What’s in a name…

My weaving friend Ginnie and I were having an email exchange about following through on distasteful tasks that sort of overwhelm us.  I completely understood where she was coming from, sometimes a task is just overwhelming from the get go, causing serious procrastination, I can think of many of those just sitting in my inbox, and sometimes once a task is started, it takes on a life of its own, one you weren’t quite counting on.  I was trying to be a little cheerleader as I urged Ginnie through her particular arduous task, describing my own experiences with taking long drawn out affairs small bits at a time.  And I went on to describe the completely overwhelming task I started probably the end of October, (I’ll have to check my blog) of every day, dyeing a pound of yarn of assorted rayons and silk, with an MX color du jour.  I’ve mentioned it frequently in my blog, and though we are nearing the end of December, and I took off days for my Key West adventure, Thanksgiving, etc., and I’ve actually used some of the skeins already in the scarf warps,  I’m still plodding along rinsing every morning, tying up the dried skeins from the day before, winding eight new skeins, soaking them in dye activator, and then mixing up a batch of dye, and putting the new skeins in to cook.  The whole process takes about 1 1/2-2 hours, depending on how much I get distracted.

Anyway, Ginnie writes back and calls me a “Seasoned Plodder”.  What a wonderful name.  She is right of course.  I’m really good at breaking things down into very manageable pieces, and doing small bits at a time.  I have a lot of tasks in my in-box, and many of them are really overwhelming when I look at the whole picture, but very manageable in small doses.  That’s why, “sample all MX dyes” seemed like a nearly impossible task, but a couple hours a day, I now have this to look at to inspire me to keep on plodding.

In case you are curious, yesterday’s color currently hanging to dry, was Conch Shell, a vivid orange red, who knew, and the color du jour in the dyepot at the moment is Tranquil Water, a gorgeous teal blue.  Can’t wait to see that one hanging to dry.

My house is dirty, so Monday, I dusted, Tuesday I vacuumed, today I’m working on the bathrooms.  Tomorrow the kitchen, and Friday the master bedroom wing.  (Don’t be impressed, it was an addition put on when we added the two car garage some 21 years ago.)  And by Christmas day, the house will be as clean as it gets.

The big loom has about eight yards of fabric that has to be woven off by the end of the year, so I can get to the project I have to develop to go along with the yardage for the Handwoven article.  A yard a day, or in this case, two pirns of yarn in the shuttle, about 32″, means that more than likely by the end of the week, I’ll have it off the loom.

And one of the table looms needs 900 ends of linen/polyester sewing thread warp sleyed and threaded for a commission I need to get cracking on, so just a few inches a day, and I’m making progress.

And if I’m a good girl and get all my necessary tasks done, I try to take an hour in the evening, and sew.  The tunic I blogged about in my last post, is turning out well so far, I’m loving what’s happening with the pleats in the plaid.  As all Issey Miyake Vogue patterns, this one is an adventure to put together, always teaching me something new, and my sewing machine quietly waits for me to turn it on each evening.

After I posted that blog, I put a link up on my Facebook page, mentioning that I had a new post up, but not feeling as though everyone I’ve ever known in my life needed to read it, certainly not kids I went to High School with, or my son’s friends, etc., I tried to narrow my audience by posting this in my status…

For all those sewers out there, I’ve put up a new blog post https://weaversew.com/wordblog/2010/12/18/an-apology-and-a-tutorial/

I immediately received half a dozen comments about having to look twice at the status, confusing the word sewer (as in one who sews) with sewer (as in where the contents of the toilet flushes to…)  The more politically correct term is now Sewist, but it sounds so contrived and pretentious.  I felt that way when “Craftsman” became “Crafter”.  I still can’t use that word.  So Nancy came up with “Sewing Geek”.  As in “For all those sewing geeks out there…”  I loved it.  Thanks Nancy, I’m cool with that.

So, happy solstice from the seasoned plodder sewing geek, I hope you all got to see the grand celestial event yesterday early morning, the full lunar eclipse occurring the same day as the Winter Solstice.   That of course hasn’t happened since the 1600’s.  My wonderful photographer husband and my daughter, who just finished a college course in Astronomy, gathered on the deck at three in the morning, to watch the event, we kept running in and out of the sliders to keep warm.  Eventually the “bottom feeders” came up from the basement to observe the phenomenon, and we all ran inside when they lit cigarettes polluting the cold crisp night air.

Stay tuned for more adventures from the seasoned plodder sewing geek…

An apology and a tutorial.

Dear Janome Memory Craft 6600,

I see you sitting there watching me from wherever I am in the studio.  I know you have that blank, sad, unused, unloved puppy face, looking forlorn because I haven’t spent any time with you in awhile, at least not any regular quality time.  OK, yesterday’s repairs of the boy’s jeans and sweats didn’t count, you are so much more than just a sewing machine to be lugged out when a zipper breaks or a seam rips.  I know I’m neglecting you and all you are capable of, and in fact I miss you too.  I can assure you that you are my most favorite sewing machine I’ve ever owned, and I long to work on another project with you soon.

New Year’s resolutions are coming and I’m promising that I’m making an early one to always have a sewing project to work on, and I really really promise I won’t languish over the project for eight months like the last one.  Take heart, there are six looms calling at me, but only one sewing machine, and that sad blank look you give me as I walk by is calling to me louder than the looms right now.  Yes, I’m on deadline for an article, 8 yards of fabric needs to be woven off, and a project/kit has to be designed, and an article written with step by step photos, but I can pay attention to you too.  It is good for both of our souls.

So my humble apologies for neglecting you, and I’m going to try to make things right by starting in on another project.  But understand, before I can turn you on, I have to do the prep work.  I know, you’ll patiently wait because if I don’t do the prep work, I’ll never really like the way the garment fits or the way the fabric cleans.  But I worked hard all week long on the prep work and now I’m hoping  to cut out the tunic this weekend, so soon I’ll turn you on and have your competent motor purring along like a contented cat.

With much love,

Daryl

PS, Really really I’m through the prep work, just read the tutorial below…

First, the project.  I picked up three yards of a gorgeous cotton shirting fabric, a plaid of sorts with grey, white and aqua tones, when I was out in Boulder Colorado at Elfriede’s Fine Fabrics.  And I pulled from my pattern stash, a very cool Issey Miyake Vogue Pattern.  I love Issey Miyake patterns, they are like 500 piece puzzles, everything ends up fitting together in such an origami-esque kind of way, but the construction is always challenging and fun.  This particular pattern called for some really interesting pleating in diagonal ways across the garment, and it says right on the pattern envelope that it is unsuitable for plaids.  But that never stopped me.  I’m thinking this could be really really cool, or really really stupid.  You just don’t know until you try.  Sort of “Plaid Interrupted…”

This is V1204, and it is or was (I don’t know the current status) available in two size ranges.  This is always a dilemma, since I am right in the middle of the 12-14 pattern range, and the AA size goes to a 12 and the EE size starts at 14.

In the end, I chose the EE size, even though the pattern ease was described as “Very Loose-fitting”, meaning there is an extra 8 inches of ease in a shirt over the actual bust measurement.  I’m not sure why, probably because when I was ordering a bunch of patterns, I forgot to check the ease allowances.  I like my clothing to fit well, and to follow my shape.  I lived through the 80’s and 90’s when clothing was generic, boxy and one size fitted all.  That isn’t me and that isn’t my personal aesthetic. And I don’t like very loose fitting styles. The photo on the front of the pattern envelope is really deceiving because that’s the way I want the garment/tunic to look, and there is no way that tunic is eight inches larger than the model.  Then again, just making a size smaller could mean the shoulders are too tight.

So first things first.  Before I tackle the pattern decisions and adjustments, I need to get the fabric in to soak.  First I check that the fabric is on grain.  Meaning that the cut ends are thread perpendicular to the lengthwise grain, that a weft thread can be pulled straight across.  This fabric was easy because it was a woven plaid.  It was already cut on grain by the fabric store.  I pre-shrink all my fabrics, and I am always met with such incredulous stares when I mention this to students in my sewing classes, “You mean you can’t just buy it at the fabric store and start cutting it out?”  NO!  Except for wools, which I handle differently, I put almost all fabrics into a basin of very hot water, soak for 20 minutes and either roll in a towel to dry or spin off in the machine, depending on the fabric.  The spin cycle can leave nasty wrinkles in the fabric.  I chose to spin this cotton fabric, because there were three yards and I knew I could do a decent job pressing it later on.

Once hanging to dry I tackle the pattern decisions.  By opening up the pattern pieces, I can find the little finished circumference indicators at the bust and hip and check them against my own measurements.

Before I do anything else, I take the pattern pieces out of the pattern envelope and I press the pieces with a dry iron.  That removes any wrinkles and I’ll be more accurate when I trace off the pattern pieces I want.  That’s right.  I NEVER use the actual tissue as it comes out of the pattern envelope.  I want to preserve the pattern in all of it’s sizes, kind of like playing around with a photo in Photoshop, I alway leave the original untouched and play around with a copy.

I always buy by my chest measurement, because you get a more accurate fit, and unfortunately the chest measurement is rarely included on the pattern.  The bust circumference is not the way to measure, since all patterns are graded on a B cup, that is 1 1/4″ – 2″ difference between the chest and bust circumference, which I can assure you isn’t very much in the asset category at all.

Sidebar: after loosing a breast to cancer, I went for my prosthesis fitting and the fitter asked what size I wanted to be.  I answered between 1 1/4″ and 2″ difference between the chest and bust circumference measurement.  She thought I was completely crazy.  My logic was I’d never have to adjust a cup/bust measurement in a commercial pattern ever again…  🙂  (I don’t recommend this method of body alteration, it really is easier to just alter the pattern, but hey, I didn’t chose to get breast cancer!)

A Size 14 in commercial patterns calls for a 36″ bust circumference.  If you subtract 2″, you’ll get the chest measurement.  My chest (measured above the breast tissue tight under the arms) measures 34″, so a 14 should fit really well.  Except that according to the little finished circumference guide printed on the pattern, which is described as “Very Loose Fitting” this tunic will be 43 1/2″ around.  That calculates to 7 1/2″ of extra ease.  And the front of this tunic has a huge overlap.  I know I’m not going to be happy with the finished garment if I make the size 14.  So I opted to trace the size 12 instead except, crap, I bought the 14-20 multi size pattern.  No problem.  This is where having the grading schematic comes in handy.  If you look at the way a pattern is graded from size to size, there is a very clear proportionate schematic, and by following that schematic, you can trace a smaller or larger size by just increasing or decreasing by each of the increments drawn on the pattern.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…  I actually trace the tissue pattern using a product called Red Dot Tracer.  It is made by HTC, and now I understand also available from Pellon, after many try and fail attempts getting the base material right.  I haven’t tried the new Pellon version, but I will if HTC stops shipping for any reason (They do that frequently).  It is available on my website, if you can’t find it in stores).  I love this product, because I can trace what I want, use the red dots to make sure the pattern is perfectly on grain, and then sew it together as a first muslin.  I can then decide if it is even worth going forward to the muslin stage.  I match up the grainline of the pattern, with a row of red dots, and anchor it to a cardboard cutting board with push pins, lining up the grainline and row of dots with a gridline on the cutting board.  OK, I’m really anal about this.  But I do accurate work and each of these little details helps make the end product that much more precise and polished.

Now I carefully trace the patterns and the details I want, and in this case, I grade the pattern down from a 14 to a 12.  Once I have all the pieces traced, I go to my trusty Janome and turn it on (see, I told you I’d be using you shortly…) and stitch together the main pattern pieces using a long machine basting stitch (the longest stitch your machine will do).  I have a dress form and so my first stop is to try it on the form.  This isn’t a really really fitted style, there are no darts, and even though the waist is too short for me, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to lengthen the torso since the garment fits straight down from under the arm, and the closure sits well above the waist.

The fit looked really good on my dress form.  So I went into the bathroom and tried on the tunic pattern, and I think the fit is good.  I didn’t get a photo because no one else was up yet to take a picture of me and I didn’t feel like combing my hair, and a lot of my fit assessment is based on how the pattern feels on anyway.

So the next step here would normally to go to a cheap fabric and make up a muslin in the basic pattern pieces.  I know, I’m going to get letters, but I decided to skip this step.  I’m reasonably confident I’m going to like the fit, call it experience, and though I might regret the decision not to make it up first in something else, I’m happy enough with how the pattern feels on, so I’m going to take a chance.  But you didn’t hear that from me…  I’ll let you know if I should have done a muslin first.  Stay tuned…

Don’t cry for me…

My sisters and I keep a running email dialog, it helps to keep us connected when distance keeps us apart, and we get to laugh and tease about each other’s daily lives, and it is a really important part of my circle of what’s really important to me.

One of my sisters makes Martha Stewart look like a slug.  She is an amazing volunteer and quintessential hostess, and she does the holiday thing in a big way.  I love her for it, but that’s not me.  She didn’t realize I was going to Key West two weeks before Christmas, for VACATION.  Her comment was, “…who would book a vacation less then two weeks before Christmas?  I’d shoot myself!”  Then she proceeded to tell me in a lengthy paragraph about all the holiday activities she participates in, including the 37 gingerbread houses she made for the kids at church to decorate.  Like I said, I love her for being everything I’m not, and what I’m not, is a holiday hostess with the mostest…

I don’t bake.  I weave.  I don’t entertain.  I sew.  I hardly buy any gifts, just for my immediate family, that would be the family that lives inside my house.  I definitely don’t make gifts, or if I do, like the mug mats last year, it was because I was in some sort of mood.  My husband and daughter decorated the outside of the house with lights, and my daughter put up the tree.  It’s artificial.  No watering.  And no vacuuming the needles up in January…

I finished up the shopping I needed to do on the plane, thank you Skymall.com.  I never set foot in a single mall the whole season, thank you Amazon.com.  And so, I chose instead to fly away with my husband, and reconnect with him, he’ll be gone again in January to Saudi Arabia, and I’ll hunker down then and churn out the work.

The trip was fantastic.  Key West is the perfect weekend getaway, if you live on the east coast.  We flew to Miami, and hopped a prop plane and took the 27 minute flight to Key West.  The weather was surprisingly cold, my one mistake was not packing warm enough clothing, but I managed to layer, and wear my sneakers more than I would have normally.  So much for my pedicure…

Key West has water sports, gorgeous sunsets, gardens, Mojitos, unbelievable architecture, history, shipwrecks, Ernest Hemingway’s House, Mojitos, incredible restaurants, Key Lime Pie, oh, and did I mention Mojitos?  We went sailing, watched the sunset, did a house tour of some of the historic inns on the island, ate at two of the best restaurants I’ve ever experienced, and took a 3 hour ferry to the Dry Tortugas aboard the Yankee Freedom.  One of the great things about what I do is the feedback I get from students, guild members, and blog readers.  As a matter of fact, the post I did just before I left, produced a comment from one of my Canadian readers, who suggested her favorite restaurant, Blue Heaven, and we located it, and ate there after spending the day at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.  When the owner came up to ask how I liked my dinner, all I could say was OMG!  He asked if he could quote me.  🙂

Irene Schmoller, from Cotton Clouds, is providing the yarn for me to do the project/kit for the upcoming article I’m writing for Handwoven Magazine.  She mentioned right before I left that her wonderful friend Ellen  Steininger owned the Hands On Wearable Art Gallery on Duval Street in Key West, so we set out to find the gallery.  It is a lovely intimate gallery with work I readily recognized from some of my favorite fiber artists, Ellen wasn’t there but the manager Coco showed us around and then suggested another amazing restaurant, Louie’s Backyard.  We dined on the water, had some more incredible food, and of course, a Mojito.

If you’ve followed my blog for awhile, you’d know that my husband is an amazing photographer.  It isn’t unusual to come back from a trip like this with a couple thousand photos.  Like any good photographer, he will take a hundred shots to get the one perfect one.  I culled through a ton of photos as quick as I could to get this blog post up, and pulled some representative shots.  When I got possession of the camera, like when he went snorkeling, I took inspirational shots of things like the herringbone pattern in the brickwork, dead seaweed in the sand, and spiderwebs clinging to the mortar in the crumbling bricks and a tunnel of doorways in Fort Jefferson.

My absolutely favorite thing we did in Key West was a complete surprise.  My husband grabbed some discount coupons from the hotel, and we happened to be walking by so he dragged me into the Butterfly Museum.  I figured it would be a bunch of dead bugs mounted in display cases, but I was thrilled when I found out it was glass conservatory with tropical plants, filled with tropical birds, quail, and hundreds of gorgeous butterflies all over the place.  I sat on benches, enjoyed the tropical rainforest atmosphere, listened to the quiet orchestration of the Christmas music in the background and just watched the butterflies.  My stress level/blood pressure dropped 20 points (not that I was really stressed hanging out in Key West drinking Mojitos, but you get the picture).  And I fell in love with a bench.  I wanted that bench.  No matter that it was $4000.  I wanted that bench.  I wanted to have it shipped home, and I wanted to sit in it next summer between conferences in my own beautiful gardens that someone else will have weeded and cared for, and I wanted to be served Mojitos by some gorgeous cabana boy in my butterfly bench in my own backyard, ok, well anyway, I had a great time in Key West.  I’m sure you can imagine.  

So we flew home and I hit the ground running.  I am diving into some new projects and adventures, and then there is the article to work on.  I’ll post more in the next couple of days, so stay tuned.  Meanwhile, I’m bundled up, it is cold in NJ, and I’m glad for having had a weekend away where it was warm and pretty and I could reconnect with my husband, even though it is two weeks before Christmas.

Have yourself a merry, and maybe a Mojito or two…

Finishing Touches

I’m heading to where it is warm tomorrow, Key West, Florida.  We are leaving the adult kids and the dog in charge, and using up some of those frequent traveler perks.  Just a short get-away, my husband and I are taking advantage of the fact that this year, we have rarely been home together at the same time, sort of a great way to have a marriage, but once in awhile, it is important to reconnect to keep that marriage alive.  🙂

So of course, like any time I hit the road, there is all sorts of prep work to be done, leaving things in good order, making sure what needs to be done gets done, and scrambling to make sure everything functions smoothly in my absence.  I only begin to relax when I’m on the plane, and then there is nothing more that can be done and I’ve only to look forward and enjoy the ride.  To make sure I have plenty of knitting for the trip, I finished up the toe of the current sock du jour, so I could start its mate, and mindlessly knit the ribbing while sitting in the airport tomorrow.  This pair is Berroco Sox, fun to knit, since the yarn is variegated and self patterning.

Remember that silk dress I started sewing way too many blog posts ago?  I’ve been slowly working through the handwork, and finally finished it up, making a little belt for it, finding the perfect buckle from my attic stash.  So now I get to pick what, from my vast stash of goodies I’ve acquired this year, I want to work on next.

I finished up some alterations that were on the pile, that would be alterations for a friend in town, sort of an exchange for services, which is always a great way to do business, he converted many of my VCR tapes of the kid’s early years to CD/DVD’s.  In exchange I hemmed a bag full of dress pants for him.  Worked for me!

Yesterday I spent the whole morning at one of my favorite places.  Silk City Fibers in Paterson NJ.  If you are a weaver, you have more than likely used their yarn at some point in your weaving tenure, if you are a weaver in NJ, you more than likely have been to their warehouse outlet.  The outlet is open to the public the second Saturday of the month, from what I remember, but I rarely take advantage of that.  I went there on a different mission.

It was hard coordinating back and forth between Silk City, who wholesales yarn to Cotton Clouds in Arizona, who retails the yarn, and who will be supplying the yarn for the project/possible kit I’m designing for my article for Handwoven (March/April 2011 issue?).  This is the article  due in a couple of weeks.  With my trip to Florida and Christmas (oh crap, that’s right Christmas is this month), there wasn’t the time to try to pull the yarns through the retailer and I took advantage of my long standing professional relationship with Silk City and near proximity (I live 20 minutes away) and just went over there to play.  I hit the yarn jackpot!  Mady and Alice are alway so accommodating and helpful and we were able to narrow down quickly which yarns were available and could be used for the project, and would be available in the future for designing a kit.  Sort of important part of the equation.  I LOVE what I came up with, and came home with a box full of the cones necessary to start on this adventure once I return from Florida.  I wish I could show you photos, but alas, you’ll just have to wait and purchase  the magazine when it comes out. 😉

And in a strong final push, I wove off the last of the scarves on the latest run for the Santa Fe Gallery.  I LOVE this colorway, called Lush Vegetation.  I got the run off, into the washer, and hung to dry, and this morning I pressed and labeled and tagged the scarves, and one left from a previous run she sold out of, and packed them for shipping.

And now, I’m going to do something I NEVER do, after heading to the post office/bank/shipper, I’m going out for a manicure and pedicure.  After all, I expect I’ll be wearing sandals this weekend, and I deserve it…

Cat bites, dreary rain, and other cosmic oddities…

Well it has been quite the eventful week.  When last I wrote, we had just returned from a lovely Thanksgiving weekend in the Catskills with my sister and her husband in their mountain cabin.  Oh, and their cat.  What I didn’t mention was my husband was bitten by their cat.  He didn’t think it was a big deal, until he woke up Sunday morning, back here in NJ, with a hand swollen to the size of a baseball mitt.  By Monday he had red streaks traveling up his arm, it was looking pretty serious.  Even the doctor was shocked.  Long story short, after four months in Saudi Arabia, he is taken out by a sweet faced grey cat.  He ended up in the ER on Tuesday with intravenous antibiotics, which seemed to do the trick, and his hand/arm/white blood cell count, are all almost back to normal.  Big relief.  My brother in law, owner of the cat, brought some much needed humor to the whole affair with his blog post, http://cabininthecatskills.blogspot.com/2010/12/guest-blog-feline-atonement.html

Meanwhile, Wednesday’s rain storm was pretty horrific.  40-50 mile an hour winds toppled trees, knocked out power, killed a couple of people, fortunately I stayed safe in my studio, with the power on, yippee, playing with all my dyed yarn. I’m amassing quite a collection of skeins, and my sample cards are growing.  Course I made the mistake of going on Pro-Chem’s website last night when my nitrile gloves got a hole in them and to my complete delight/dismay, they had a whole bunch of custom colors of MX dyes on sale.  So what could I do but order more colors, assuring that this little dyeing adventure will continue well into the new year, or until I run out of yarn to dye, whichever comes first.

I needed to get another run of scarves on the loom for the Santa Fe Weaving Gallery, and I think I mentioned in the last post I had chosen one of the palettes from one of my last forecasts from Handwoven, one called Lush Vegetation.  I went on a treasure hunt around the studio, looking for bits of anything that were drapey and would work with the color range.  Lining them all up on the cutting table, I printed out the draft, glued it to card stock, and proceeded to do a wrapping.  Iworked hard the last couple of days to get the warp on the loom, stopping only to reset the AVL Warping Wheel so I could wind more skeins to dye.

I chose to try putting the supplemental ribbons on the lower beam this time.  Just trying to see if I gain much in consistent tension.  It did make the warp winding easier, I didn’t have to count so specifically, just winding the ground without the ribbons.

The samples have arrived from Irene at Cotton Clouds, so I can focus on designing a project for the article I’m writing for Handwoven Magazine.  My husband and I took a break this afternoon and went to the Morristown Armory to see the craft fair there, it was a great show and I ran into a couple I haven’t seen in probably 20 years, Linda Kaye-Moses and Evan Soldinger from Plumdinger Studio.  Lots of hugs, lots of comments how we are all so much older, and remembrances of craft fair escapades in the early 1980’s. That was back in the day when you could sleep in your van behind the booth and bring your dog to the show.  That was such a long time ago, a different life ago…  We are all old school craftsmen.  It was great to see people like the Littlefield’s, Candiss Cole (who came to dinner Thursday night), and Sue Sachs, craftsmen who’ve been showing their work, living the lifestyle for more than 30 years.  I don’t miss doing craft fairs, that was so very long ago, but I do miss the craftspeople, there were relationships formed that transcend time and space, a family of like minded creative souls that held each other up no matter how bad the sales, the economy, the weather, etc.  It felt good to reconnect, and of course I still see Candiss and jeweler Sue Sachs on a regular basis.

So back to work I go, I’d like to get another scarf woven before bed, I want to get this run off and shipped before I leave on Thursday for warmer climates.  A weekend get away with my husband.  We are NOT bringing the kids…  🙂