Rested…

All week I felt as though I were moving through Jello.  I slept as much as I could, and just accomplished what absolutely needed to get accomplished.  And I mourned that, although I’m having a wonderful year teaching, I haven’t done anything creative in the studio, except write, for a long time…  My adventures on the road though interesting, from a blogger’s point of view, get redundant after awhile, there isn’t anything new to say, and I long for a meaty project, and for that matter, to just put warps on my looms, any of them would be great, because they are looking like that girl from Bluefly.com who goes to the party naked because she has nothing to wear.  (If you watch Project Runway, you’ll know the ad.)

My handweaving guild, Jockey Hollow Weavers, has an exchange every September.  The goal/project for the year is set,  we have all year to come up with whatever is expected of us, and we present it in June.  Well of course that means I don’t look at it until April, and then maybe start on it in May.  The meeting comes early in the month, first Wednesday, so I really only have about another month to pull this off.  You might remember last year this time, my daughter and I were working frantically on eight overshot placemats each, the loom wasn’t cooperating, and we were pretty much down to the wire on that one. My daughter is participating this year as well, but I have my own project to worry about, so I’m not nagging her, yet…

This year, the guild chose a creativity project, each participant put cones of yarn in a brown bag, and then chose from the bags on the table; the assignment was to weave something from the contents of the bag, and then return it to the person whose bag it was in June.  This isn’t unlike the  Challenge project I did for the Tampa Bay Convergence in 2008.  Here is yarn, make something.  Sort of a Project Runway parameter.  Except I had nine months, not one day. My bag of yarn was from my guild-mate Sherrie Miller.  She put a very large cone of pink kid mohair, with a cone of beige Homespun unmercerized cotton, and a small cone of some unlabeled rust cotton, and about 100 yards of a fat, soft, hairy variegated knitting yarn.

I’m not one to plan projects.  I like to weave yardage.  How much yardage?  How much yarn do I have?  I spent a day with my McMorran Yarn Balance, and a scale, and did lots of calculations.  The knitting yarn, I just measured by hand.  I wasn’t sure how else to be completely accurate and I didn’t want to waste an inch playing around with the balance.  Then I played with yarn wraps, getting a feel for how the yarns looked together.  I loved the knitting yarn, but with only 100 yards, and I was determined to use every inch, how could I get that to work with 30 ounces of fine kid mohair weighing in at 2750 yards per pound.  And the cottons seemed coarse next to the mohair.  So I was thinking of trying to minimize their impact.  I started leafing through my vast collection of weaving books for structure inspiration.  I have acquired some new ones, and I pulled Ann Dixon’s Handweaver’s Pattern Directory from Interweave Press.  I found a lovely Swedish lace pattern, and started to see lace boxes with plain weave horizontal and vertical stripes of the cotton with a center of the knitting yarn.  I worked out how many warp and weft stripes I could get for varying widths of fabric, until I came up with something I liked.  It was relatively easy to work out using weaving software.  I use Fiberworks PCW.  I have for years.  I plugged in one of the lace blocks into my software, and to my surprise, the software showed it wasn’t actually weaving.  There were warp floats that were the size of the entire block.  Hmmmm……  I checked it about six times, thinking my brain must be really fried, and then it dawned on me, could there be an error in the book?  I went to the Interweave Press website, to check for errata, we can do that now you know, and sure enough, to my horror, there were pages of errata.  But not the page I was using, page 191.  Could it be I discovered yet another mistake in the book?  I quick emailed my guild-mate Sally, there isn’t a structure she doesn’t know or can’t figure out, and I figured if she had the book, she could look at it and confirm that I wasn’t nuts.  Sure enough, she wrote back within five minutes, had the book, and declared I was correct, there was an error. I quickly corrected it, and felt vindicated…  small silly victory, but hey, it made me feel competent for about five minutes.  I love the internet…

Since I only had eight shafts, I chose to use only one of the blocks of the Swedish Lace, and then set out to figure out how to make the knitting yarn act as a supplemental warp AND weft, which took most of the remaining shafts.  It took me quite awhile to figure how to get it to float and intersect like a cross in the middle of the stripe.  I love challenges like this.  The world disappears and I am so focused…  When I clicked on the correct shaft, suddenly the draft wove perfectly and I was cheering from my desk.  The rest of the family did the proverbial eye roll, you know how we get, but I was really happy with myself, and now all I needed to do was actually weave it, sample first once the warp is threaded and wound, and then adjust the sett if needed.

So I pulled out my warping mill, and wound three separate sections of the warp.  There will be less distortion on the yarns for 30″ across, and I’m not sure how fragile the kid mohair is.  I found some breakage, maybe from old rodent or insect damage near the bottom of the cone, so I didn’t want to cause any unnecessary stress on the yarns.  Since I had so little of the knitting yarn, I didn’t want to lose any to loom waste, I added a 20″ header of junk yarn, to each of the knitting yarns in the warp.  Since this is eight shafts, the waste is more because of the depth of the castle.

So I’m all wound and ready to start threading.  I’m feeling a bit more rested, and I’ve given my mind a creative stretch, and I’ll soon have a warp on the new loom.

Oh, and what am I going to make with this fabric?  I don’t have a clue, I’ll wait until I actually make the fabric, and since Sherrie is a fantastic sewer (she was one of my favorite weavers who worked with me on the forecast column for Handwoven Magazine) I might just give it to her as yardage.  🙂

Stay tuned…

Making room…

Last Wednesday night, my daughter came flying into my studio screaming in a typical 17 year old manner, “Mom, I need a cushion for the chair by tomorrow night!”  Ah, those words, “I need “x” by (insert date that is impossible to comply with)”.  Every mother loves to hear them… NOT!

Let me back up a bit.  Brianna is a junior at Boonton High School.  Among her usual Honors Physics and Elemental Functions of Calculus classes, she chose an elective of Cabinet and Machine Woods.  You know, woodshop.  She took the intro course last year, and adored it.  So this year, she happily signed up for the more advanced woodshop class, and we have been getting texts since last October, with updates on the progress of her advanced woodshop project, a reproduction Stickley chair.  Over the spring break, I helped her upholster the seat, which fit nicely into the chair, or so she texted. I hadn’t actually seen the chair.

Fast forward, Boonton High School has a Showcase of Excellence every spring, usually right before the vote on the school budget, to show what the students have been doing all year.  There are musical performances, and art displays, along with classroom projects in all subjects.  And the advanced woodshop projects were going to be displayed outside the auditorium.  The Showcase of Excellence was last Thursday night.  So Brianna and I set to work making a cushion for her chair, which I had never seen, when she came home from school on Thursday based on instructions she photographed on her cell phone.  (see previous post on this subject!)

Off she went to school for jazz band rehearsal for the evening performance, she plays trombone, and we would arrive later to the Showcase in time for the performance.  We got to the auditorium and were stunned to come across this…

Obviously there was a crowd gathered around, including the superintendent who was a shocked as we were that a high school student made this chair.  And of course I get the bad mommy of the year award for having the next thought, “Where the hell heck are we going to put this thing?”  We have a moderate size house, with lots of stuff in it, we have lived in it for 28 years.  You can imagine.  I’m doing a rough calculation and I’m thinking, uh-oh…

Later that evening, after enjoying all the attention my daughter received for her truly outstanding project, we loaded it into the back of the wagon (actually the principal and vice principal jumped in to help there) and we made our way home.  My husband had left earlier to attend a board meeting, and that left Brianna and me to figure this out.  Her original intent was to put it in her room.  We moved the chair from there, to the guest room, and then moved the chair in the guest room to the basement where my son will return to when he comes back from Artillery Training in May.  We carried the Stickley chair around the side of the house, through the gates, up the back deck, up the back staircase to the balcony, through my bedroom, and tried to wedge it between all of the door frames in our path.  Can I say that this is one huge chair?  We managed to manipulate it carefully, around each of the doorframes, except the last one, the doorway to her room, at the end of the long hall at the opposite end of the house.  We tried, we really did, but there wasn’t a chance in the world that it would fit.  So I stuck it in the guest room, because I didn’t know where else to put it.  That took out any remaining space in the guest room, but the chair is so spectacular and I rarely have any guests, that no one is complaining.

Which brings me to the real reason for this post…

I don’t know what I was smoking when I agreed last month to buy another loom.  I won’t go into the details, let’s just say it was one of those cosmic coincidences that fell in my lap, the sister loom to my other four Tools of the Trade looms, a 36″ 8 shaft double back beam loom that said in no uncertain terms, it needed to come home with me.  So last Friday, my husband and I got in our pick up, and drove the 6 hours down to a small town on the Potomac, west of Washington DC.

It was threatening rain all afternoon, but we crossed our fingers.  My husband was able to wheel the loom across the grass to the truck, and hoist it up into the truck.  I stood and took pictures…  🙂  Did I mention I love my husband?  We had removed anything we could easily remove from the loom to help reduce the weight, but these particular looms are really really heavy.  That’s why I like them. Claudia Segal sold me the loom, it has a little bit of history, apparently I am the fourth owner, and I feel like the loom has found its final home…  Claudia is one of the partners on Weavolution, you can check out the online weaving community by clicking on the link to the right of this post.  As we closed the back tailgate of the truck, it started to rain!  Timing…

Anyone who has ever seen my studio knows, there isn’t anywhere to put another large loom.  Does that every stop any of us from more stash/equipment acquisitions?  I spent a lot of time over the last month figuring out just where this puppy would go, and last week when I returned from California, I shifted things as best I could, hoping to make enough floor space for the new addition.  I was mildly successful.

We returned home from Maryland, very late last night.  My husband slid the loom out of the truck and we dragged it to the garage. Where it sat overnight.  This morning, I drove my husband to the airport at 6:30am to catch a plane to North Carolina.  I left him at the airport, came home, did the grocery shopping at 7:15, picked up the dog from the kennel, and made some homemade granola, had breakfast and went to the garage to stare at the loom.  I was alone in the house, except for the dog who wasn’t much help, my daughter was away at a Girl Scout camp for a staff weekend, and I really really wanted to get that loom out of the garage and into my studio.  Today.  Did I mention that patience for this sort of thing isn’t my strong point?

No one is more resourceful than a handweaver.  I got my trusty socket wrench, and a screw driver, and I headed to the garage to begin the process of dismantling an eight shaft loom that weighs probably 250 pounds.  I removed the front beam, the back beam assembly, the beater, and the treadle assembly.  All got carried to my studio.  I removed the eight bolts that connected the castle to the base, and then carried the base of the loom upstairs.  That left the castle.  With shafts removed, I could almost lift it. I probably will really pay for this tomorrow when I wake up, but I managed to hoist that castle over my shoulder and gently glide it up the two flights of stairs, and get it through the door of the studio, and into position on the base.  🙂  I did it!  All by myself…

Then came the task of putting the whole thing back together.  Bolt by bolt, I reassembled the loom, and by noon it was complete.  I could feel the energy coming from my other looms wondering who the new kid on the block was.  She fits right in with the rest of them, and I know they will all be good friends.  I had an extra 8 dent reed for the large loom, which Brianna cut down this afternoon when she came in from NY, squealing in delight at the new acquisition.  I also had an extra crank for the back beam, and I have lots of benches.  I’ll call Gowdey Reed company and order the additional 36″ reeds I will need for the long haul.

And I actually managed to spin some of the merino/silk roving I bought at CNCH last weekend, on my little drop spindle, in the truck while we made the 6 hour trek to Maryland on Friday.  There wasn’t a lot of room in the passenger seat, but I managed to spin a foot at a time, and I love the colors and the way the yarn will look plied.

Other than the fact that I am so exhausted I am not sure what day it is, it was an eventful couple of days, and the house easily absorbed two very large items, there always seems to be room for whatever we bring in.

I am keeping the photos small, to see if it helps the memory issues I’m having, so far I have not gotten the Fatal Error message while writing this post. Just click on the photos to see a larger version.  I know the memory problem isn’t corrected, but I’m hoping that some of you are able to read and comment on the posts, and have patience when the message comes up.  My tech guy is golfing in NC for the week.  He is allowed…

Ruminations on the other “C” word…

Copyright.  You know that little C in a circle that appears on just about everything and protects creative work from being copied or reproduced?  I wrote an article for the May/June 2003 issue of Handwoven Magazine titled “More on Ethics in Handweaving” on just this subject.  Seven years later, I think we have made great strides in teaching those in the fiber community that you can’t just xerox a project in a magazine and pass it around to all your friends.  And ethically you can’t make a bunch of that same project and sell it at your local guild sale.  That would be sort of unethical.  We have come a long way, but the discussion doesn’t end there.

One of the great things for a teacher is attending conferences, and spending quality time with other teachers.  All jobs have their good points, and their bad points, but being able to commiserate with others in the same boat is very reassuring, and often the collective mind can problem solve and head off potential directions that may hurt us all down the road.  It was during the conference last weekend that I spent some time talking with other teachers, and saw a trend that makes all of us uncomfortable.

First, let me backtrack a couple of years, to a now infamous conference that occurred in Denver sponsored by the HGA, I believe it was 2004.  Previously, conference attendees would happily photograph all of the items in the exhibits, along with instructors work and samples during seminars, and would take the photos home and show them to their fellow guild members or keep them for a remembrance, much like vacation photos.  They usually were very mediocre quality photos, poor lighting, less than adequate display especially for garments, but we all did it, and probably after the first viewing, put them away in a drawer somewhere, and forgot about them.  Fast forward just a couple of years.  After the Vancouver Convergence held two years before the Denver conference, someone took those photos of all the exhibits and posted them across the internet, so all the world could see what others paid a lot of money to view.  And the artists whose work was photographed and posted across the internet, never gave their permission, actually never saw or had any control over the images that were taken, often a poor reflection of their actual work.  I know I encourage people to go to my website and look at and share any of the photos of my work that I post, but the photos are professionally shot, and represent the work as I want it represented.

Anyway, in Denver, at Convergence 2004, a new policy was instituted which caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth; the HGA banned all cameras and photographing of any of the work in any of the exhibits.  The furor of that policy is still being felt today.  Instead, Convergence now provides every conference attendee a CD, at the time of registration, that has all of the works in the exhibits, using the photographs submitted by the artists themselves, and containing the artists’ names and other important information.  OK, so that special little detail that you wanted to remember isn’t shown on that slide, that’s what a sketch book is for, but the overall exhibit and the pieces in them are there on one disk for you to remember.

At the conference last weekend, there were a couple of issues that came up, and I wanted to talk a little bit about them, feel free to comment as the spirit moves, but this whole area is still a sensitive one, and there are plenty of opinions floating around.  First, I overheard many of the organizers tell attendees who inquired (thank you for asking) that photos were allowed in the exhibit areas.  Furthermore, it was explained that every person who entered signed a waiver that allowed the taking of photographs of their piece.  I was actually a bit surprised by that, usually when I sign that waiver, I am under the impression it is for the event to photograph for publicity for the event and not for the general public to have a field day with their cameras.  Obviously I was quite mistaken.  But no matter.  My work is posted on the internet, for everyone to see, and though I would prefer the work be posted in the most professional way, using the images I’ve made available, most who enter the exhibits don’t have professional slides and the images taken at the show are sometimes their only recording of the actual work.

This is largely why I don’t have photos on my post conference blog post from the fashion show this past weekend, I never felt it was right to actually photograph the fashion show, or others work, and post it on my site without the permission of each of the artists, and frankly there wasn’t time to track anyone down.  I was too busy teaching.  I’m hoping CNCH posts the photos, and I’ll provide a link, but I didn’t feel right about doing that on my own.  I’m always careful to ask permission of class attendees, students, peers, other instructors, anyone who appears in my blog in photographic form, I get permission.  Occasionally someone asks that I don’t post a photo, and I respect that.  It is their right.

There is another more troubling trend I am starting to see, which a number of faculty members noticed that has us all a bit worried.  Video taping seminars.  More than one of us noticed that as we were teaching, there were small video cameras or cell phones pointing at us and we realized too late, that our seminars were being recorded.  I’m going to assume that because the equipment is so available, just point a cell phone and press start, that no one actually thinks about the long term ramifications of these actions.  I’m also going to assume, at least I hope this is the case, that those who are recording the seminars, are just trying to remember everything that was said, fine points the teacher made that weren’t in the handout, and that that recording will eventually go by the wayside and never be looked at again.  Trouble is, those recordings will now be downloaded to a computer, and will be available for viewing by anyone anywhere for the rest of all time.  I have no control over the content, how I looked, how I sounded, what I said, and what the total context was.  Those videos could be posted to YouTube, they could be shown in a guild meeting, they could be transcribed and information could be printed in a handout, they could be duplicated and passed around, they could be duplicated and sold.  I know the handweaving community is largely not out there to make money off a teacher’s seminars, but that’s not really the point.

First, understand that as a teacher, this is how I make my living.  I spend months working on a lecture or seminar, and more months polishing it and fine tuning it.  I get paid nothing for this effort.  Once a seminar/lecture/workshop is ready for prime time, so to speak, it is then presented, and as teachers we are paid a modest stipend to present it, certainly not adequate to reimburse the months and months, thousands of hours we have put into the seminar to make it happen.  So for me, I don’t earn a cent unless I get on a plane.  I know a number of conference attendees who have received scholarships from their guilds, so they could attend the conference, with the stipulation that the attendee/scholarship recipient come back to the guild and present a program on what they learned at the conference.  I’ve had a number of these attendees call and ask if they can copy my handout.  It depends on the situation, and I appreciate the call, but the answer is usually no, since I spent months developing it, and then get no further monetary reward for all that work.  And, once a guild has passed around the handout, seen the photos of all the samples, and listened to the video of my seminar, where is the incentive to actually hire me to come out and teach.  This is no different than making twenty copies of the latest sock pattern in Knits magazine, and passing them all around the knitters’ guild.  This is all about protecting those of us who spend our lives providing projects, creating inspiration, and pushing the envelope of what we do all the while trying to eek out a living.  It is about having control of your work, and what happens to it, and videotaping lectures and seminars, even if it is for you to remember techniques, falls into this category.  I will eventually make a video, and then sell it, and I have already invested in the equipment, but it will take time, professional editing, and I will have watched it numerous times looking for mistakes, information that isn’t clear, and I’ll make sure I have a manicure and pedicure before we start shooting!  🙂

I suppose I could just announce before I start each seminar, the same string of words we hear every time we go to a live performance or theatre production.  This isn’t any different.  “The use of  video recording devices  during this performance is strictly prohibited.”  That said, when asked if a student can take photos of my garments during a class, I am usually fine with that, and appreciate the courtesy of asking permission first.  I also let them know, that all of the work is professionally photographed and available on my website.  It is with the assumption that any images they are taking would be for their own use.  A good rule of thumb is to ask first.  Always ask first.  And if the answer is no, don’t hold it against the teacher, and don’t take it personally.  I’d love to have feedback here, what do you think about this whole issue, and hopefully there won’t be any Fatal Error messages.  I’ve gotten two while writing this post, which means all the tweaking we have done in WordPress in the last 24 hours still hasn’t worked.  🙁

Out of memory…

I’ve been getting emails and messages all day about my blog, a message pops up, Fatal Error: Out of Memory and then this string of information that has so far been useless to us since it changes all the time.  We’ve been having this problem for a couple of months now, and though the problem clears up pretty quickly, just try again a few minutes later, it is pretty annoying, and it has made my techie quite frustrated.  We had the server up the memory, but that didn’t fix the problem.  Know we are still working on the problem, and my techie went in today and changed some of the settings, based on something I found on the internet, so we will see if it is still occurring.  If it does happen, let me know theweaver@weaversew.com, so I know the extent of the problem.  And if there are any bloggers out there with WordPress who have seen this before, and know of a solution, feel free to post a comment, if you are able and don’t get another Fatal Error message…

There are days when I feel like I am out of memory.  Like today.  Re-entry is always a challenge, and it is hard to even know where to begin.  It is impossible to focus, there are so many things calling to me, and my brain feels like it has a fatal error and is definitely out of memory. And I’m also suffering from jetlag… I find that spending a bit of time trying to organize some key rooms in my house helps calm my brain.  I can think in an organized space.  When there is chaos everywhere, I am so scattered I am usually cranky and worthless.  Sadly I live with my family, and all of them have the opposite kind of brain.  They thrive in chaos, and no matter how big the pile, they always know where everything is and somehow that chaos makes them focus better.

I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen.  That felt good.  I did a 20 minute yoga workout, there are podcasts and videocasts online with yoga workouts, and it is great in a pinch, to get you back on track.  Try www.yogajournal.com.  I came back from California with a stack of orders, I spent most of the afternoon printing and cutting orders, and packing them, they are all ready to ship tomorrow, and all the paperwork and banking is done from the conference.  NJ Sales Quarterly Sales tax forms have been filed, thank goodness I can do it online, takes longer to add up the numbers than it does to file the forms.  And I tackled the mail.  This was a pretty lucrative stack, besides my pay check from the museum where I teach sewing every week, there were two acceptances for exhibits and contracts for the MAFA conference next summer.  I had two pieces accepted to the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild Fiber Celebration 2010 exhibit.  That would be my Frosted Florals dress and my felted Celebration Bag.  In addition, my yardage was accepted to the yardage exhibit for Convergence.  Alas I was not accepted for Small Expressions, but I made arrangements to use the piece that didn’t get in for the faculty exhibit at Convergence.

I did four loads of laundry, while my printer was humming along, that kind of multitasking I can do.  And I did manage to spend about an hour at the grocery store.  So I can actually make breakfast tomorrow.

But through the day, I really longed to be able to just dive into my stash and start to create something, so I actually took a break, dug out a couple of drop spindles, and started to play around with the  dyed silk/merino roving I bought at the conference.  I found that the little drop spindle I got in a guild workshop worked best, and it would be more portable.  I also recently acquired a copy of Abby Franquemont’s book, Respect the Spindle.  I had to buy the book just for the title.  It is a beautiful, colorful book, that covers anything and everything you would ever want to know about the drop spindle, there were things I didn’t know, when I read through it, and I’m glad I picked it up.  The spindles are beautiful, and I started spinning on my little top weighted whorl, and the yarn is exceptional.

So today was pretty productive, frustrating because so many people haven’t been able to read my lengthy blog from yesterday.  If you get the Fatal Error notice, just wait a few minutes and try again.  We are working on it.  And I got the message twice while trying to write this blog, so I know whatever we tweaked today, didn’t work.  Stay tuned, unless you get a Fatal Error…  (I’m so glad I’m a fiber person.  Fiber artists never get Fatal Error messages.  If it isn’t working, just take the scissors to it and turn it into something else…)  🙂

I’ve seen the future and it’s looking bright…

I’m writing this on the plane, flying home to Newark from an amazing four days in Northern California at the CNCH Conference.  That would be the Conference of Northern California Handweavers for those not in the know…  First, I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to be asked to teach at this particular conference.  Eight years ago, I was scheduled to teach at CNCH 2002, and six weeks before the conference, with sold out classes, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I had to cancel a number of teaching commitments that spring, and CNCH was one of them.  Eight years went by without another invitation, and I always felt bad that I never had the opportunity to make up for having to cancel.

I taught four classes at the conference this past weekend, Friday morning I had a large group for my Photographing your Work seminar, followed by a class called Warp Fast, a seminar on warping techniques that involve methods using multiple threads, paddle warping, sectional warping, and using an AVL warping mill.  I had a very large class for that seminar, and I got a lot of very positive feedback after both classes, which always makes me feel good, that I’ve inspired and encouraged others with new information and sometimes a new perspective.  Friday night was of course, the fashion show.  Always a conference favorite, I had a front row seat, which I appreciated, since I would be giving the technical critique of the garments on Sunday morning.  I had spent Thursday afternoon previewing the garments as they came in, so I had a chance to look up inside, check construction details and techniques.

I had already sensed that there was something different about this conference, a different energy and enthusiasm I haven’t felt at a fiber conference in a very long time.  The conference committee was doing an exceptional job, the facility, the Santa Clara Conference Center, attached to our hotel, the Hyatt, so we never had to leave the building, was first class, my classroom perfect for my needs, all my classes in one room, and the food at the Hyatt restaurants, outstanding and very reasonable.

So my weaving buddy, great friend and roommate Robyn Spady and I sat up front for the fashion show, and what a treat.  I found the garments to be largely in one of two groups.  There were a number of lovely jackets, beautifully tailored, made from exquisite handwoven, sometimes handspun and handdyed fabrics, and the makers of the garments, or their friends modeled them on stage.  They were so proud of what they had done, and celebrated the moment.  The show opened with the wedding ensemble, the year long undertaking of relatively new handweaver Tien Chiu, who has painstakingly documented every thread woven and every stitch taken on her  blog.

Then came the rectangles.  A large percentage of the garments were quite the throw back to the 60’s and 70’s when handwoven clothing was a series of pieced together rectangles.  Yet, there wasn’t a single bog jacket, that Bronze Age shape made from a couple of strategically place rectangles, based on the garments found in highly acidic boggy ground water.  When I started making handwoven clothing in the late 1970’s the yarns available for the average handweaver were nothing like the yarns available today.  Colors were classic, understated, and dyed more for rug weaving and tapestry than clothing.  As a matter of fact, my art school,  where I first learned to weave, had bins of rug yarn, and carpet warp for our use, and not much else.  The first garment I ever wove was from a coarse wool, and it was actually a modified bog jacket.

Note:  this photo, of a garment I did in 1976 represents how NOT to take a photo of your work!

Fast forward some thirty years and the yarns available to the average handweaver would blow your mind.  We have the knitters to thank for that, and the brave spinners out there who have taken handspinning to a new level, spinning with the most amazing fibers that didn’t exist in the 1970’s, (like bamboo mixed with Angelina and soy silk) and the rectangles that are coming out of small simple looms are anything but classic.  I’ve known that the knitting community has found handweaving and is embracing it with an excitement and an enthusiasm never before seen, but I hadn’t actually seen this phenomenon in action.  Armed with the Knitter’s loom from Ashford, or the Rigid Heddle loom from Schacht, and some incredible yarn, in unbelievable color combinations, these new weavers  are  single handedly resurrecting the craft of handweaving, and taking it to levels I could have never imagined.  And by young women half my age with pink hair wearing lime green hand knit socks they very competently knit themselves.

I don’t know if there is a Project Runway influence here as well, but the rectangular shapes of the garments that came parading across the runway were not the shapes of yore…  I’m going under the assumption that since home ec is not part of the current curriculum in most schools in the US, that these amazingly talented young women are learning fashion skills somewhere else.  The influence is pretty clear, since the rectangular clothing up on that stage was thoughtfully draped over someone’s body (a dressform?) and folded and tucked and seamed, stitched and embellished into some extremely creative clothing.

Alas, I have no pictures.  I’m hoping the CNCH website will eventually provide some shots of the fashion show, but trust me to say that I was SOOOOO excited by what was in front of me.  And in many of my classes, including the Saturday workshop on making a jacket pattern, there were numerous new weavers, first time conference attendees, and some amazing enthusiasm.  The torch has been passed. And to my complete delight, the aging handweaving community seems to have opened its arms and embraced the new blood and the new creativity that has blown in like a fresh breath of air.

Keep in mind that this is California.  In my travels, every new trend seems to originate here.  It will probably take some time to make it across the country, but even in my discussions with the  HGA Convergence Albuquerque committee, an international weaving conference happening in July of 2010, registrations have gone beyond all expectations.  I have seen the future for handweaving and it is very very bright indeed.

Saturday night’s keynote address was given by Syne Mitchell.  I first met Syne probably five years ago, a  30 something former Microsoft programmer with a very young son, she took my class in making a pieced vest in Seattle.  Syne was a new weaver, coming from the knitting world with a huge background in technology.  It didn’t take her long to find a need, and Syne jumped right in there to fill it.  In a few short years, she has united the global handweaving community, connected them to the knitting community, and turned the fiber world upside down with her podcasts called Weavecast, (I’m episode 26) and her online weaving magazine Weavezine. ( I have agreed to  write a monthly column on handwoven garments for Weavezine, stay tuned for that.)  Weavecast has been listened to on six of the seven continents, still waiting for Antarctica to come on board.  Syne gave a keynote that brought the global sources of handweaving found on the internet into the laps of everyone in the room.  She showed the conference attendees what could be found with just a few keystrokes and a couple of URL’s.  Online weaving publications, like Handwoven Weaving Weekly from Interweave Press; handweaving.net, developed by software engineer Kris Bruland with over 60,000 weaving drafts; Weavolution, an online global community of handweavers, blogs, and resources and information have revolutionized how we think, create, and interact with each other.  Syne ended her keynote with some weaving karaoke that you had to be there to see, and she had the audience laughing with her through the entire address.

Keep in mind that this conference is right in the middle of Silicon Valley, and it isn’t just the 20 something pink haired knitters turned weavers armed with a drop spindle that are revolutionizing the handweaving community.  Sunday night, after the conference was over, I went out to dinner with Syne and Tien Chiu, of wedding dress fame, and Tien’s significant other.  I’ve always been one of the youngest of the handweaving community, having been trained in college and shortly after making a career of handweaving, but now, in my mid 50’s, I sat back listening to the discussions at the dinner table over Pad Thai and Ginger Chicken, about solenoids and dobby’s and software and 24 shaft looms, by two technologically savy women and a non weaving soon to be spouse of a weaver, and saw that the technologically trained programmers and software and web developers have not only found handweaving, but are running forward with the available technology at a speed that has left me in the dust.  Tien is a web developer so it isn’t a surprise that she began her journey into handweaving finding a medium that would challenge and satisfy her amazing brain and blog about the journey so that others around the globe have followed the creation of the wedding dress, every intimate detail of it.  Syne, Tien, and others like them are taking handweaving to places I never thought possible.  It is all so very exciting, and I feel oddly enough like I’ve simultaneously gone back to my roots while feeling like I’m peering in the window of something truly wonderful and I want to come in and play too.

I do know how to spin, quite well actually, and I had a real desire to dust off my spinning wheel and find my drop spindle, and try some of that wonderful colorful stuff available at the conference.  I only had an hour or so to wander through the vast displays in the vendor hall, but I did manage to pick up some beautiful silk/mohair roving to spin, hand dyed in gorgeous purple and orange shades by Red Fish Dye Works, and in the back corner of the vendor hall, at the booth next to the pen with three alpacas, I bought the first fleece from Montana, a baby Alpaca, and I’m going to start spinning some yarn.    It was hard not to get caught up in the new enthusiasm of the future of handweaving, and to my great delight, in addition to all of the wonderful things to spin and weave and knit available at the conference, there was a Janome sewing machine dealer who was doing quite the brisk business selling sewing machines.  I heard more than one person telling me about retiring that old Singer from 1940 and moving on to something that would inspire creativity and get them sewing again.  Along with the rebirth of handweaving is the potential for a rebirth in the sewing world as well.  Which makes my heart sing, since I keep a foot in both worlds.  I weave cloth, to sew into clothing, and suddenly the possibilities have exploded and I couldn’t be happier.  I have seen the future and it is indeed bright.

This morning, I had breakfast with Nancy Weber, one of the key organizers of the conference, and she showed me the “conference scarf”, woven by a committee of weavers, as a gift for all the organizers.  It was based on my weaving buddy and guild mate Sally Orgren’s article in Handwoven Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008,  on eight shaft and four shaft dimity.  Can I say they were exquisite?  The colors were hand dyed, and can I say I coveted one?  I have a loom, I have tencel, and I have that issue of Handwoven Magazine.  In addition, the table runner across the breakfast table in Nancy’s home was woven from self patterning sock yarn.  Who knew?  The beautiful ikat effects were just yarn that was engineered to pattern a pair of socks.  My head is spinning with possibilities.  These are perfect projects to put on all my baby Structo looms.  Can you tell it was a mind blowing weekend?  So now I’m heading back to NJ, on my last leg of the trip, sitting in first class, with my wine, and thinking that life is really good.  And the future is very bright indeed…