I left Harrisville, NH last Friday.  I drove to the Catskills in NY State, a spectacular region, where my youngest sister has a cabin.  I’ve written about it before.  Both my sisters met me at the cabin for a rare sisters’ gathering, a weekend to relax, renew, and re-energize.  God knows I needed it…

We did some fun sisterly things…

Ice Cream in Phoenicia

Picnic on the lawn in Woodstock with a 50’s version on the outdoor stage, of Shakespeare’s As You Like It…  (Bird on a Cliff Theatre Co.)

Spa Day at Mohonk Mountain…

And a climb up the infamous “Labyrinth”, a rock formation up the side of the mountain that takes your breath away, literally and figuratively.  It was hard, and scary and my mountain climbing little sister cheered us on as she scampered up the rocks like a pro.  No one broke anything and we decided not to kill her when we got to the top.  The view was too beautiful and totally worth it…

We should have had our spa day massages after the climb.  I’m still in pain…

We stopped at our favorite winery, El Paso, and then at our favorite crafts haunt, Crafts People.  I picked up some earrings and a new dress, and a new mug and bowl from the pottery building for my morning granola breakfast.

Life is good.  Or at least it was when I set out to drive home on Monday.  With everyone in my house gone, I asked one of my son’s friends to stay in the house to keep the dog happy and make sure nothing went amiss.  Dave was great, the house looked clean and picked up, and I started to settle in…

That’s when I noticed the pool.  It was a swamp.  It was disgusting.  Then I noticed the airconditioning wasn’t working…  It was disgustingly hot.  Then Dave told me they found horrible disgusting insects the size of NJ in the basement, the kind you don’t mention in mixed company…

Re-entry sucks…

I did my best to call whoever needed to be called to fix whatever needed to be fixed, meanwhile I had 15 hours to prepare for Wednesday’s adventure, I promised my daughter who is lifeguarding at a Girl Scout Camp all summer, that I would come up to the camp (about two hours away in NY State, wasn’t I just there?…) and teach the campers how to weave on looms made from gathered materials from nature.

That was all fine, or at least it was a good idea at the time, but I had no samples of this sort of thing, since I don’t make my looms from yard debris, though God knows there is enough of it out there.  So I hired a lovely friend of my daughter’s to come up and work with me for the day creating samples and figuring out the best way to teach this to a bunch of 10-12 year olds.  I didn’t know until late Tuesday night that there would be 26 of them…

Larissa helped me gather twigs and branches, we had a blast foraging through my yard, it was nice to look at something other than the gigantic crop of weeds that have taken over in my absence.  We twisted branches into looms, and took advantage of natural forks in the branches, and generally had a complete blast.  Larissa was able to move through multiple looms since she wasn’t obsessive/compulsive like I am, and made samples that would be wonderful to show the campers.

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, I worked on the forked loom, and got so into it I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening on it and am so excited with how it turned out and it isn’t a piece of clothing…. Who knew?

So yesterday I got up at 5am, and headed up for the long drive to the camp, loaded down with all kinds of stuff to use in the looms, I did have to buy additional tapestry needles, I didn’t have 26, but most everything else I could provide, and was happy to help.  It was lovely to be with my daughter, to see her in her element, and I found out she is now their resident sailing instructor…  How/when did that happen?

All was well until I came home.  Exhausted, and wanting to just check email and curl up and chill, I made the mistake of heading out to the pool to add the additional chemicals I had been instructed to add by the pool place to clean up the swamp.  The pump cover O-ring had broken, and water was leaking everywhere, along with a hose, and to make matters more uncomfortable, it was pouring rain, and one of the ponds had emptied in my absence.  What I really wanted to do was sit down in the middle of the yard and cry.  What I actually did was get in the car (it is now rush hour in NJ and if you live in NJ you know this is not a good time to be out on the road driving unless you are coming home from work and prepared to spend a couple hours in a commute) and slowly and methodically work through the pool stores, after no luck at the hardware store, looking for an O-ring.  I’d sit with my smart phone in the car while the rain came down in torrents, and Google the next pool place, and I found what I was looking for on the fifth try….

It should be noted that my entire trip, that took over an hour, only covered about 10 miles.  The interesting thing about NJ is everything is here, practically in walking distance, in any direction, because driving here is nearly impossible at certain times of the day.  So I had lots of choices, and eventually I found what I was looking for.  And that’s a good thing…

I picked up the O-ring, and a replacement hose, and returned to my home, in the pouring rain, re-scrubbed the pool, cleaned out the spillway of the pond from the overgrown plants that clogged it up, replaced the O-ring/ pump cover (not before going back out to CVS for Vaseline, which seemed to have disappeared from my house) and replaced the leaky hose.  Of course it was pretty hilarious, standing in the pouring rain, trying to screw on a hose clamp with greasy Vaseline covered hands.  But that’s another story.  I wasn’t laughing at the time…

Like I said, re-entry sucks.  It is hard to be responsible for everything.  I kept telling myself that no one died, and this is all just stuff, small stuff really, and that I needed to get a grip and act like a big girl.  I passed out at 9pm.  When my son, who is at artillery drills in the hills of Virginia woke me at 10:30 and shared how he was in a tent on top of a hill with no protection in the same torrential storm, with a river running through their tent quarters, I felt pretty silly complaining about all my issues with the pool.

So today, I just concentrated on printing and preparing everything for the American Sewing Guild Conference in LA, which is in Mid-August, but I have to ship by this weekend since I’ll be at Sievers School of Fiber Arts in Wisconsin all next week.  I’m counting the days until my husband returns from Saudi Arabia…  (Less than a week…) Stay tuned…

 

 

 

Or two or three…

Not that kind of bar silly…

The Verizon Wireless bars, you can’t get cell service when there are no bars…

It is hard for me describe how cut off I felt all week.  The only WiFi available was during class hours with a weak signal from the General Store across the street.  Since we worked most days until 6-7 in the evening, it wasn’t realistic to hang for another hour and post a blog. There was absolutely no signal from the cabin where I was living…

I was teaching all week at Harrisville, I blogged about them last year, Harrisville,  a quaint turn of a couple of centuries ago mill town in NH was like a step back in time, to a place where textiles were the engine that ran the town, and due to amazing preservation of historic structures, the center appears like it did in the late 1700’s.  I think, I don’t actually know since I wasn’t around back then…

i·dyl·lic/??dilik/

Adjective: (esp. of a time or place) Like an idyll; extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque: “an idyllic setting”

It was sort of fitting that there wouldn’t be cell service in this area, which means I couldn’t use my own MiFi, I couldn’t use all my sophisticated computer devices, online yoga classes, software tutorials, or access my blog, email, etc.  Phone calls from home were sketchy and lasted about 40 seconds, texts came in and out sporadically.

Still, for a brief week, I had to do without, in the evenings I read and knitted, and enjoyed the most idyllic views and scenery and gentle air and focused on my enthusiastic class as they made garments from their handwoven cloth.

The view from the deck of the cottage where I stayed provided hours of viewing, I knitted and drank wine and thought, life doesn’t get any better than this.  The village of Harrisville was like a postcard of old New England, and the classroom, huge, well lit, and comfortable with fans, was full of cheery hardworking students, and considering my last miserable teaching experience in Michigan, I felt like I died and went to teacher heaven.

Surrounded by yarn, and color, and textiles and looms, I helped five wonderful students find their path and make some remarkable jackets.  The great thing about this particular class, a five day sewing intensive, is the repeat students.  I’m doing another one at Sievers (in Wisconsin)next weekend.  For those who have never studied with me, I have an agenda where they make a jacket, from their handwoven or commercial fabric, and they learn everything I can cram into their heads and fingers in five days.  Repeat students are great because they challenge me to think outside my comfort and knowledge zones, and help them achieve success at whatever they planned to accomplish during the week.

Four of the five students had handwoven cloth, and the cloth was as different as the student’s personalities.  I’m really proud of all of them, and can’t wait to see final photos.  All left yesterday with hours of handwork ahead of them, but glowing with pride over their accomplishments.

So now, I’m sitting in another idyllic setting, at my sister’s cabin in the Catskill region of NY State.  My two sisters met me here yesterday afternoon, and we are enjoying cooking together, drinking together, rafting in the stream, and just being girlfriends.  I am so blessed to have two sisters whom I adore, and that I trust with my soul, and that can laugh with me and be brutally honest, and that no matter what I do, will love me unconditionally.  It doesn’t get any better than that.

I’ll eventually return home, and spend a crazy week getting ready for Sievers and the American Sewing Guild conference in Los Angeles right behind it, and then my daughter’s “heading off to college” experience, it will be a busy month, but the gift of sisters, wine, idyllic settings, and finally enough signal to get a blog post out, well I’m just as happy as they come…

Application to 9x9x3 mailed.

Done.

The Painted Kiss: A Novel, by Elizabeth Hickey.

Done.  (Excellent read)

 

Araucania wool, silk, bamboo socks…

Done.

 

Rayon print shirt.

Done.

 

Silk Feather Jacquard shirt.

Done.

First Online class in Inkle Weaving Pick-up.

Done.

Article for the American Sewing Guild publication “Notions”/ summer 2011 issue.

Published.  (You have to be a member to access it!)

And now dear readers, I’m going to struggle to stay cool and hydrated in this sweltering heat, while I crank up my printer and spit out monographs and handouts and cut and package interfacings for my next round of travel.

Stay tuned…

…I finished.

There were times over the last couple of days, I admit, that I really wanted to quit.  So who would even know if I didn’t enter this show?  The organization will survive without me, and there is no guarantee anyway I’m going to have any of the three pieces accepted.  More than likely I won’t have any  accepted, but that wasn’t the whole point really.  And there were times this week when I said to myself, “So Daryl, what is the point here?  What are you trying to prove?  Is all this really worth it?

It is rare for me to have a two week hole in my calendar, with a couple of cancelled classes, I decided to devote a week or so to doing some actual artwork, something that I always want to do, and never actually make the time to do, that nebulous concept of creating something that communicates who and what you are to the viewer of your work, and I had just the venue, three 9x9x3” boxes for an exhibit with the Textile Study Group of NY.  The  only criteria to fill the boxes was that the artwork must involve fiber materials and/or textile structures in its construction.  That’s it.  For someone who knows just about every textile technique ever imagined, and probably has the equipment to do it, this was really really broad, and where to even begin.

If you read my last blog post, you know I did try from the get go, to narrow down my focus, for no particular reason other than the new acquisition of my motorized drum carder, to felt.  I already had the dyed fleece, and it seemed doable.  So I started to play.  Which is what one does when one is creating from nothing.  Playing with materials, seeing how they interact, contemplating a direction, a voice, a thought, a thread.  It can be really vague and unfocused and not at all the way I like to work.  I felt like I have so little to show for the last two weeks worth of work, yet somehow I learned so much about myself and what I love to do, and actually what I don’t love to do.  So many times in the last few days I nearly chucked the boxes to sit down at the sewing machine or the loom.

But alas, I’m not a quitter.  I’ll stick with something even if it makes no sense, because it becomes a personal mission to finish what I’ve started.  So many of you my loyal readers wrote comments that were so helpful, and many of you bypassed the comments and wrote to me directly, some very lengthy and thoughtful critique.  With a couple of you I continued the dialogue late into the night.  You know who you are…

And so this morning, after yet another rework, I finished the boxes.  I’m not sure I felt the usual elation I get from a job well done, I like the pieces, but they came with a lot of pain and frustration, and angst and sturm und drang.  (Look it up…)  And I still had to photograph them.  And I was already having an anxiety attack over what has to be done for my travel classes in the next few days.  I leave for Harrisville for the week this Sunday.

So I spent the day, the entire day, trying to photograph these little boxes.  This was not fun.  I spent eight hours trying to get perfect images and I really am not completely happy with them, but for better or for worse, this is what I’ve got, the application is filled out, burned the CD and I’ll head off to the post office first thing in the morning so it will be postmarked by tomorrow.  I’ve gone round and round on titles, and I’ve come up with Life Forms: Growth, Destruction, and Rebirth.  All of the boxes are filled with handdyed cut felt manipulated in some way.  So many of you suggested a common element, and I found three old keys in a box of detritus left from one of my mom’s recently sold homes.  I liked the metaphor…