wheel that is.  So I finished plying what was on the wheel, and I’m all ready to go…  I plied this yarn rather asymmetrically, I had twice as much of the lighter blue (80/20 Merino Silk from Louet) than the darker handdyed Finn cross from Spinners Hill.  So I played around with uneven plying and making little slubs.  I started to get a rhythm about a third into the skein.  It was a good exercise.

And some other follow up, a rather sad note for this dreary day, no one died, but I did get the dreaded one page letter telling me that none of my felted 9x9x3 pieces were accepted for the Textile Study Group of New York exhibit.  You may remember a blog post series back in July where I worked feverishly for a couple weeks, creating these little boxes, click here and here.  The thing is, I new it was a crap shoot applying to this show, sometimes you get in and sometimes you don’t, and the whole process ultimately wasn’t about actually getting into the show.  I use opportunities like this to push myself, certainly taking advantage of deadlines, but themed exhibits are great ways to see if you can think outside the box, or in this case inside the box, a 9x9x3 box, the artwork had to fit inside of it.  I was disappointed I didn’t get accepted, but still really happy with what I’d done overall.  I think I will re-shoot the images and use them for Small Expressions 2012  That deadline is coming up quick, and I’d rather work on some serious clothing in November/December, I have some wonderfully challenging ideas.

On a brighter note, I did get one piece accepted to the TSGNY Crossing Lines exhibit, The Many Faces of Fiber, Courtyard Gallery, Three World Financial Center, NYC, December 6, 2011-February 19, 2012.  My stripped silk piece rewoven in the Theo Moorman inlay technique I mentioned above, of my mother in law as she lay dying in a nursing home, titled “Watching Death Come” was selected for exhibit.  Rebecca Stevens who is consulting Curator of Contemporary Textiles at the Textile Museum, Washington, DC was the juror.

So it all turned out well in the end, and for now the rain has stopped and I’m going to iron a stack of clothing that has been hanging on the “to iron” rack an embarrassing long time.  And then it is lunch time.  🙂

Stay tuned…