All’s Well that Ends Well…

The much anticipated end of the year guild meeting of the Jockey Hollow Weavers was last night.  On top of the guild challenge, there was the paperwork, and of course the PotLuck, where I made a couple of quiches since A-M had to bring a main dish.

A 5:30, Bri and I loaded everything into the car, and off we went.  The meeting was great, so much happening in our guild, the group has grown so much, lots of new weavers, or weaver wannabees, just wandering in from the knitting/spinning world, a natural progression.  And what a meeting to attend…

The bulk of the meeting was of course, exchanging our projects, there were eight total who participated, sadly one of the participants was missing in action.  Sad for the person who spent a year making her project, and sad for the recipient of the project from the missing in action participant, because she went home with nothing.  Not even a hint. In my case, the project for me from my yarn wasn’t finished, but Jerri did come with samples, and photos, and the assurance that the yardage was half way finished, and she works five minutes from my house so delivery should be prompt, and she offered a consolation prize, I now have a new dishtowel to add to my collection of two.  🙂

So here is the beginnings of the fabric Jerri is weaving for me.  The fabric samples she showed were washed and there is a lovely drape, but the fabric is stable and I am seeing this summer dress from a Michael Kors Vogue pattern I just bought…

I handed over my fabric to Sherrie, I think she liked it, she told me she thought the fabric w

as very couture, and oddly enough, liked the reverse side better, (she wasn’t alone in that) and I didn’t even get a picture of the back side!  Go figure…

I think Brianna had the most fun.  Bri presented her masterpiece, which someone in the guild affectionately called “Runner with Napkins” to Judith, and Judith seemed absolutely thrilled.  I am so glad.

I did get a photo before we headed out to the meeting, so Bri would have it for her journal.  Bri bought a 24″ x 36″ stretched canvas, and she covered it with rust colored Ultrasuede from my stash.  The black folded “napkins” are from Irish linen, and there are a couple of additional folded Ultrasuede things as well.  The entire piece is mounted with black beads and strategic stitching, so in essence, with a couple of clips, the entire yardage can come off of the canvas intact.  It was fun to watch Bri wander through the creative process, and how she effortlessly found her way to this point and it is great to watch a 17 year old be truly proud of something they accomplished.

Jenny received Bri’s bag of yarn back in the fall, Brianna, being 16 at the time, picked mostly pinks and purples.  I can assure you, those aren’t Jenny’s favorite colors.  Bri just squealed in delight  when Jenny presented her with this yardage… Now she has all summer to figure out what to make from it…

All in all, there were some amazing projects from this challenge, many in the guild wished afterwards that they too had participated.  It takes guts to put yourself out there and try to create something from someone else’s yarn,  what if after all that work, they don’t actually like it?  Honestly, after all seven participants showed their  end results, there wasn’t a piece in there I wouldn’t own.  I was thrilled at the level of workmanship, creativity and technical stretching that everyone put into the group assignment.

So we have the summer to wait for next year’s assignment, I promise I won’t wait until the last minute to work on this next challenge…  I hear it has something to do with complementary colors and dishtowels…  I may have to break my claim to have never woven a dishtowel…

The End is Near…

My eyes are crossed, my back aches, and I seriously need a stiff drink…

I took  Saturday and Sunday off.  I drove to Maryland to be with family, a rare treat, everyone gathered for a Memorial Day picnic at my mom’s.  My sisters and I spent all day Saturday cooking and chatting and being great friends, I’m so lucky to have two wonderful sisters.  My daughter came down for the Sunday festivities (thanks for bringing her down Uncle Rich) and we both drove home together Sunday night, making the long trek up the NJ Turnpike, laughing ourselves silly listening to Podcasts of Bill Maher’s political satire.

You see, we both needed to be home Sunday night, because Monday morning, we both had a date with a loom…

If you are new to the blog, or haven’t been keeping up, check the last couple of posts, they talk about the progress Bri and I are making on our guild challenges.  They are due Wednesday night at the end of the year pot luck.  No pressure.  My wonderful daughter of course, not unlike her mother, waited until the very last minute to attack her project.  In all fairness, she is busy with so many school functions, college prep, SAT’s, finals, etc. that there never seemed to be an appropriate time to tackle this assignment.  Nothing like waiting until the last minute.  I have no excuse other than I wasn’t in the state for most of the last four months.

So Bri got her warp on and ready to weave by Friday night.  She checked her threading and started troubleshooting and then worked all day Saturday at the kennel.  Sunday she met me in Maryland.  This morning, we both started in on our projects.  Bri wove her little heart out, carefully working through loom mishaps, broken threads, loose threads, letting a curse word slip out occasionally, while I worked through my own tedious warp from hell.

By 8pm, Bri squealed in delight as she encountered what every weaver dreams of… Oh the joy of seeing the knots rise up over the back of the loom.  🙂

Her fabric is quite lovely.  She is planning something sculptural with it, not something functional, since the recipient encouraged her to think way outside the box.  She is finished with the fabric, has cut it off the loom, and has done her washing samples.  There is considerable shrinkage, and she is waiting to see what the sample that has been put through the dryer looks like.

As for me, I have woven until I can’t weave anymore tonight.  I can’t say I’m seeing the knots come up over my back beam yet, but I’m really really close.  In all fairness, this was a sticky warp from hell, see previous posts, and I had an extra yard to weave and my picks per inch were much denser than my daughter’s.  And I’m just making excuses.

I’m really proud  of her, and am anxious to see what she comes up with.  I’m just presenting my recipient with yardage.  Thank goodness she sews…

Down to the Wire…

The year just got away from me.  That would be the guild year, you know, starts in September, ends in June.  Like next week June.  The assigned challenge/exchange happens in September, and the final results are due in June.  No sweat.  Right.  So why am I sweating?  Because my exchange piece is due next Wednesday night, and it has been 95 degrees here for the past couple of days, I refuse to turn on the airconditioning because it is suppose to cool off, which it actually has, after last night’s big thunderstorm, but weaving mohair in 95 degree heat isn’t my idea of fun.  So why did I wait so long?  I didn’t think the fabric, which I designed back in April, would give me this much grief, and because I am constantly changing shuttles, it is weaving painfully slow…  And I’m using a temple, to maintain width, which is also very slow as it has to be moved every inch or so.

You see, each of the guild exchange participants put yarn in a bag, and the bags were exchanged.  You are required to weave (or whatever fiber technique floats your boat), something for the person whose yarn you picked, and obviously you don’t get to choose what’s in the bag you pick.  I got a combination of some very odd things, and I blogged about the yarns, and what I planned to do with them back in April (In a post titled oddly enough,  “Rested” !).

So here I am, struggling through this warp, on my new to me loom, my 36″ Tools of the Trade, (circa 1985) that I bought back in April.  I have to say first off, I adore this loom.  It feels like an old friend, since I have four other Tools of the Trade looms, the size and weight is perfect for my aging body.  And it is handling this very problematic fabric with extreme bravery.  First off, this fabric is primarily a very hairy very sticky fine kid mohair.  Since the original design called for three shafts in the block with the mohair, there are 24 ends per inch spread over three shafts and if you are a handweaver you know this means major sticking when trying to change sheds.  The first six inches or so of this warp were really painful.  I haven’t had this much grief over a warp in years.  I just couldn’t build any speed.

I resorted to every trick I’ve ever had to use as an experienced weaver, after all, I got my start weaving production mohair yardage, and I found a can of Niagara Spray Starch in my laundry cabinet.  That was the first thing.  Spray Starch tends to have silicon in it to help the iron glide, and it helped control the hairyness of the mohair.  The next step was to redesign the block, which I wanted to do anyway since I didn’t like the appearance of the original design.  I worked out a pattern that only required one shaft to be lifted at a time.  In the case where one of the picks required two shafts at a time, I spread them out over two treadles, so I’d be lifting only one at a time.  The shed on this loom is fabulous, and the shafts themselves heavy, so I’m getting good clearance once the threads do separate.  Still, this is a painfully slow warp.

The other trick I resorted to, was to dig out my temple, that bar with teeth that digs into the selvedges and spreads the warp so there is no draw in, which had been substantial on this warp.  By keeping the fabric at full width, I’m getting weft coverage and maintaining the 24 ends per inch.  If I were to weave this again, (which I won’t) I would probably try setting it at 20 epi instead of 24.  I know that sounds funny coming from someone who plans to have on her tombstone the words, “Should have been sett denser…”  In this case, the blocks aren’t weaving completely square, and I’m not resleying it at this point.  

So my trusty loom and I are plodding along with an eye on the clock, yes I shouldn’t be blogging, and I shouldn’t be spending the mornings weeding the yard, and I shouldn’t be spending afternoons in lunch dates and paperwork, but honestly I’m not enjoying this yardage.

BUT, I am damn proud of what I have in front of me.  The fabric is really beautiful, and I am really pleased at what I came up with given the odd array of yarns in my bag.  I’m not making anything from the yardage, like some of the other guild members, since the person who will get this yardage is a fabulous sewer (I know the word now is sewist, but that’s irritating, I’m a sewer and proud of it.)

Meanwhile, my daughter, who definitely waited too long to start her project for the guild exchange, is frantically trying to get hers on the loom, and hitting just as many road blocks.  She did an excellent job of calculations to see what she could get from the five cones she was given, (Unlike the rest of us, she adores math) and she is planning a tartan like plaid from the colors, a gorgeous palette.

She finished winding yesterday after school, and last night set to sleying the reed.  She partitioned off the reed, since there are multiple ends in each dent, and then started sleying.  She finished up and I heard a screech and a curse word that shouldn’t come out of the mouth of a 17 year old, and I went over and she was in despair because she was one dent short in the reed.  She had started too far in on the right side.  So she sucked it up, and resleyed the entire reed, moving everything over by a couple of dents, and finished up a second time.  She has a half day today because of the holiday weekend, and will try to get the loom threaded by tonight.

Oh, and here is a tip, I don’t normally use standard warp beams, my three other floor looms have sectional pegs, so no packing paper is necessary with the warp.  But my new loom, though it has two warp beams, does not have sectional pegs, it is a standard beam, requiring packing.  I found a roll of sturdy white paper from Staples, the regular craft paper rolls weren’t wide enough.  I attached the end of the paper roll when I started beaming the warp, and the paper just unrolled as the warp beamed.

There was still a lot of paper left on the roll, and I didn’t really want to cut it off, and thought of a way to self rewind the paper as I wove the fabric.

By tying the paper roll, suspended from the warp beam, with two pieces of string, the roll is actually rewinding as I advance the warp.  I’m pretty impressed with myself.

OK, back to weaving…

Loose Threads…

I’ve wanted to post all week, little things, but the week just slipped by in a whirlwind, not all of it work related, but all of it consuming my every waking minute.  Really though, I’m feeling like I’m starting to catch up, to find my house, to get a little bit done in the yard which is looking spectacular, alas, no photos because, well, I haven’t taken any and I’d go out and take them now, but it is dark.  🙁

The week started promising and then went downhill from there.  My lovely husband left on Thursday for Saudi Arabia for three weeks.  It was hard to try to do everything I needed to finished up my own agenda and help him get everything in order so he could leave.  Getting the yard/house/pool ready for the summer, way ahead of schedule, is a monumental task, and my husband handled what he could, and the rest, well, it can wait.

I had a number of pieces accepted to an exhibit, May 29th – July 10th, 2010 in New Bedford, MA, at a gallery called Artworks!.  The exhibit is called “To Tell a Story”.  It is a show featuring work that derives and is inspired by photography, curated by Mark Mederios & Karen Alves.  The call was for a sequence or a mix of media that can sometimes tell a complete narrative in a way that no single medium approaches.  I thought personally that my current body of work fit this description nicely, and I submitted three works, and they accepted an additional three.  I spent Monday packing up the work for that show and getting it shipped out.

So if you are in the New Bedford, MA area, stop in, grab a photo if you can and send it to me, since I more than likely won’t make it up there for the show.

I also shipped out my garments for the Fashion Show for Convergence Albuquerque.   You can see that work on a previous post.

Meanwhile, my husband left on Thursday for Saudi, like I said, and all hell broke loose.

Sidebar: My husband has been a traveler for work for a long long time.  Before I had children, he traveled.  He was always traveling somewhere, while the kids were young, but he always managed to be there enough that my kids felt like that two involved parents.  He was traveling when I was diagnosed with cancer, but he managed to be here for all the important stuff, my surgeries and my chemo, and we are all very use to his coming and going.  I can’t really say anything, because in the past 10 years, I’ve done enough of my own traveling.  But with my husband, there has been a long standing joke in the house, that whenever he would leave for a trip, the gods of the home fires would get pissed, and do something in the house to ensure he would need to return.  It happened so often, that it became a standard joke, that my husband’s plane wouldn’t even have a chance to arrive at a destination and something minor would happen in the house, nothing cataclysmic, just annoying enough that we would be inconvenienced until he returned, thus assuring he would return.  I will say that the gods have been sort of quiet over the last year or two, or maybe I’ve been gone so much myself, there hasn’t been a need to assure he will return, since I was away too.

So, a lot happened in the 20 hours or so it took my husband to go from Newark, NJ, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia via Frankfurt, Germany.  Friday was like a comedy of errors for my son and me, both of us decided it was safer to hide in bed, but between the ice maker breaking, and the car failing inspection for a non working side mirror, and the pump going on the big pond waterfall, and my computer deciding to have hissy fits, most of Friday, when I should have been packing, was spent trying to trouble shoot, and shop for a new pump.  I learned more about pond pumps than I care to ever know thank you very much.  My computer problems were corrected, thanks Eric, and the ice maker worked for a bit, but it is really done, and we only replaced it a year or so ago, (I can buy ice for three weeks), but I was able to purchase an affordable pump for the waterfall, get that installed, and get the waterfall working, so now the fish are happy.  (I heard yesterday that one of the running boards fell off the truck, my son dealt with that little incident, I was safely in southern NJ…)

Which means I didn’t get to pack for my trip to South Jersey on Saturday, until late Friday night.  Still, everything was ready to go, so it didn’t take long, and I got a good night’s sleep, and I set out Saturday morning for Southern NJ, to teach a seminar to a guild down there, a Small Looms Guild.  They were all prepared with warped inkle looms, for a very intense brain frying afternoon of advanced inkle loom techniques.  I taught them supplemental warp, 7 thread pick-up, and 1:1 name draft pick-up.  By the time I got to the last technique, I think everyone’s brain was on overload, but they all had some great things on their looms, and all seemed really happy with what they learned.  I put together the entire presentation onto PowerPoint, and will one of these days make it into a monograph supplement to my inkle loom monograph. The Advanced techniques supplement will eventually be available on my eShop.  Look for it…

Saturday was also my birthday.  Lots of people work on their birthdays, there was no reason to turn down this job because it fell on my birthday, and as it turned out, we celebrated the occasion on Wednesday, the night before my husband left, and there was the birthday lunch with my girlfriends on Thursday, at the new sushi restaurant on Main Street, and then my son took me out for my birthday Friday night.  Saturday was low key, I stopped at a friend’s house on the way home, for wine and pizza and some recorder practice for my recorder consort which met today.  I sat in bed late last night, enjoying all of the birthday wishes from everyone I’ve ever known who are now friends with me on Facebook. It is too much fun.

So now my big push is to finish the fabric on my new loom, which I’ve just started to weave.  You may recall back in April, I sat down to design this fabric, as part of my guild’s challenge.

We all did a yarn swap last September, and the goal was to weave or make something with the yarn in the bag you got, for the person whose yarn it was.  I detailed what was in my bag in my April blog post, and then I started traveling again, and never got back to it.  The push is on now, because it is due in 10 days.  And I’m really nervous.  I did get the loom warped finally, earlier this week, but since the bulk of the yarn is a hairy kid mohair, it is going to be a complete nightmare to weave.  I’m taking all the steps I know to get it to weave, the loom is handling it all remarkably well, this is my new acquisition, and I couldn’t be happier with it, but still, this is a sticky warp, and it is painfully slow to weave.  Plus I hated the first inch of my design, and I had to go back to the drawing board, and redesign based on the threading because I was not about to change that.  So now I’m happy, and I can wind my shuttles and start weaving in the weft wise stripes, and hopefully I’ll be able to develop a rhythm and get this yardage off in the next 10 days, and help my daughter get her challenge project finished as well.  Stay tuned…

Oh, and one more thing, if you are in the Western North Carolina area, you know about the Western North Carolina Fibers/Handweavers Guild, sponsors of the Blue Ridge Fiber Show.  I’m one of the jurors this year, and I donated one of my tote bags for a raffle fund raiser for the awards the jurors will be presenting at the exhibit.  There are a number of other donations, and you can view them all online, and my tote bag as well.  Bid early and often!

Choices…

I was all set to blog about my great day yesterday, spending the day at an American Sewing Guild event, featuring Shirley Adams, who is one of my long time idols.  I watched Shirley’s show, Sewing Connections, for years when my kids were really young, she inspired me to do many things with my scraps of Handwoven Fabric, all stored in the attic, from my production days.  I was all set to blog about how wonderful it was to spend the day, looking at her work, her patterns, her techniques, and tips.  I was all set to show photos, and brag about what a wonderful time I had.  Except…

I didn’t go…

You see, I got off a plane last Sunday night, and I hit the ground running a marathon that I was ill prepared to run.  I blogged about tying in the 900 ends to get a loom ready for an all day series of lectures at an elementary school, and I blogged about teaching at the Newark Museum on Tuesday, and I blogged extensively about my experiences teaching all day on Wednesday at that elementary school.  By Thursday I never wanted to see my studio again, and by Friday I was beginning to use the “B” word.  You know, BURNOUT!  I haven’t felt like this since the year leading up to my diagnosis of cancer.  I swore I’d never put myself into that situation again, where I’d lost control, and that my life was consuming me, at a huge cost to my health and my family.  I’m getting dangerously close again…

So Friday afternoon, I had lunch with a very old friend, one whom I hadn’t seen in years, it was a very healing lunch, though we never mentioned my current state of mind, I didn’t need to, I heard what I needed to hear.  I looked at my husband Friday night, as he is preparing to leave for Saudi Arabia for three weeks, and knowing both of my children would be active elsewhere on Saturday, and my husband would be puttering around in the yard, trying to do it all alone before he left, I said to my self, “Enough”.  I would have loved to have seen Shirley Adams, truth is, I needed to be home more.

My husband and I slept in, and at 8:50 the phone rang, and to my utter dismay, the caller ID said it was my sister from Maryland calling, which could only mean one thing that early Saturday morning, something happened to my mom.  I picked up the phone with dread in my voice, and to my shock, a chipper sister’s voice said, “So what are you guys doing today?”  Turns out, she was on a tour bus coming up the NJ Turnpike on the way to Manhattan, with a load of High School drama kids, as a chaperone for a field trip, and had a couple of extra tickets to see…

So my husband and I got up, walked into town for some bagels for breakfast, and did about an hour of yard work.  We showered and headed into the city, and met my sister for an afternoon Matinée.  Of course the show was wonderful, and it was great to see my sister, and her husband, and meet some of the other teachers who work with her husband.  This was not at all what I thought we would be doing today, and I loved how the universe handed me such a gift.

After the show, all 50 High School students trekked the couple of blocks from the Ambassador Theatre to 44th street for

dinner at John’s Pizza.  The food was amazing and they accommodated 50 hungry teens beautifully and I’d eat there again in a heartbeat.  The facility itself is gorgeous, presumably an old Theatre renovated into a restaurant, the domed ceiling is worth the trip.
After dinner, we all hugged goodbye, my sister et al boarded the bus for Maryland, and my husband and I walked the two blocks back to Port Authority, where we parked the car.  We had parked on the roof of the car park there, and the twilight colors of the buildings and spectacular views of 42nd street will give me much inspiration if I ever have time to make things in my studio again.