Daryl's Blog

When last we left off our weary traveler, desperate to get something, anything on one of her looms, it was a late Saturday night just a little over a week ago, and she threw on a four scarf warp, and managed to actually get the thing threaded and a couple inches woven after posting the blog that talked about getting something, anything on one of her floor looms…

I actually did manage to get the warp threaded, and sleyed, and I wove a quick couple of inches so I would know what it looked like before I left last weekend early Sunday morning, for Sievers.  I decided not to update the post for two reasons, the computer was already powered down and I was exhausted, and truthfully I didn’t like what I had woven.

I wasn’t sure what I didn’t like about it, and I was too tired and too rushed, having to get on a plane in a few hours and desperately needing sleep, so I decided to just not deal with it, and maybe things would look different when I returned.

I’m glad I waited.  I mulled over the options in my head while I was gone all week at Sievers, which probably accounts why I slept so poorly.  My brain was always humming something.  I wandered around Sievers’ shop and looked at some of the knitting yarns there, and found a couple of balls of stuff that might work for supplemental yarns with this warp.  After I unpacked Saturday, I looked at some of the stuff I bought, and decided that I really actually liked the warp, except for one part.  The lavender shiny broken checkerboards in the teal area and the purple area were too much.  Actually one area would have been fine.  It was two of them that caused a competition and the illusion of symmetry which was not what I was going for.  So I decided to leave the teal area intact, the value contrast wasn’t as strong and I actually liked the icy look, but I pulled out the shiny lavender yarns from the purple section and substituted a flat matte ribbon yarn, that picked up some of the colors from the right side of the warp.  First though, I un-wove everything I had done so far.  Thank goodness I hadn’t hem stitched the front end yet.

Since I had a second beam on this loom (which has helped me so many times over the 25 years I’ve owned this little Tools of the Trade wonder), I hand measured three 10+ yard warp ends and pulled them through the reed/heddles, and wound them onto the second warp beam for storage.

So I retied the warp onto the apron bar, tightened everything up, and started to weave all over again.  I put in the hemstitching this time, and then kept going.  Now I’m happy.  So happy I ordered a bunch more stuff from Webs for playing with in my color sandbox of yarns.  One of my late fall projects is to go through my dye cabinet, and make up a small amount of each of the colors in it, for a reference chart, and while I’m at it, dye or over-dye some of the white/pastel yarns I have that would work in these kinds of warps.  I don’t need much.  A 50 gram ball of knitting ribbon will do a bunch of scarves.  So I checked out Webs sale stuff and ordered away.  I love their discounts…

Of all the places I have taught, Sievers has to be my favorite.  There are so many things I love about the experience, just getting there is an adventure, two flights, a two hour car ride from Green Bay Wisconsin, and then a ferry boat ride to a beautiful island off Door County peninsula, into Lake Michigan, to an island that has a powerful hold on all who venture there.

I flew back yesterday, sitting in first class, gotta love those upgrades, happily knitting my socks,  completely exhausted, and yet sad to leave such an amazing place.  The free margarita in first class helped…

I had another wonderful class, they are all wonderful really, each class I teach presents its own set of challenges and triumphs, but this particular one at Sieve’s has to go down there with my all time favorites.  This class in particular is really special to me, I get to teach for four and a half days, which is a really nice chunk of time, so I get to really know the students and help them achieve their goals, and since this is my fourth year teaching this class here at Sievers, I have a number of students who repeat the class each year.  Cindy has actually taken this class five times, starting with the Midwest Conference class in Sheboygan, WI I taught in 2005.  Nancy and Sherrie have taken the class with me all four years at Sievers, and this is Ginnie’s third time.  Terry came back this year for a round two.  Others have taken classes with me at other venues and made the trek to Sievers to take my intensive this week.

For those who are taking the class for the first time, I give the agenda, they make a jacket, custom fit to them, from either their handwoven fabric, or if they are a non weaver, whatever commercial fabric they come up with.  Silke made this “Daryl” jacket from a commercial fabric electing not to cut into her handwoven on this trip.  Nancy is a non weaver, she is actually a jeweler, but she brings the most amazing projects, from fabrics that find their way into her stash, and this year, she brought her grandfather’s WWII army blanket, and made this wonderful jacket from March Tilton’s Vogue pattern 8430.  Sherrie worked on a stained glass effect vest from a stack of fabrics she brought.

Ginnie made another “Daryl Jacket” from her handwoven fabric, but this time, she lined it and piped it and cut the sleeves and pockets on the bias.

The new students all made jackets that were so personal to them.  Ellen is a really talented quilter, who teaches at Sievers herself, and she used a hand dyed fabric she brought in, along with piping made from one of her quilt fabrics, and Ellen now has a jacket that she can wear with pride and has stretched her sewing machine skills to include garment construction. Jane made a lovely jacket from her husband’s handwoven fabric.  Her husband was along for the ride on this trip, and was a pleasure to have in my lecture on setting and finishing handwoven fabric.  And the list goes on.  Each student went on a sewing adventure, finding out about their own bodies, how to address fit issues, and how to use their sewing machines to produce a garment they could be proud of.  I manage the flow of the class by instituting a sign up sheet called the “Daryl Alert” and if they need my help, they put their name on the board, and then I go from student to student crossing off each as I go.  Only problem was, this class kept me moving so much I’d forget to take a potty break, and some well meaning student (probably Terry) decided to actually put a potty break into the line up for me so I’d remember to go.  I love this group!

I’m really big into finishing off the inside of an unlined jacket, and the inside of Cyndie’s purple corduroy with the Hong Kong seam finishes, made her want to wear the jacket inside out. Cindy, having been with me the longest, always brings wonderful patterns, and incredible fabrics, and pushes herself to try new things.  She brought a fabric she dyed and wove in a class with Heather Winslow 10 years ago at Sievers, it was actually only a sample, which she used on the collar, and then created yardage to match.  There is lots of handwork to finish, but Cindy’s stash of handwoven jackets is starting to rival mine.

There were some fit challenges in this class, which helps me grow as a teacher, I love being able to give someone a pattern who can’t walk into a store and buy a ready to wear garment, and have them be able to make a jacket they too can wear proudly.  There is just never enough time in the short week here to get it all done.  I suppose that if we had two weeks, we still wouldn’t get it all done.  Many of the students were already talking about next year.

There was another class running simultaneously, in the other studio, a beyond beginning spinning class, led by Deb Jones, owner of the Fiber Garden in Black River Falls, WI.  I so wanted to take her class.  On Thursday of the week long class, both of our classes made a studio visit to the other class to see what wonderful things they had done and Deb’s class just made me want to dust off my spinning wheels and dive right in, which I completely intend to do once I stop all this traveling for the year.  I learned so much just watching all the demonstration stations she set up.  I heard nothing but rave reviews from her students.

The weather at Sievers was a bit stormy, and we lost power one night, later in the evening,  creating a surreal acknowledgement of how much we rely on electricity.  Ann, owner of Sievers,  happened to be in our studio at the time and instantly produced flashlights so we could all find a safe comfortable place to sit down, and I took a flashlight and an umbrella and made a made dash for my cottage to bring over my last remaining glass of wine.  Well I can’t take it home on the plane with me.  Seemed like the perfect thing to do in this situation.  Within about fifteen minutes, the generator was turned on for the whole island, and power was restored, and we resumed sewing well into the night.

The views on the island are peaceful, serene, and restorative.  As hard as we all worked, there is such a sense of accomplishment and pride, and lots and lots of inspiration to draw from once back on the mainland.

The ferry ride back yesterday was quite the trip, after all the storms the night before, the water was choppy and the spray up over the front of the ferry drenching.

Donna Kallner, one of my all time favorite fiber buddies, we roomed together at that now infamous Sheboygan conference, teaches frequently at Sievers, but this time she was a student taking Deb’s class.  Donna and I had a really nice long chat on the two hour drive back to Green Bay and the airport on Friday.  She graciously volunteered to drive me, we stopped at a wonderful place for lunch, an old county meeting hall converted to a cafe, the whitefish salad sandwich was to die for!

I’m home now. And so is my husband, who flew in Thursday from Saudi Arabia.  My children are also home, if even only for today.  We actually all sat at the same table tonight, just the four of us, and had ourselves dinner.  It was a really special dinner.  It is really good to be home.

At this point, I’m really impressed that anyone is still reading my blog, filled with travelogues and adventures on the road, I don’t know about you, but as the writer of the blog, I really really am tired of writing about my adventures on the road, and really really want to write about some new fun adventure I’m having in the studio.  So I tried to budget in a day or two this week, to actually put a warp on one of my looms, just for old times sake, I’d almost given up thinking I’d ever find time to weave again…  or sew for that matter…

Spurred on by the request by the Santa Fe Weaving Gallery to carry “my scarves”, which don’t actually exist yet, (except for the two loom mates I shipped once one came back from the exhibit in Albuquerque), I decided not to spend too much time over thinking anything, which is largely my favorite past time, and focus on just getting a warp on to my 8 shaft 25″ floor loom.  That would be the loom I would weave the scarves on.  I leafed through my binder of all the palettes I ever did for Handwoven magazine’s Color and Fabric Forecast, and selected the last one I did, Theatrical Fantasy (maybe from Jan/Feb 2008, I can’t be sure since my binder/portfolio of articles is packed).  It is vibrant, and fun, and something I was in the mood to work with.  So I ran around the studio and gathered everything that could possibly work with the palette, focusing on rayons, tencel, silks and bamboo, things that would really drape well.

Just looking at the pile of yarn on the table made me giddy with delight, it has been so long since I made anything in this room, my hands on creativity reduced to whatever I could manage on an airplane.  God knows I’ve been on enough of them lately…

I started with the draft, and printed it just larger than life size.  I glued it to a piece of heavy cardboard so I could do warp wraps directly on the draft, knowing when to put in the supplemental threads.  This worked really well, and I added and subtracted, tweaked and adjusted until I got something I thought would work.

Because almost every one of the 264 ends is different from its neighbor, the method of warping that made the most sense was the AVL warping wheel, which would produce two inch bundles of warp which could be beamed sectionally as I wound them.  I love this pricey piece of equipment, and would probably never have bought it had I not been at the right place at the right time, when AVL first introduced it in 2000 at Convergence Cincinnati.  I paid a whole $250.  It costs almost $600. now.  I am so glad I own it, it is perfect for this kind of multiple thread warp.

I warped and beamed, warped and beamed, until late last night, after a wonderful sushi dinner with an old friend, I finished the 10″ wide warp.  I put on 9 yards, I’m hoping to get four scarves out of it, we’ll see.  I’m thrilled because I’ll come home to a loom calling to me, instead of a bunch of dirty toilets and dog hair on the carpets dense enough to be raked…  I’m doubting I’ll have time tonight to start the threading, I’m mostly packed for my trip to Siever’s Fiber School tomorrow, but I don’t want to cut myself short and leave anything for Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, Part 2 of my The Weaver Sews: What to Weave column on Weavezine is live, just posted about an hour ago.  I’m really having fun with this column, there is so much to say, and I love having an archive of photos and work to pick from to illustrate my points.

Stay tuned for a field report from Sievers Fiber School, Washington Island Wisconsin, provided I get any form of internet connection while I’m there.  I haven’t in the past, so don’t hold your breath!

I spent a couple of hours last night with my daughter, whose senior year in HS schedule along with a couple of evening classes at the local community college, along with all her college applications due this fall, is not for the faint of heart.  We talked for a long time about how one goes about getting it all done.  Sometimes I feel like a master of the technique, and sometimes an abject failure, I always pull it out in the end, and my daughter’s comments mirrored that sentiment, but sometimes what you pull out in the end isn’t quite your best because you left too little time to really do the job justice.

I’m a big believer in lists.  I have a Google Calendar, accessible from all of my electronics, and printed up month by month on the refrigerator.  It sync’s with my husband’s calendar as well.  But my calendar on the refrigerator doesn’t break down each little task I need to accomplish in a day, like “Clean the Bathrooms” and “Sort the Bills for Payment”.  For those task lists, I use a little daytimer calendar on my desk, and pencil in the day’s assignments.  It is with great joy that I erase each task as it is completed.  This week saw lots of catch up work at the desk, contracts, a book review, an upload for edits of my next installment of my quasi monthly column for Weavezine.  I had a local business man in town send me some pants to hem, a favor I’ve been doing for him for years.  I had to add that to the list.  I had to order more shoulder pads, more Form Flex interfacing, more 15 denier nylon tricot, and more office supplies.  And there were all the final meetings and adjustments to the weaver’s guild schedule for the year, since I’m in charge of programming.  All of those tasks got added to my little daytimer, so I didn’t have to waste anymore brain power trying to remember what I had to remember.  I broke down the bigger tasks into smaller pieces and tried to create a realistic schedule for myself of what I needed to get done and by when…

I tried to share this system with my daughter who is in the throes of cramming the unfinished summer assignments in calculus and English into the last few days before school starts.  At 17, sometimes it is easier to sit at the computer watching Japanese Anime, (in Japanese) for 5 hours than tackle the tasks that really need to be done.  I felt like that last night when I started knitting another pair of socks and I was really suppose to be cleaning the bathrooms.  Toilets, socks, toilets, socks, the pull was just too much…  In the end, because I’ve been doing this a long time, I managed to do both, and went to bed quite happy with myself.

My daughter worked late into the night creating her own Google Calendar.  I don’t know how long it will last, but these are baby steps.  Learning how to prioritize the tasks, and stay on them is tough for anyone, especially a 17 year old who gets distracted by a roll of duct tape…  And I continue to add to, erase, and adjust my own list of tasks as the week moves forward and I do the final preparations for my flight Sunday to Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, I finished reading a wonderful tome while I was in Harrisville last week.  Marion Marzolf, a talented weaver and retired journalism professor wrote a lovely historical fiction novel about a Swedish Immigrant, Lisa Lindholm, born in 1911, who made her way to the United States as a young girl to teach weaving in a small mountain school in Appalachian, NC.  Lisa’s fictional life weaves in and out of the early history of 20th century handweaving in the United States, and I read with great joy and surprise each time Lisa crossed paths with one of the weaving greats, all part of my own historical  background studies in the 1970’s, Else Regensteiner, Edward Worst, Lenore Tawney, Lucy Morgan and Penland, Cranbrook Art Academy, etc.  I really enjoyed reading this book, and found myself heading off to my own library shelf to revisit books I haven’t looked at in years, three of Else Regensteiner’s, Ed Worst’s book “Weaving with Foot Powered Looms“, and a book on Bauhaus Textiles.  The full review is available on Weavezine.com along with information on ordering the book, Shuttle in her Hand, from the Swedish-American Historical Society.

OK, cross “update blog” off the list…

It is a cozy Sunday morning, the house is quiet, my husband is in Saudi Arabia, my daughter working at the kennel, the “bottom feeders” (an affectional term for the crew of guys that occasionally live in my basement) are home from national guard drills and sound asleep.  It is raining.  A gentle summer rain, making a tiny attempt at quenching the thirst of the bone dry dusty landscape that was once lush NJ greenery.  A perfect day to write.

I returned late Friday night from an amazing week at Historic Harrisville, where I taught in the Weaving Center at Harrisville designs, which operates in the old mill town, built in the 1790’s.  From what I understand, this is one of the only remaining intact mill villages left in New England, perfectly preserved.  Harrisville Designs, as we know it today, started around 1970, not long before my own career as a handweaver began in 1974 with my first college class.  Harrisville Shetland yarns and looms, especially the kit loom, have been part of my weaving language since the mid 70’s.  Some of my early craft fair work used the Harrisville Shetland yarns, and though I never actually owned the kit floor loom, they were part of my repetoire for decades, most weaving studios where I taught had a number of these small compact, portable, inexpensive four shaft looms (I just found out it comes in an 8 shaft version as well), they did their job as the perfect introductory floor loom for an inexpensive price (still under $1000.), and the amazing thing, it is still being manufactured, if you find one on eBay, you can still get parts for it, the loom has endured, and I’m thrilled to know that this could be just the thing to launch all those Rigid Heddle Weavers coming into weaving from the knitting community, onto a real honest to goodness floor loom, where they can explore endless patterns and fabrics, 22″ wide is perfect for yardage for just about any type of garment!

The class itself was a dream.  The space was huge, well lit, plenty of room to move around, the students, all 10 of them had handwoven cloth.  Many of them had taken weaving classes at Harrisville, and all of them produced very very competent cloth, the best group I’ve ever seen in any one class.  All were sett appropriately, and finished well.  This is a group of well trained weavers.  It was a joy to watch them turn their fabrics into a garment that made them happy.  Only one of the students had studied with me before, making the jacket in a different venue.  For a repeating student like that, I always let them bring whatever they want to work on, and this particular student didn’t disappoint.  Pat brought a pile of UFO’s, affectionately called Unfinished Objects, and we worked to bring them out of the box and into fruition.  Sometimes you just get stuck and don’t know how to move forward…  That’s the part I love best about this class.

There were some wonderful side trips this week, to the Harrisville Spinning Mill (where they have interesting ideas about what to do with all those empty cones), where all the Harrisville yarns are spun, along with Peace Fleece and a new line from a yarn designer whose name went totally out of my head, silly me, but it had something to do with Brown Tweed.  The yarns were gorgeous.  Babs, who has been a fixture at the mill for 30 years, gave us the tour, starting in the storage area at the beginning, where New Zealand fleece comes in from the dyers.  The colors were bright and fresh, and I wanted to go diving into the wool.

We watched the pickers, and the carding machines, and the machines that carefully created the fine roving that would eventually be spun.  They were working on white today.  The dust in the room was sort of amazing, hanging and clinging to every available surface, I so wanted to grab a vacuum…

We watched the spinning machines, and the machine that plied the wool, until it finally wound onto skeins and then Babs showed us the most amazing thing, the yarns are then washed in the skein, gently, in a 25 year old top loader, where she carefully controls the soak, the spin and the amount of water coming back in during the rinse cycle, and then the skeins are hung to dry.  Someone sits at a desk and hand wraps the wrapper around each skein.

Babs also gave us a quick demonstration on how to turn a standard wide eyed heddle into a repair heddle, by heating the soldered ends with a lighter.  Once hot, she banged the soldered end onto the concrete floor to snap the solder joint, and unwound the end of the metal heddle.  For the non weavers out there, the heddles are the wires that hang from the shafts that control each individual warp thread.  Sometimes you just make a mistake in threading and instead of tying in a string heddle, or actually cutting the heddle head with wire cutters like I do, this is a cool trick for adding a missing heddle onto a different shaft when one does make that dreaded threading error.

Of course, what would a spinning mill be without the requisite wool humor!

Chick Colony, founder of Harrisville Designs, spent some time with us Friday afternoon, giving us the history of the mill and his family’s involvement.  It is a great story of the history of the textile industry in this country, and how things change sometimes wiping out entire industries almost overnight.  It is a history we are seeing first hand today in almost every thing we know.  It is a story of survival, of regrouping, of coming together as a community to save a village, and it is a story of seeing the handweaving community as we know it today, getting a fresh infusion of young knitters who are discovering what all of us who were trained back in the good old days, came to know and love, and spend a lifetime exploring, after 35 years at the weavng loom, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.

So Friday afternoon, the class got together for one group photo, all wearing their finished jackets, some still with tailor’s tacks, I don’t let them take them out until I’m safely back in NJ.  🙂  They learned a lot, and are looking forward to next year, Harrisville has already requested dates from me for 2011.  I love teaching in this kind of venue, there is a great energy, and repeat students bring me fresh challenges, and I get to see their skills grow and develop as they launch into a world where they aren’t just weaving cloth, they are making garments for themselves.  I’m looking forward to next weekend when I fly to Washington Island, Wisconsin to teach the same class “A Wearable Extravaganza” at Siever’s Fiber School.