I have these two weeks to just play in the studio, the goal here is to come up with three works to photograph to enter for an exhibit I’d love to participate in, and I’m finding it really difficult to just stay on task and stay focused.  Part of the problem is I am not exactly sure where I’m going, and that’s as it should be, but that isn’t familiar territory for me in this context, and I’m all over the place.

That’s probably why I haven’t posted in about a week, as my dear husband, who is in Saudi Arabia and looks forward to my posts reminded me today.  I don’t like to post when I don’t have anything brilliant to say.  I’m actually just muddling along, feeling my way, and starting to get some direction.  And the deadline is looming.  Pun intended except there is no loom involved here.

I know when I teach, I encourage students to not have a plan or a goal for their fabric.  That actually works really well for me with garments, because there is an underlying goal, the fabric will eventually be worn, but that kind of “not knowing where I’m going” is much easier since I actually do know where I’m going, I’m eventually going to make a garment.  It is different when I’m sitting here with three 9x9x3″ boxes with nothing in them, and I have to make “art” by next Friday, so I can photograph them and enter the show.  I really don’t know what I’m doing here, and I’m using unfamiliar materials, and yet, a vague memory of working like this in art school comes haunting back somewhere in my subconscious.

When I am working in familiar territory, warping a loom, constructing a garment, sending out applications or proposals, I’m the model of efficiency.  But creativity can’t be rushed.  I try a little of this, spend a couple hours seeing if something will work, it doesn’t or I get a better idea, and I shift into a different direction.  And it is really really hard to do this by yourself with no feedback.  This is where I really miss my daughter.  If nothing else, she can come in and state the obvious which I usually can’t see because it is staring me in the face.  I find myself taking frequent breaks, weeding the yard, having a lot of cups of tea on the deck, emailing friends, walking down to my neighbor’s for cocktails, hanging with the boys in the basement (I actually played beer pong one night and won…  Don’t ask…)

I’m finally feeling like I have a direction and for better or for worse, I have my work cut out for me and I think I know what path I’m taking.  Until I get a better idea…

So here is what I have for now.

I completed box number one, cheered on by two of my son’s friends, Jenna and Alli, who stopped in frequently to see how it was going.  The series is called Life Forms, and this box represents earth.  It is cross cut felt, rewoven back together.  It is hard to seem the dimensional quality of the felt in the box.

In the meantime, it was either Jenna’s or Alli’s suggestion that gave me the idea to continue the series with Fire and Water.  So I built batts of carded wool in fire and water themes, and stacked them up.  Then I wet them down, and rolled them for hours sitting on the deck listening to a book on tape.  Once I got them down to the size I needed, I cross cut one of them into strips, pressed the strips flat and started to play with “fire” forms.  The strips are pinned down on a board, and I’m trying to sew them all together so they will hold while I arrange them in the box.  Meanwhile I’m finding elements in my studio that I think might want to play along, some bark, and some deep plum crinkled paper yarn from Habu that I’m weaving into a grid or net.  I have no idea what I’m doing…

Here’s the thing, I teach for a living, and I write, books, articles, essays, this blog, and all of that allows me to be creative in a different way than actually making work.  But it is important as a fiber artist, to keep making work, and to have the work out there, in exhibits, and supporting my teaching and writing.  They are all “woven” together, pun intended, and it is hard to keep track of all three areas of my creative life at the same time.  The one that usually trails along like the poor stepchild, is the exhibition part of my resume.  It takes a lot of work to find the exhibits, keep track of deadlines, have new work (usually done in the last two years, and it may take me months to build one piece…), fill out entry forms, pay the entry fee, and send off yet another application for an exhibit, which I have about a 40% track record for acceptance.  If the work does get accepted, I have to keep track of ship by dates, and then pack and ship, or pay a shipper to pack and ship, and pay not only the costs and insurance of getting the package there, but include a label for return postage as well.  That little line item on my resume, when I am fortunate enough to be accepted to an exhibit, is pretty costly.  Depending on the work, sometimes $150. an exhibit.

I recently posted a blog about an exhibit in Colorado, Fiber Celebration 2011, sponsored by the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild, held at the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising in Ft. Collins, CO.  The exhibit runs through August 12.  I sort of forgot I had work out there, I couldn’t obviously attend the opening, and since I prepaid the return shipping, the work will come back sometime in August.  I remember this being a particularly costly ship to the museum, since I was traveling and missed my window for Ground UPS.  Three day cost me $75.

I got a note in the mail today from one of the organizers, and I didn’t quite get at first what it was about.  Turns out, I won the Complex Weavers Award 2011, for my Sandstone Layers Jacket, and there was a stack of papers I had to fill out and send to Complex Weavers.  How cool is that?  It is times like this I’m glad I made the effort to apply to the show, and spend the money to ship.  In addition, I apparently won a Wearables Award, but I don’t have any other information except apparently the award is the collection of Handwoven Magazines from 2008 on disk.  That’s probably not a great prize in that I may find I like having the magazines on disk instead of taking up room on my shelf and I might be tempted to invest in the other years that are available…

The Complex Weavers Award is actually a big deal.  At least to me.  I don’t really think of myself as a complex weaver, I only have eight shaft looms, but this particular jacket was pretty darn complex.  I had at least three different structures running simultaneously with five different warps, one of them a supplemental.  That’s a lot to ask of an eight shaft loom.  Still, I never get noticed for stuff like that.  So I’m feeling a little grateful and a little bit proud.  And I’m tickled that I was accepted to teach an advanced Inkle class at their conference in Washington DC in the fall of 2012.

So there is another deadline looming (pun intended) for an exhibit with the Textile Study Group of New York.  They always have very specific theme/requirements for their shows, and I like to enter because I have to push out of the proverbial box to create exhibit specific works, which of course may or may not be accepted.  The deadline for this particular exhibit is in about 10 days, and the theme is 9x9x3.  That means the work has to fit into a 9 x9x3″ box that you had to buy ahead of time.  Photographed works are then submitted for jurying.

Sadly there weren’t enough students to run my boot camp and garment construction classes at the Newark Museum, a shame since I love teaching those two particular workshops, but that leaves me with the gift of some additional time to really play with these boxes.  Worst case I don’t get them finished for jurying, and I’m just out the cost of the boxes.

So this morning, I called the cable company to inquire about the occasionally slow internet service I’ve been experiencing, and I called a tree guy to take down a monster maple tree that threatens my second floor studio.  Then I dug out the boxes and started playing around.  One thing led to another and I dug out an old piece of plaited felt I had done that never actually went anywhere.  I over worked the piece and it became brittle and unstable.  It was cut from a poorly felted, because I didn’t know any better, lump of wool, done about 10 years ago, back when the only felt information I had was from college where they still had you stick wool in a nylon stocking and put it through the washer/dryer.  Now we exercise a bit more control…

I sort of liked the concept, and I wanted to play with it further.  So I dug out my new/used Pat Green Carder with powerpack, turned it on, and started to feed it all the wool I had dyed and teased from my crock pot dyeing adventure two summers ago after the 2009 Midwest Conference in Grinnel, Iowa, where I sat next to Amy Norris in a felt a boa class, and she told me all about crock pot dyeing.  I blogged about it quite extensively back then, and now all the dyed bags of fleece just sit in my storage closet.  So I dug them out and started feeding the carder.

I don’t know where this little adventure will take me, but the whole point here is to have fun.  I don’t know if I’ll have anything to enter for this exhibit, but I’m trying to just stay in the moment and see what happens.

Entering exhibits is probably my least favorite of all the jobs I do, but they keep me working on new and interesting things.  I just fired off a half dozen proposals for teaching online classes at Weavolution.com, and I updated my workshop/lecture lists on my website with all kinds of new proposals, I can do all that in my sleep.  But this kind of creativity takes patience, and focus, and a connection to the tools and the fibers and sometimes there are too many distractions.  So, stay tuned to see where this takes me ’cause at the moment, I haven’t a clue…

My daughter came home for the weekend last night (she is a lifeguard for the summer at a girl scout camp in NY State), it was so good to see her, to inhale her drama and enthusiasm, I realized how quiet it has been with her gone…  There is a frenzy today to get her car serviced, and check out banking options for when she will be at college (we will need an account she can access at school to funnel thousands of dollars a month in the financial hemorrhage of college tuition costs…)

Probably won’t get a whole lot done today in the studio.  That’s OK…

I finished my first online class yesterday through Weavolution.com and what a terrific experience.  I was worried going into it, I am accustomed to reading students faces for understanding, and using their energy to fuel my own animated teaching style, what would it be like talking to a webcam?  The experience was different yes, but in many ways almost better.  The equipment worked perfectly on my end, and after some audio adjustments for one of the students the second session, all seemed to work fine on their end as well.  I taught a beginning inkle weaving class over the course of two days, that would be 2 hour and a half sessions.  I was able to send via email the presentations ahead, and we could go through them slide by slide on their monitors.  They could weave – a – long as we worked.  When necessary, I could switch to a live demonstration, and the detail my webcam picked up, was amazing.  Better than if I was actually working directly with a student.  I could count threads the detail was so clear.

What amazed me about the whole thing is how global it all was, I had a student from the US of course, and one from Canada, and one from the UK.  How incredibly cool is that?

Anyway, I have so many lectures that are already good to go, and I’m looking forward to adding many additional sessions.  I already have another Inkle Weaving class scheduled for Sat/Sun June 16-17.  The classes are inexpensive, and I am so far impressed with this vehicle for learning.  If anyone is interested in exploring this type of learning opportunity, there is a free open house scheduled at Weavolution.com, Tuesday morning at 10:00am EDT.  Sign up and take a tour of how web conferencing works, test your computer and ask questions.  If you miss that open house, I’m sure more will be offered. And you can check out the Weavolution forums and online help.  And the best part is you can take classes in your pajamas…

For those who live in the northern NJ/NY area, last call for the fiber boot camp I”m teaching at the Newark Museum next Monday-Thursday.  It is a four day class, the most fun you’ll ever have playing with fiber, we cover spinning on a drop spindle, microwave dyeing with food grade dyes, plaiting, Japanese braiding (kumihimo), wet and needle felting, inkle loom weaving and tapestry loom weaving.  This is an especially great class for those with ADD, every three hours we switch to a new technique!  We need a couple more people to actually run the class, so if anyone happens to be available next week, the museum is bright and cheery, free parking vouchers for a secure lot right by the museum are available, and I provide almost everything.

I sat down the other night to just sew.  What a lovely evening.  I love garment construction when I just follow the directions step by step, sort of like life, one footstep at a time, and suddenly you come to the end of the project.  I love the blouse, and the silk jacquard fabric is so delightful to work on.  My only dilemma is the buttons.  I don’t like the buttons I stuck on the front for the photo.  They are too large.  I went to the opening of a new Joann’s yesterday in Paramus, NJ, and all I found there was plastic garbage.  I do in fact have a lovely button here in the studio, three of them actually, that I bought at Webs last month, but I really need five. They are etched silver metal. I’ve take a photo and emailed Webs to see if I can get anymore.  Note to self, you should have bought five, not three…

I’ve been slowly updating my classes on my website, adding in new options for lectures and workshops.  I’ll continue to do that over the weekend, hoping by Monday to have everything all up to date.  I came up with a bunch of new ideas when I applied to Convergence 2012 earlier this year, and I am posting what they didn’t select.  And I will finish up writing the prospectus for the “Weave a Memory” class I’m developing for a two day class in weaving the photos on silk I’ve been doing throughout this blog.

Thanks to all who sent me poems and inspirational writings from newsletters, and your own thoughts on managing the balance between the big and small stuff in life.  It all made me smile and move forward with a lighter load.  Know I read every single comment posted, they are like little postcards that come in the mail when you least expect it, like hugs from a friend.

Stay tuned…

I needed to recover.  No one would argue that.  I spent the last few days, since my frenetic return from the midwest, trying to recover, to be kind to myself, to find quiet moments, and to just be.  I took it easy, only doing what needed to be done.  Except there were so many things I wanted to do…

See here’s the problem.  Life is full of things that need to be done.  And life is full of things I want to do, but that are purely for my entertainment and not critical for daily existence, or critical for running a household, or critical for running a business.  I needed to pay all the bills, organize all the paperwork, balance all the checkbooks, prepare the bookkeeping for the business to pay quarterly sales tax.  I needed to ship out a dozen orders, and I needed to unpack and take care of the laundry.  I needed to prod my son into mowing the lawn and checking the pool levels and vacuuming the pool and taking care of his truck with the missing muffler held up by some army issue rope.  (That didn’t work…)

It was hard to explain to my 21 year old son why things that needed to be done come first, if there is any time left, then things he wanted to do would fall into place.  Except it never works that way.  The things that need to be done always suck up all of the time and the things I want to do I never get to.  I run out of time…

One of Eric’s friends drew this illustration for my son on the refrigerator white board…

It is all about balance.  And that is probably my biggest character defect, I don’t know what that is.  I constantly attend to the stuff I need to attend to (which is why I’m really good at what I do, I follow through on the small stuff, I’m known for my organization and details) but it makes for a very one sided resentful person (who me?) when I watch the 20’somethings hang out every night under the stars drinking and partying and having a general good time.  That’s not my complete idea of a good time, though I enjoy a good gathering occasionally, as a matter of fact I attended two yesterday, just party hopped my way across the county.  My idea of a really good time, is sitting in a pile of fiber making stuff.  (Of course this is assuming my husband is out of the country and unavailable to play, as he has been for the better part of the last 14 months.)

So I paid the bills.  Because I am responsible.  They needed to be paid.  I organized the bank books and bookkeeping.  Because I am responsible.  It needed to be done.  I vacuumed, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen and the toilets.  They needed to be cleaned and I am responsible.  I reworked my inkle loom presentation for the online class I’m teaching tomorrow through Weavolution and got that information out to the students and did a dry run this morning to make sure I understood the conferencing software.  It needed to be done and I am responsible…

But what I really wanted to be doing, was playing with my new/used Pat Green drum carder with power pack (it goes by itself), which I bought from Ginnie while I was visiting her on the Upper Peninnsula.  It arrived in four boxes.  🙂

And I wanted to start a new sewing project, a couple of them actually.  I wanted some new summer tops.  I rooted through my fabrics and came up with a couple of contenders and found a pattern I liked, but alas, it was sized for knits.  These were woven.  So I needed to re-engineer the pattern to fit with wovens, three muslins later and a lot of redesign, in the sleeve and the overall shaping, I got what I wanted.  🙂  The fabrics are a bold printed rayon and a gorgeous subtle lavender and black woven Jacquard feather pattern in silk from Carolina Herrera.  I think I bought both of them from Waechter’s Silk Shop last year during my trip to Asheville where I bought a boat load of remnants I wanted, but certainly didn’t need.

So I carry on, always seeking that illusive balance, I will keep Alli’s drawing on the refrigerator as a reminder that there has to be a balance between the wants and the needs.  And both my son and I sit at opposite ends of the see saw trying to make it balance and not having much luck.  The lawn still isn’t mowed, and pool levels are unchecked, the muffler is off but still hasn’t been replaced.  The neighborhood knows this when he comes in at 2am…  But my bills are paid, orders shipped, prep work done for the online class, house reasonably clean, and I’m going to attempt to cut out one of the summer tops tonight.  It is only 9am.  If I were 21, the night would definitely still be young…

And I don’t even have to get out of my pajamas! To find out more about online classes, go to Weavolution!  If this actually works, I’m hoping to do a lot more online teaching!

Beginning Inkle Loom Weaving

Date(s) – EASTERN TIME:

Wed, 07/06/2011 – 11:30am – 1:00pm and

Thur, 07/076/2011 – 11:30am – 1:00pm

OR

Sat, 07/16/2011 – 1:00pm – 2:30pm and

Sun, 07/17/2011 – 1:00pm – 2:30pm

Price:

$40.00

Description:

No weaving experience necessary!  The inkle loom is portable, easy to warp, easy to weave off, and makes beautiful warp face belts and bands.  Daryl uses it to trim her garments.  Every weaver should own one.  They are inexpensive and children as young as third grade can learn to use them.

There will be TWO class sessions, one and one-half hours each.  Classes will be taught using PowerPoint presentation and weaving demonstration.  Students will receive homework assignments.