Daryl's Blog – Page 137 – The World from a Weaver's point of view!

Not a great start to the year…

OK, true confessions… I’m a baby when it comes to getting sick. I’m miserable, cranky, and very whiny. Fortunately my husband is on the other side of the world, and my son is safely in Boot Camp. That means poor Brianna has to listen to my misery…

This hit me like a ton of bricks, and I never saw it coming. As a matter of fact, I kept blaming my not feeling quite right on all kinds of stupid things like the jalapeno pepper I put in the cole slaw yesterday, and overdoing it at a new yoga class last night. Truth is, I’m sick. There is no denying it. How long I’m sick for, and what actually I have, remains to be seen, but I am achy, feverish, and have a deep rattling cough. Bummer…

I’m guessing that my body did what it had to do, got through the holidays, got through the New Year, got my husband off to Israel, and my son off to Boot Camp. I cleaned out his room, and his car (it would take a blog post by itself to describe those adventures, but I’ll be kind and just say, everything is now clean, beds are properly made, and nothing is currently growing or unidentifiable in the downstairs refrigerator.)

And now I’m sick…

I did manage to finish sleying the reed with the new marble inspired warps, and I did manage to update my sister’s website, but it was painful. Everything on me aches. I had to cancel attending the guild meeting tonight, which was tough because I was one of the panel speakers. Brianna is driving, as I write, to Mendham to take over for me as program chair, for the Jockey Hollow Guild meeting tonight. She is a trooper (and I think she welcomed the excuse to get out of the house since I was so cranky…).

I have to say I’m really really lucky. I can lay low. Other than dropping off my work tomorrow in Montclair at the George Segal Gallery for the Art Connections 6 exhibit, I have nothing on my calendar requiring me to be out of the house, and I can hopefully sleep it off. I have a slew of deadlines, but it is more important I get over this thing quickly, so I’ll cave and be a good girl… And I just started an 800 page book, the final installment of the Outlander series, Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon though I hear it really may not be the final installment. This is book 7 I think… It was a handweaver in Connecticut who turned me on to this series, many many years ago when I stayed with her. So I’m off to curl up in bed and read, and hopefully sleep…

Here are the photos from my loom adventures today. I slowly but surely worked my way across the reed, pulling the appropriate amount of threads from the cross on the appropriate warp bundle. I loved the colors, and it was peaceful to just sit and thread, but I sure wish I didn’t ache all over…

Here is a tip, I found this out the hard way of course. If you are using hand dyed warps, always save a couple of extra threads, or wind a couple of extra threads to include when you are dyeing, in case one breaks while you are weaving. You’ll always have a way to correct the break with the right color.

The next step is of course, threading each of those warp ends, one by one through the heddles in the shafts. Here is another tip, one I also learned the hard way. Check how many heddles are on each shaft BEFORE you start threading. My loom is the type where you can’t add heddles once you start. You also can’t remove them. And I’m going almost the full width of my loom. So having a bunch extra squeezed on the sides, or heaven forbid not enough, can make the most easy going handweaver resort to hair pulling…

So I used my handy dandy computer drafting program (I use Fiberworks PCW) and it gives me the heddle count for each shaft. Now I just have to pull each of the eight shafts out of the castle, and lay them on my cutting table, and add the correct amount of heddles. I keep my heddles stored on knitting needles, so they just slip on the heddle rods effortlessly, checking first to make sure they face in the correct direction.

This process takes time. And I really don’t enjoy this step. But it is an important one, on most of my shafts I had to add at least 100 heddles…

Now they are all back safely in the castle, fully loaded with the correct number of heddles, and I can start threading tomorrow. If I can get out of bed…

New Year’s Resolutions… Bah!

I will admit that I dislike the whole idea of New Year’s Resolutions. It isn’t that I’m practically perfect in every way and don’t need to do some scheduling adjustments occasionally, or focusing adjustments, or attitude adjustments, or lifestyle adjustments, it’s that I fail to see the wisdom of getting down to fixing yourself, one day a year, promising the impossible, after a month of social engorging, overeating, too many gifts and way too much merriment. I look at New Year’s Day as the official end of party season, and now, life can resume again where it left off. Oh, and coincidentally, there is now a new digit added to the date when I write my checks.

I prefer to do those adjustments as I find my life getting bogged down with unfavorable things. Things I can actually control. That happens all throughout the year. And since I travel so much, there are always periods where I just put one foot in front of the other and get through the day, and there are periods where I am in the studio for 4-6 weeks and have piles of things calling to me and I haven’t a clue where to begin. That’s where I am at the moment. I try not to over think all this, try for a vague plan, contribute heavily to my Google Calendar for daily tasks like clean the bathroom and send proposals to X Conference. And I get out of bed in the morning, and try to make the most of the day. Some days are more successful than others, but that would be a good description of life.

One of the blogs I follow is from fiber artist Donna Kallner. Donna actually has two blogs, but the one I instantly latched onto was her blog on compost and creativity. Just the title makes me want to dive right in. Donna is an excellent teacher, I met her when we roomed together at some distant conference in Wisconsin I think, and I loved her spirit and sense of the bigger picture. So Donna presented some early morning warm up exercises for creativity. Sounds simple enough, and with a degree in art, you’d think I’d know to do this sort of thing on a regular basis. We did warm up exercises in drawing, not so much in fiber, which is pretty labor intensive. But warming up creativity is really important and if there is one thing I do need to address in the coming year, it is just simple play exercises to wake up the muses in my head and hands. So a huge thank you to Donna’s New Year’s post, because it got me to remember that I take my creativity for granted, and that keeping it youthful and supple and in shape takes work, just like exercising my body and mind.

Donna suggested 5 minute quick collages. I seriously need to get an egg timer or one of the little timers from one of our numerous games. Timers are great for stopping your brain from overworking, and overthinking. You just do it. I need so much practice in this area. A graphic designer friend recently cleaned out a book shelf and gave me a couple of 40 pound tomes full of advertising art. She was going to toss the books, but offered them to me instead and I grabbed them and hoisted them onto my cutting table and started to leaf through to find images that excited me. Silly me. That wasted about 3 of the five allotted minutes. So instead I just ripped 3-4 pages from one of the books, and grabbed my rotary cutter and started to randomly cut up the images. I assembled the scraps onto pages of my notebook, and of course way over thought the exercise, looking for compositional balance, meaning, phrases that would relate to the imagery, in essence, I turned them into little art collages, seriously missing the point of the exercise. Oh well, I’ll try harder tomorrow. It took me ten minutes to just glue all the scraps down. Anyway, here is my first overworked attempt at play…

So I’m beginning the new year with a new project. I played around with some drafts for the three warps I painted, inspired by the marble column from the Cloister’s.

I’m really suppose to be updating my sister’s website, but I so longed to start combining the warps, just to see what they’d look like together. I promise as soon as I finish this blog, I’ll get right to that task of updating her site, but for now, I’m really loving this fabric wannabee…

The draft is a combination of structures, as many as I could fit on an eight shaft loom. I have one of the warps weaving in plain weave, next to another, weaving a 2/1 Three Shaft Twill. The third warp is actually a 3 shaft birds-eye, not sure how obvious the design will be but the yarn is a textured cotton lace, so the surface will stand out from the rest of the yarns making the fabric dimensional.

I’m setting these roughly 2100 yard per pound yield yarns, at 27 ends per inch, which would put three ends in each of the dents in a 9 dent reed. (I’m going for a warp face fabric here.) I will be warping this fabric from the front of the loom, going through the reed, threading the heddles, and then finally beaming onto the back, for pretty obvious reasons.

The first step was to divide my 45″ reed (I’m warping the fabric about 41″ wide), into three levels, so each of the three yarns in a single dent has its own little compartment. Beaming this will be so much easier when the yarns stay separated in front of the beater. I just tied a sturdy string all the way around the beater creating a horizontal line and then repeated that step with a second string.

Then I carefully followed my draft, pulling each thread in order from the warp bundle and sleying through the reed until I had the amount of threads needed to weave the particular stripe of the draft. I’d sley one thread in the bottom of the dent, the next thread in the middle compartment of the dent, and then the next thread into the top of the dent. It is a slow process, and tedious constantly changing warp bundles, but I love feeling the texture of the yarns and seeing the colors build across as I sley.

I’m already about a third of the way across the reed. And I’m thrilled to have something finally going onto my big loom which has sat idle for more than a year. I have a lot of computer work in front of me for the next few weeks, two websites to build for my two weaving guilds, updates for my sister’s site, and lots of new software to learn and tutorials to play with. I have Adobe Illustrator CS4, and InDesign CS4, both are on my list to learn or relearn (I have a really old seldom used version of Illustrator which is probably so obsolete it doesn’t count). I also picked up a couple of books on Fashion Design using Photoshop and Illustrator, which can only help expand my knowledge of the programs and the possibilities. But for now, my creative muses are getting some exercise, and my hands are happy, and my spirit is looking forward to the new year and its possibilities.

My husband leaves tomorrow for an overseas trip to Israel, and my son leaves on Sunday for Boot Camp for the Army National Guard. I wish them both safe journeys, and to my son, I love you and will try to put one foot in front of the other each day you are gone, and try not to get overwhelmed by how much I’ll miss you… Stay safe…

Post Mortem or playing ketchup…

Actually it is Catch-up, but I liked the word ketchup better. We are almost finished with the holidays, the social obligations, the Christmas cookies, the good cheer, the Christmas cookies, oh, and did I mention the Christmas cookies? (I recieved something like six trays…)

We spent a glorious three days over the Christmas holiday with my sister and her husband in rural northern Maryland. It poured rain for most of the time we were there which prevented us from doing anything wonderful outside. I brought nothing with me to keep me occupied. That would be no weaving, no sewing, nothing that involved yarn, no computer, no technology, no email, no blogging, just gifts, and my family and a big bottle of wine.

The weekend was glorious because I did something I almost never do. Absolutely nothing. I just enjoyed the quiet and peace of a good visit with my sister, wine and friendship, planning meals together from all the leftovers, fixing a puzzle with my daughter, and playing the occasional word or card game. I finished a couple of books, and I came home feeling rested, calm, and peaceful. Sort of what the holidays had intended but rarely produce.

So now, I am back in fast forward drive, trying to play ketchup or catch-up this week, dealing with all the things I didn’t deal with while I was playing in NYC, unwrapping gifts, and visiting with my family. Things like clean the house. Bummer… Things like laundry. Double bummer… Things like paying the bills. We won’t even go there… None of these activities make for an interesting blog post, but they all have to get done, and once finished, they have this habit of needing to be done again almost immediately.

So I spent the better part of the last two days, cleaning my very dirty house, doing countless loads of laundry, organizing the paperwork so I can pay all the bills when the pay check comes in tomorrow, and four hours today writing proposals for a conference in 2011. That would be a year and a half away. So far away I can’t even think. The conference may even conflict with my daughter’s High School Graduation, but I won’t know the dates for that until late next year. So I send out the proposals and hope for the best.

What I really want to do is play with my new painted warps. They are beautiful. I can’t wait to get them on the loom. I might play around tonight with my drafting software (I use Fiberworks PCW) and see what I can make with these babies. I long to get something substantial on the loom. Some of the colors dyed brighter and deeper than I had planned, but no matter, I think this fabric will weave up gorgeous, and colorful.

In addition, I got a few skeins from the leftover dyes. More than likely I won’t use these skeins in the 10 yard fabric, but they are there for when I get inspired and need just the right thing. And I had a stack of rayon scarves sitting under the cutting table, and I used two of them to mop up the rest of the dye, a dark brown and a dark plum.

One of the books I finished on my weekend getaway, was Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle. It is the story of her family’s yearlong attempt to be locavores, that would be consuming only foods grown by them or by local farmers or producers. The book is fascinating, and Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite writers. I actually listened to the audio book, and she reads the book herself. The point of the book I think, is not to convert everyone who reads it to go back to the land and grow all your own food, raise and slaughter your own poultry, make your own cheeses, and can and preserve all the fresh produce you can for the long cold winter months ahead. She and her family did all that, but I never got the feeling that she was judging those who don’t. The book is designed to make you think. That’s all. Think about where our food comes from and make personal choices that work for us. This is almost January. We are in the middle of an icy wind storm in NJ. There won’t be fresh local produce available here for months. I travel too much to be able to grow, tend, harvest and preserve my own foods for my family, but I loved the passion she showed, for understanding and documenting the process from the beginning of working the ground while it is still partially frozen to glorious meals with the simplest and freshest ingredients.

I feel like that, working a basic necessity of life, from the very beginning, from the raw sheep fleece, spinning the yarn, (Ok I do cheat and buy yarn on a cone…) dying it in bright colors that make my heart sing. Working the yarn into a cloth, carefully threading the loom, weaving the fabric row by row, and taking the finished fabric and turning it into a spectacular garment to celebrate and decorate my body. It doesn’t get any better than that. I completely get what it means to understand a process, and to painstakingly work, step by step to achieve a goal, clothing to wear. Yes, we’ve all heard the passerby wonder why we do this, why can’t we just to go the store and buy dishtowels, or lace, or a knitted hat, or a woven jacket. Wouldn’t it be cheaper? Sure. But there is no explanation to those who ask that kind of question, they aren’t wired to appreciate that it is the process of getting dirty, of feeling fingers in the mud, of crawling under the loom to tie up the treadles, of painstakingly threading each thread through the reed and heddles of the loom, of endless weeding, of sending the shuttle flying through the shed that makes our hearts sing and our souls satisfied. It allows me to take the time, to pay the bills, to vacuum the house, to scrub the toilets, to fold endless streams of laundry, because I know once I finish those tasks, I get to play with my yarn and create something from nothing.

Here’s to another year of creativity and passion, lift your glass in celebration of the process! Cheers!

Christmas Eve

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring except for Daryl, who was hunched over a sink for five hours rinsing warps.”

Don’t feel too sorry for me, I would have done this yesterday, but my husband and I went on an adventure…

My husband Kevin and I both travel a lot. When I travel, I almost always stay with a member of the guild who has hired me to speak or teach. My husband though, gets to stay in hotels. I’m not sure who has the better deal, the luxury but lonely anonymity of a hotel, or the home like comfort of another fiber person where you instantly feel like you’ve known them all your life. No matter, but there is one perk my husband can claim, occasionally he gets a free bonus night in a hotel. So he came to me with this free night, which had to be used by the end of the year. Gee, where could we go for one night right before Christmas?

Well that wasn’t hard. We drove east to Manhattan, a whopping 30 minutes to the tunnel, and then an hour and a half to actually get to the hotel, since, well, you can’t make rights or lefts in Manhattan between 2-6pm during December! We finally gave up, crossed our fingers and made an illegal right hand turn, and made it to the hotel Intercontinental on 48th street, and turned over the keys to the doorman.

NYC in December is spectacular. It was cold and bright, and beautiful, the decorations didn’t disappoint. We dumped our bags, and walked across town, passing Rockefeller Center, the tree, and the snowflakes on Saks Fifth Avenue which turned out to be animated on the hour to some terrific music.

The colors were wonderful, the lights were bright, and it was such a treat to be with total strangers, trading cameras, and celebrating the season of light. I think the colors in the soldier match one of the palettes I’m working on…

We continued across town, stopping at a restaurant, where I had a pomegranate margarita.

My jacket colors actually competed with my drink!

We continued across town and ended up at the theatre where we had tickets to see Altar Boyz at the New World Stages, where we were last month with our daughter to see Avenue Q. I enjoyed the musical, the boys were adorable, the dance numbers wonderful, and the whole show was hilarious.

On the way back, we took a small detour to Times Square, the ball is in position on top of the center building, ready for next week’s countdown.

And then I dragged my DH to Saks, where I checked out the window displays, the clothing was beautiful, and their famous animated windows for the holidays were full of color and shape, and whimsy. I think I saw that palette of colors in my layouts as well.

We drove back to NJ, after a leisurely morning, a quiet breakfast, and a quick cruise through the wonderful architecture of Grand Central Station. The space is so large, and so ornate, photographs just can’t do it justice.

And so I began the tedious process of just sitting on my butt, on a loom bench parked by the bathroom sink, I like that sink because the porcelain doesn’t get stained from the rinsing dye. 30 yards of warp, and a bunch of miscellaneous skeins and a couple of rayon scarves and five hours later, I got this.

I won’t know how accurate I was until the warps are completely dry, but I don’t really care. The palette I was working from was just something to get me going. I like the colors I’m seeing, and I think the warps will mix well when they are all integrated together. Anyway, I’m having fun.

And that brought me to dinner time. The past few years, we started a tradition of All you can Eat Sushi at a local Sushi Bar, with our neighbor and her kids, but she is traveling this year, so we all loaded into the car, and the four of us ate ourselves silly. I hate all you can eat, because I always overeat, but boy it is fun! The plates brimming with gorgeous rolls, artfully arranged on colorful plates just made me want to grab my camera for more holiday creative inspiration. So my family sat rolling their eyes, chopsticks in hand, while I ran around the table taking pictures.

Merry Christmas!

Dyeing to get into the spirit of the season…

I sometimes have this little issue with timing. Like starting a project when I know I can’t possibly follow through, or when I know I’m going to end up completely distracted. But that’s pretty typical of the way I work, when the mood strikes, whether it is the middle of the night, or three days before Christmas, with a calendar full of seasonal activities, I jump in head first. Course I procrastinated on the whole warp painting thing so long, I realized that I needed to light a fire under myself if I want to get a couple of warps painted, rinsed, dried, designed, on the loom, and woven before the deadline for the yardage exhibit the end of January. My loom has been naked for more than a year. Nothing like waiting until the last month. Obviously I work well under pressure…

Anyway, If you made it all the way to the bottom of my previous post, I showed the marble column from the Cloisters that inspired my palette for the first series of warps. I Photoshopped the palette into the photo so you could see. I’ll include it again in this post so you can follow the progression.

I spent all day yesterday making a complete mess in my studio, albeit a safe mess, (I do wear a filtration mask), playing chemist, trying to match the colors in the Color-aid chips with the dyes I have on hand. I have quite a few dyes, and when all else fails, you can mix almost everything with Turquoise, Fuchsia, Yellow and Black. Some of the colors I got on the first try. I am pretty good at seeing whether I need to shift a color warmer or cooler, but some of the colors just eluded me. I had to stop last night to throw on more presentable clothing and run down the street to my neighbor’s winter solstice gathering around the fire on her patio. I attended her celebration last year, it was quite wonderful, there is a tradition of burning that which you want to let go of for the new year, and I chose to throw in photos of my kids when they were young. With my daughter driving now, and my son about to leave for the military, I wanted my kids to use their wings I hope we’d given them, to soar high and move into adult hood with grace, enthusiasm, and independence. Meanwhile my son was out snowboarding at an area sledding hill, and came home with $2500. worth of damage to the back of the truck from a mishap in the parking lot, (He claims he wasn’t in the car when it happened) and his friend in tow, stopping to change before taking his friend to the hospital with a concussion from a wicked fall off a snowboard jump. It was an interesting night. Had I given them their wings too soon?

This morning I went back into the studio to finish mixing the last color, and to start soaking the warps, I chose three of the ten yard warps I wound last month, and put them in for pre-soak, one at a time. I kept careful records as I mixed the dyes, and had the dye cups all lined up.

Once the warp was wet with the dye activator, I spread out the first section across the table, over a long piece of plastic wrap.

I painted, and painted, and checked my email, read a few blogs, and painted and painted, and wandered down into the kitchen to have a little talk with my son about the truck, and I painted and painted and I set up an account on Facebook (I have no idea what possessed me) and I painted and painted, and painted some more…

As I finished a section, I wrapped it securely in plastic wrap, and shifted it down, coiling it at the end of the table, exposing the next section of warp.

And I kept on painting, I painted 30 yards of warp (that would be three 10 yard warps, each painted with the same colors in a different sequence) and when I finished the three warps, I grabbed what I call weft mops, white skeins I previously wound to mop up excess dye. I even pulled out a couple of white rayon scarves I had in the cabinet and painted them.

At one point I wandered down to the kitchen, trying to make an attempt to appear to care about dinner. I found my daughter in the throes of her annual ‘Christmas presents for her teachers’ extravaganza, she decided with about 12 hours to spare, that she would make 6-8 batches of pulled hard candy for her teachers tomorrow. Timing. I know where she gets it from.

My kitchen was trashed, which didn’t surprise me, and there were bundles of delicious flavored home made hard candies, I stole a couple of pieces and went back to my studio. I called out for someone to order Chinese. Seemed like the obvious choice.

With all these painted warps, I needed my son to fire up the wood stove, I found the space behind the stove to be the perfect spot to cure the warps, which have to sit in a warm spot (over 70 degrees) for 12-24 hours. My husband and I have plans for tomorrow afternoon and evening, so I know I won’t get back to rinse these warps for a day or two. I don’t think it will hurt them. Seems to me they can cure for awhile.

So I’ll be spending Christmas Eve bent over the sink, rinsing yards and yards of warp and a bunch of skeins, and a couple of scarves, and that’s not a bad thing. While we are celebrating the holidays, they will be doing their drying thing. And when Monday morning comes around, I’ll start looking at drafts and how to combine these three warps.

So, to all of my faithful readers, enjoy the end of 2009, celebrating in any way that works for you! We have just passed the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and with each new day, there will be a little bit more light, welcoming us all into the new year. Stay healthy, enjoy life’s treasured moments, and spend as much of 2010 as you can creating something from your hands, in whatever form works for you!