Countdown…

It’s been years since I got ready for a show.  I did craft fairs for ten years, that was a long time ago, and I’ve blogged ad nauseum about how I never wanted to sell my work again, and how I’m trying to overcome my need to hold on to everything I make, and how I might need it as a teaching tool, and well I could waste the whole blog on all my woes about my years of selling and how burned out I got.

So fast forward…  I have too much stuff I’ve made, and no where to put it.  The airlines are restricting my luggage so badly, that I have to basically travel with nothing when I teach, and all these wonderful teaching pieces are now in photos and in PowerPoint presentations.  I don’t wear most of what I make, or I wear it once for a fashion show, and exhibit it a few times, and that’s it.  The pieces sit in cleaner bags in my closet, taking up valuable space.  (I actually don’t have the lifestyle to wear and use all of what I make…)

So, with a critical eye, I’ve started to gather pieces that I think I might actually want to part with if someone really wanted to buy them.  I’m not convinced that will ever happen, someone wanting to buy something I made isn’t something I’ve come to grips with, largely because a) I’m not in production anymore, I’m not buying in bulk and raw materials are expensive, b)I’m not interesting in making things in an inexpensive way, if I want to spend two days carefully edging the binding on a tote bag with couched yarn, well I’m gonna do that.  Too bad if the tote is $300. c) I’m personally too cheap to buy anything that isn’t on sale for 50% off the lowest sale price or I have a 30% coupon at Kohl’s.  I wouldn’t buy my work (because it is too expensive) so it is odd to me that anyone else might…

But I digress.  This isn’t about selling my work, it is about making the commitment to tag and bring my work to the guild sale. In order to do that, I have to properly photograph everything I’ve done recently that hasn’t already been properly photographed.  Blog shots don’t count.  Because if I actually did manage to find someone who wanted one of my pieces badly enough to pay good money for it, I’d never see it again, and if I don’t have a proper photo of it, I can’t even use it for a teaching tool.  In my “Photographing Your Work” Monograph, I believe the first slide in the presentation says,

RULE # 2: NEVER SEND OUT WORK THAT HASN’T BEEN
DOCUMENTED IN SOME WAY.
I’ve gotten into trouble before not following my own advice…   🙂
The_MessToday is photographing day, which means I try to take my tiny weaving studio and turn it into a tiny photography studio, and since I’m doing small things, I need the table top set up, which means there is shit stuff all over the place.  🙂  It is really hard for me to work in this chaos, which is why I am blogging at the moment and not photographing like I should be, because I needed to just look at a computer screen for 45 minutes and not my studio.photographing
I’ve turned my cutting table into a photo area, and I climb up and over and under and around to get the shot I need, crawling around lights, cords, shit stuff on the floor.  I can’t get out of my own way.  But I’m slowly working through the pile.  And the images are coming out well.  I have a list of 33 items, and I took all of yesterday to figure out how to work the computerized forms that the guild set up, which will generate inventory/price tags for each item on the inventory sheet.  It’s a mail merge thing done between Excel and Word, and I’ve never done anything like that before, so there was a lot of tweaking and hair ripping.
labelingOnce I’ve gotten a good photo of the piece, I carefully tag it with my own labels, and the inventory tag, and then bag it into one of those very large, no, jumbo, Ziploc see- thru bags with handles, that every fiber enthusiast on the planet has purchased by the industrial case!  bagging
At the moment I am working on inventory item #7, and there are 33 items on the sheet.  Many of the items, especially the garments, are already photographed so I’m hoping they go a lot quicker.  I only have tonight and tomorrow…
Meanwhile…
I have received a few comments about the Structo Loom I’m working with, there are apparently others who are looking to repair old Structo’s or add heddles, and I did another Internet search yesterday and found that Texsolv heddles do indeed come in 6 1/8″ length’s and they should fit on the heddle bars which would be a perfect solution to the non available heddles that plague Structo owners.  I called Halcyon Yarn, and spoke with Susan yesterday morning, and had her StructoCollapsedmeasure the heddles in the warehouse, and it looks like they might work.  So I ordered 400.  They were shipped today and I should be able to play with them next week.  However, the remaining partsparts I have from the two Structo looms I started with are not enough to make a second loom.  Specifically I’m missing the rods that hold the beater assembly together.  They are small rods, with threads at the ends to hold a wing nut or a bolt at each end.
With 400 heddles coming, I want to be able to get the loom to actually work next week, and my husband is flying to Israel on Saturday to do some consulting work for Palestine Telephone.  So I asked him about the threaded rods.  Which prompted the following discussion when he wandered into my studio…
Kevin: “What’s this for?” (As he is fingering the small Allen wrench in a baggie on my loom bench)
Me: “Actually it is for the tension adjuster for my small AVL end-feed shuttle (you don’t have to know what this is to appreciate this story…), but I’m so mad I could spit.”
Kevin: “Why?” (He is a man of little words…)
AVL_shuttleMe: “I tried using my 20 year old shuttle with 10/2 tencel which is too fine for the tension the way it is set, and I found the original allen wrench that came with the shuttle, (be impressed, it has been in storage for 20 years and I put my finger on it in 45 seconds) and alas, the shuttle is actually defective.  The whole thread carrying mechanism wasn’t installed right, because the set screw for the allen wrench is off just enough that the allen wrench doesn’t engage when you stick it in the little hole.  I can’t return a shuttle that is 20 years old and this is the first I’ve noticed the problem…”
AVL_shuttle2He takes the shuttle and looks in the light and verifies what I’m talking about.  I felt sort of smug that he couldn’t fix it either. Then he turns the shuttle over to the back side and sticks the allen wrench in the rear hole, which I failed to notice was there, having owned the shuttle for 20 years, and he adjusts the tension.
So now I know where my daughter gets her amazing ability to just waltz by my studio, assess the situation in 30 seconds and throw out the solution on her way down the hall.  I hate when my whole family is smarter than me.
KevinBack to the Structo.  So, now my husband looks at the rod I need for the Structo repair, and says, oh, you can get a rod that is threaded the entire length and then you can just cut it to the length you need.  And he disappears.
He reappears with the threaded rods I need.  ?!?!?!?
Me: “Where the hell heck did you find them?”
Kevin: “I saved the threaded rods from the attic stairs when we pulled them out to replace them.  Thought they might come in handy…”  beater repaired
OK, now I’m rolling my eyes and taking back all the crummy things I’ve said/written/complained about my husband and his champion pack rat status.  We replaced those stairs a couple of years ago.  And he knew exactly where in our junk hole of a garage the rods were stored.  A size 6 rod, 32 threads to the inch, 12″ long will fit through the drilled holes on the beater assembly.  He continued to tinker around, and within about 10 minutes he had the beater back together.  All I have to do now is add the heddles when they come in next week, and make an apron for the back hex beam.  And I’ll have another working  4 shaft sample loom.
I love my husband… (But I still can’t stand all the piles of shit stuff all over the house…)



Plans gone awry…

First, I have to say Happy Birthday to my now 17 year old daughter who has her driver’s license and can’t wait to find places to drive.  She decided she has to drive to the High School tomorrow because her rather large woodworking project is ready to be brought home.  Timing…  Good job Brianna!

I sat down at the computer this morning, after getting her off with the driving instructor who would take her for her test, and my plan was to catch up on some contracts and proposals that needed some attention, and start preparation for tagging and photographing items for the guild sale this weekend.  Silly me, what was I thinking…

It all started when I happened to look ahead on my Google Calendar, all the way to tomorrow.  I noticed that I was suppose to deliver my piece for the Visual Art Center Blank Canvas auction, and I completely panicked.  The piece isn’t even made yet.  Then I looked at the original sheet with the dates, and the piece isn’t due until November 20th.  Big relief!  🙂

Then I found an ad for an exhibit in Texas, an international juried art competition, but the application had to be sent out today.  🙁  So I started looking through the artwork I have committed to specific exhibits to see what pieces would be available for submission.  I came upon the outstanding entry form for the New Jersey Focus for the Art Center of Northern New Jersey exhibit, and looked at the dates and nearly had a heart attack when I read that all accepted work was due today.  🙁  I never heard from them, so my assumption was they didn’t get my application?  I called them.  In fact my work had been accepted, and it was due today, and by the way, I never picked up my piece last week from the International Juried Show…   Hmmm…..  Well, I did apparently screw up there.  I failed to mark on my trusty calendar that I had to actually pick the work up when the show was over, you may recall, that was the piece where I won the Merit award.  (In my defense, I rarely exhibit in a show that doesn’t involve shipping a piece and prepaying the return shipping, so it isn’t something I pay attention to, the piece just shows up on my doorstep. ) OK, so I just had to gather the work that had to be brought to the Art Center for the next show, and pick up my poor orphaned piece I had left behind.  I don’t usually make mistakes like that.

I went to my files to see what pieces had in fact been accepted.  🙂 And I nearly had another heart attack when I realized that one of the pieces had been woven, but it had never been mounted on a frame. 🙁  I didn’t even have the frame.  It was a big piece, 28 x 24″  and I just stood frozen in my studio for a good couple of minutes.  Then I sprung into action.  First I searched my stick barrel in the studio, every weaver has one.  Lease Sticks, Temples, wood slats for warping, dowels, yardsticks, all things long and wood-like reside in the barrel in the corner.  And there, like a gift from heaven, were two 28″ stretcher bars, and two 24″ ones.  🙂  This is my lucky day!

Big SisterBig Sister DetailI put them together, and built a padded cover, and then covered that with silk.  I mounted the artwork, a piece I wove a few months ago, a larger version of the original Big Sister, and carefully pinned it stretched on the frame.  Then I hand sewed it to the silk, all the way around.  The whole process took about 4 hours, and I was finally able to head out to the art center around 2:30.  This was not what I was planning to do today.  And I found out the artist’s reception is Sunday when the show opens, right in the middle of the guild sale, and no where near the guild sale.  I hate calendar collisions.

I managed to get back from Bergen County around 4pm, which left me about 40 minutes to process images, burn a CD, fill out the paperwork, make out the check, place everything in an envelope and get it to the post office before it closed today for the exhibit at University of Texas at Tyler, which is what started this whole escapade today.  I did make it to the post office with five minutes to spare.

So nothing I had planned to do today got done, except putting in the proposals for Siever’s for next year.  But that’s life in the fast lane, we all went out tonight for all you can eat Sushi for my daughter’s birthday.  I am going to finish up this blog tonight and curl up in bed and read.  I’m in the middle of two good reads, one on my iPod, and the other on my night stand.  One is an Elizabeth Berg novel, about a woman who contracted polio in the 1950’s and was pregnant, and managed to give birth to her daughter while in an iron lung. She went on to raise her daughter by herself, in spite of being completely paralyzed.  Like I said, it is a good read.  The other book is by Brett Lott, called Jewel, about a family from Mississippi whose last child has what we now call Down’s syndrome, but back then, the term was Mongolian idiot.  Both books are from the same time period, and both take place in Mississippi, and I am always appalled reading about how we treated each other and how racism and prejudice were everyday occurrences.  We have come so far and yet, not far enough…

I finally got hold of some of the images my husband shot at the musical Once on this Island, performed last weekend at County College of Morris.  The show takes place in the French Antilles, in the 1950’s.  The story is a folk tale, of an orphan after a horrific storm, who was kept alive by the gods, and how she grew up among the peasants and the indigenous peoples of the island, but falls in love with one of the French Grande Hommes, after she rescues him from a car crash.

OnceOTIsland4OnceOTIsland2OnceOTIsland1I wanted to share the photos, because I helped with the costumes, providing some of the actual garments from my vast stash of amazing clothing.  The god of water, Agwé, wore my peacock vest, actually all four of the gods wore capes of some sort, so my peacock vest was perfect to give the illusion of sparkling waves as he turned and moved around the stage.  In one scene, he covers the orphan Ti Moune, who has been taken by the god of death, (on Agwé’s right in the first two photos), with a wave of water.

I copied a dress with some handpainted silk fabric from Thailand for Erzulie the goddess of love.  OnceOTIsland5The costumer added a cape, and the actress looked like a pink froth of love!  She moved and swirled, and it was all quite effective.  On her right was the goddess of the earth, Asaka, and I put one of my sari skirts on her, and reworked the cape from a costume from another venue.

OnceOTIsland3And of course, there was my son, who played the grandfather of all the french inhabitants of the island, Armand, who came in the time of Napoleon, and in spite of having a lovely wife, to his right, he slept with all the peasants.  My son loved the role…  I designed the look for Armand, and I provided the white lace dress for his “wife”, and the peasant to his left, has on one of my silk broomstick skirts.

After the show, we carried out a carload of garments and fabric, and I’m still cleaning everything.  I was glad to have had the opportunity to help with the costumes, I actually enjoy it, and the challenge of making up something from nothing, and it only has to look good from the audience, and not up close, and it only has to make it through a weekend of shows!  The complete opposite of how I actually work!

I’m going to try again tomorrow to work off some of my to do list.  Wish me luck…

Where to Begin…

I feel like I’ve been away for a year!  So much has happened!  So this blog doesn’t top out at 2000 words, I’ll probably do it in 2 or 3 parts.

BriannaLucetStarting with last Wednesday, my lovely talented daughter with the pink hair, gave a presentation to the Jockey Hollow Guild on braiding with the lucet.  I couldn’t get her to hold still long enough for any decent photos, and then I got too into helping people with their braids to take a group shot, but here is a slightly blurry photo of Brianna holding two different types of Lucets.  The Y and the Lyre.  Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun, and we sold a number of the Lucets we had purchased last summer from woodworker Wayne Grove.

Side bar: Bri turns 17 tomorrow.  She is focused on her driving test, which is also tomorrow.  We all hope she passes her test, no one wants to be around a 17 year old who just failed their driving test, so we are all crossing our fingers she’ll do just fine.  She is a good driver, and I’m looking forward to her being a little more independent.  Meanwhile, she is working on so many different things, it makes me look like a slug!

BjornBearInkleShe showed her latest Inkle Loom band, a collar and leash for her new dog named Bjorn (Norwegian for Bear), at the guild show and tell.  She heard you could do an alphabet on the inkle loom, I directed her to an article in Handwoven Magazine,  May/June 1999, about weaving an alphabet.  So she looked up the article in my vast archives, and figured it out.  I love the way she just dives in.

She also has been watching one of our guild members crochet.  She sits next to Cathie at the meetings, Cathie is as creative as Brianna is, and the two of them always have their heads together.  Cathie crochets, and Bri has been dying to learn, and I haven’t had five minutes to teach her.

So Bri got tired of waiting for me, and last night, after taking a Vivarin to keep her awake to finish her psych paper, which she finished, but the Vivarin hadn’t worn off (Vivarin is straight caffeine), she tried to figure out how to crochet based on what she remembered BriannaCrochetfrom watching Cathie.  But she couldn’t figure out how to start.  This is where I’m so jealous of this generation of kids, who have never known a life where you couldn’t get an instant answer on the internet.  So she Googled how to crochet a scarf, and got a photographic tutorial, and when she came down in the morning, she had already crocheted about 4 inches of single crochet from yarn we picked up the other day at Michael’s Craft Shop (like I don’t have enough in the studio…)

I did however, teach her how to do a double crochet, which goes a lot faster and will make a scarf more pliable.  She immediKennethColeVestately ripped out what she had done and started over in double crochet.  Bri loves fat variegated acrylic  knitting yarn for finger weaving, another of her skills, so that’s what’s in her stash.  It is fun to have separate mother and daughter stashes…

I promised a photo of one of the vests I picked up in Atlantic City last month, or was it last week?  Here is the Kenneth Cole vest, I loved the styling and the details.

VestClassOn Friday morning, I headed into Newark to the museum, to teach a two day class on making a vest.  I was thrilled when I got there to find out I already knew everyone in the class, they all had taken classes with me before, or I knew them from my guild, and we had a lot of fun together.  One of the students had a family commitment the second day of the class, so I only have photos of three.

The vests need finishing, and  a lot of handwork, but they are really pretty and so individual.

Vest1Vest2

Vest3The fabrics ranged from handwoven, to upholstery tapestry, to light weight Indian cotton.  And one of the students used the selvedge of the upholstery tapestry to make a fringe-y effect on the bands.

InkleClassOn Sunday, I returned to the museum, to teach a one day class in Inkle Loom Weaving.  I had four students, an easy class, and I already knew two of them.  They made some really pretty bands, and we had a lot of fun.

InkleBand1InkleBand2InkleBand3

I’m missing a photo of the fourth band, a really pretty one, and I’ve emailed Dolly to see if she can get me a photo.  Dolly is a felter, I met her at the Felter’s Fling a couple of years ago.  It is great to see the cross over of fiber disciplines, felters can use Inkle Woven bands as handles for felted bags, and all sorts of trims.  I CompCelebrationBagCompCelebrationBagDetailfelted this bag after attending the Fling, and combined Ultrasuede with an inkle woven band for the handles.  I love the dancing woman pin I purchased from one of my favorite craftswomen, Cheryl Olney, who goes by the name of Louise’s Daughter.  I called the bag, “Celebration Bag”.

Thursday through Saturday night, we raced over to County College of Morris,  after I finished teaching each day, to attend the evening performances of their fall musical, “Once on this Island”.  I’ll post about that tomorrow, since I worked on some of the costumes for the show, as soon as I can get the photos from my husband, who took about 500 images during two of the performances.  And then there was the guild meeting today where we all learned how to twine a mat.  Stay tuned…

On the run…

I promise to just touch base and be off again, it is very late and I have to get up early in the morning to leave for the Newark Museum to teach all day.  I’ll be there Friday and Saturday, and then on Sunday I teach a one day class in inkle loom weaving.  Meanwhile, last night my daughter gave a lovely presentation on braiding with the Lucet, I’ll try to get a couple photos up later on, but she had everyone braiding away, and they all looked like they were having fun.

My son has a role in County College of Morris’ fall production of Once on this Island.  I helped with the costumes, and my peacock coat is on the god of water.  It looks amazing on him.  The show opened last night.  I caught tonight’s performance, it was magical.  If you live in the north Jersey area, it is a real theatrical treat, great story, colorful and beautiful.  Shows are Friday and Saturday evening at 7:30 and there is a Saturday matinee.  Tickets are only $15.  I’ll be there Friday and Saturday night as well.  So it will be a busy couple of days, and I doubt I’ll have a chance to blog.

I’ve done about three yards of the eight yards of trim I need for the rocker.  It is coming out quite well.

More later…

Tying Loose Ends…

I am in the middle of entirely too many projects, and that just makes me want to smile.  My ADD self just loves to flit from one thing to another, and it makes me want to jump out of bed early in the morning to get cracking…

vestSo here is a run down…

First, I needed to finish the remaining handwork on the vest I made a couple of weeks ago from an alpaca throw I wove, circa 1980?  I love how the triangular buttonholes came out, and I know I’ll enjoy wearing this vest.  Plus I needed the sample for the workshop this weekend.

I finished the upholstery on the chair last night, I just have to bang in all the tacks and trim the fabric.  rockerI am so loving the way this rocker looks.  Meanwhile,  I ended up sampling the braid I started weaving on the inkle loom, trying different weight wefts, to see if I could get a bit sturdier braid.sampler

The original weft for the braid was a 5/2 perle cotton, and the braid was a little bit too flexible for use in upholstery.  I tried using three strands of rayon, and then I tried dark brown handspun, and finally I tried two strands of 3/2 perle cotton.  I played around with how they looked on the chair, after I wove off the whole two yard warp.

Oddly enough, I ended up liking the original braid best, but decided to actually weave the next two yards with a single strand of 3/2 perle cotton and I’m thinking that this braid will be perfect.  And it is weaving up really quickly.inkle_braidbraid I like the spacing of the little diamonds better in the latest version which is on the loom on the left.  The “seeds” are a bit plumper…

So here is one of the original samples of the braid on the actual chair, I am really happy, and I can’t believe it is the same chair I upholstered 30+ years ago. This has been really fun, and I can hear my mother in law cheering me on…

loomMeanwhile, remember the Structo I was rewarping last week?  I got about half of it threaded and then got side tracked by the trip to Atlantic City, and then the rocker and then, well, I needed to finish threading that puppy, and find out if my hard work would produce a cloth weight that would work for the postcards I weave.postcard_in_progress

I’ve now finished threading the loom, and I started to weave on it, using a very slim stick shuttle, I’m surprised at what a good shed there is for such a little loom.  My damask boat shuttle is tied up on the other table loom. The fabric is really fine and tight, and I’m happy with the linen so far.  I had started a couple of postcards on the remaining warp on my 25″ table loom, on a gray 10/2 cotton, as a demo when I went to Albany the beginning of October.  So you can see what the strips look like in progress.  I’m hoping I can weave lots of little postcards,  and with 15 yards of warp, I can really experiment with this medium…

Here is a shot of the actual linen cloth, it is pretty fine, the linen is about the weight of a 20/2, and sleyed two per dent, I have 30 ends per inch, not counting the tie down threads.cloth

While I was threading, I couldn’t help myself, my brain wanders to the stash which is right in front of my eyeballs…

And draped over one of my looms is a fabric I wove that is gorgeous, from a warp I dyed in a class with Irene Munroe back in 2008 at the Tampa Bay Convergence.  I sett it too dense for a scarf, and there is so little fabric that I’m not sure I want to make it work for a garment, but it would make a great tote bag!new_project (Click on Tote Bag and scroll to the bottom of that blog to see the latest tote I made…)

I always have to have something colorful to look at on my cutting table and I’m always adding and subtracting to a pile before I actually jump into it head first.

So the vest is finished, and the loom warped, and another project is lighting up my cutting table, and now I have to finish weaving two more scarves on the loom (Photo below)  so I can have them for the guild sale.  And I just have to weave about 8 yards of trim for the rocker.scarves

candy_wrapper_toteAnd speaking of tote bags, I did promise a photo of my daughter’s tote bag she made from candy wrappers and duct tape.  She gets these brainstorms as school, probably when she gets bored in calculus or physics (I should have that kind of brain…) and texts me to ask if I have this or that material for her next brilliant idea!

Even her pens are covered in duct tape!  Note the white rose sticking out of the tote!