Daryl's Blog – Page 143 – The World from a Weaver's point of view!

All my children and roller coaster rides…

What a week!

First, my children are of the ages when roller coaster rides seem like canoe trips on a lake… My son, who wore camouflage his entire third grade year, has finally signed on the dotted line and joined the military. He leaves for basic training for the Army National Guard on January 4th. I’ve been asked by a number of friends, how do I feel about this? Honestly, no one knows where life is going to take them, he parties hard for a 19 year old, and his motivation for anything involving work is pretty low. I adore being around him and his friends, who seem to be living in my basement on a full time basis now, eating me out of house and home. He is entertaining, kind, interesting, and I know I’ll really miss him when he grows up and goes out on his own, but I don’t see that happening without the structure of something like the military. So, I’m OK with this decision, and pretty proud, he did this all on his own, gathered all the paperwork, medical records, and he is pretty excited about the future, for the first time in his life.

Meanwhile, he has a roll in the musical Once on this Island, at the community college where he attends, and happily volunteered me to help the frazzled costumer, who has to come up with island/Carribbean costumes for 40 cast members. My stash proved to be quite useful, where do I find these things?, and my first assignment was to copy a Hawaiian wrap dress out of a vintage handscreened handwoven silk from Thailand. That was a fun 3 hour diversion.

I attended the rehearsal again last night, and now have a suitcase full of alterations to do today on top of finishing up my article for SS&D. Shades of 27 dresses…

Then there is my daughter. My lovely adorable interesting and very capable pink haired daughter. She is still in HS, and in between her honors physics and calculus classes, she has a class in Woodworking, Cabinet and Machine woods to be exact. She loves the class, the only female, and fortunately it is her first period class and makes her mornings actually bearable. This is the age of complete connectedness to your children, for better or for worse, and though it isn’t really permitted, the kids text blindly under the desk on a regular basis, so I know what goes on at school way more than I should! Usually I get texts like, “Mom, the Yankee Candle order forms and money are due today. I forgot, can you bring them over to the HS right away?” But yesterday morning I got a text that just said, “Finished”. Attached was a picture of her latest project in cabinet woods, a gorgeous oak shelving unit. I know she will want to put it in her room, but I think I’ll fight her on this one. It is beautiful! I want it for me…

Later on in the day, I got a text that said, “I’m inspired… do you have any of that clear plastic fabric?” This is always problematic, because when my daughter gets an idea, she runs with it, and doesn’t stop until it’s done. Which means taking over my studio for an indeterminate amount of time. She ended up making a tote bag, (inspired by my tote bag adventures) out of duct tape, saved candy wrappers (who saves their candy wrappers?) and clear plastic vinyl sheeting (which I did have in my studio). She needed a small tote for her Japanese books for the Japanese class she is taking at the community college. I’ll send along a photo when I can.

So this was more than a roller coaster week, aside from my children. Back at the end of September, I applied to three exhibitions, where I thought my work might be appropriate. They were all running during the same time frame, so it was quite a juggling act to see which of my artpieces I would send for which exhibition applications. Once the applications are sent, it is a nail biting waiting game. You’d think by now I’d be use to this. I don’t think you ever get use to the waiting game, and ultimately the rejections that come with them. Two of the notifications were suppose to be released on October 15th. October 15th came and went, and nothing. One of the applications was done online through Juried Art Services, so the notification would be online as well. Either a green checkmark, or a red X. Very personal. I checked the website about every half hour for about 5 days straight. Suddenly, there it was, two big red X’s. And the accompanying note, if you actually clicked on the X’s read, “Thank you for your submission. We regret to inform you that your work was not chosen for this year’s exhibition.” 🙁

OK, so there were still two more applications out there, and I kept checking my snail mail, with eager anticipation, until the next notification popped up in my email box. I hadn’t actually expected to hear from this exhibit quite this soon. “Thank you for your submission. It was a very difficult decision- making process as we received many applications. We are sorry to inform you that your work was not selected this year.” 🙁

OK, so there was still one more. I was only out about $100 in entrance fees, and I had just won an award at an exhibit a couple weeks ago, so the roller coaster feeling of being high and then crashing down to the ground and rethinking your entire body of work, is all in a days work.

Then came the final notification, suddenly, in my inbox, a week overdue.

“Congratulations! Thank you for your submission to the George Segal Gallery for Art Connections 6. This year over 175 artists submitted work for review with a total of over 750images to be juried. The quality of the work was outstanding, which made the selection process very challenging. The juror chose 182 works from 118 artists. You are one of those artists!” 🙂

This exhibit is actually at the new gallery that is part of Montclair State University, where I got my art degree in 1977. So I sort of feel a little thrill at finally being able to come back and say to no one in particular, see what I did with your degree? Like I said, this week has been a roller coaster ride.

I did manage to make up that tote bag I started last week, I didn’t actually start it, more like laid a pile of the table of stuff that sort of related, and waited to see where it would take me. I got the handwoven fabric laid out pretty quickly, but the companion complementary fabric just wasn’t working. I rooted around in my stash a bit more, and found some raw silk I had used for sampling some fabric paints and stencils. So I dug out my fabric paints and stencils and painted the rest. I chose to do a more complex binding, which involved yarn and bias strips, and it took way longer than I could ever sell the tote bag for, I really find it hard to do inexpensive and simple, but I had a blast, and love the results. I used one of my silk sari’s from India for the lining, and it made for a pleasant day being one with my sewing machine while the world rained chaos around me. 🙂

My Swedish Sister

During my senior year of High School, back in the early 1970’s, my family agreed to open our home to a girl my age from Sweden, as part of an exchange program. We shared a very crowded room together, climbing over beds to get to closets, and we developed a friendship and a bond that has lasted more than 35 years. She married a Scot, and lives in London with her four boys, mostly grown now. My Swedish Sister has opened her home to us in London, many times, and my only regret is that we can’t see each other more often than we do.

Annika flew to NYC this weekend, for a business seminar, and called me last week to let me know she was coming and would there be any way my husband and I could join her Sunday for lunch. I cleared my calendar, and jumped at the chance. We met her in the lobby of her hotel on Park Ave., along with a couple of other old friends of hers that also live in the Metropolitan area, and we all squeezed into a car and headed south to the Meatpacking district of Manhattan. This upscale area, filled with designer showrooms, and contemporary eating establishments was full of gorgeous old architecture and cobblestone streets. The cold dreary rain didn’t deter us from finding a lovely quiet restaurant called Revel, with an enclosed glass roofed garden, well lit, so despite the gloom outside, it was cheery and conducive to good conversation between old friends. On the way home from Manhattan, we dropped Annika and her colleague off at Newark Airport.

By the time I returned home, I was convince I was coming down with something nasty. I had the run over by a truck feeling, and that scratchy throat, and the all over feeling of malaise. Damn… I pushed myself too hard, and my body is finally putting on the brakes. Fortunately I had nothing critical on the calendar today, except work on my SS&D article, and so I went to bed last night at 8pm, slept fitfully, woke early to get my daughter off to school, went back to bed, and finally got up, stayed in my pj’s all day, and just worked on my article and the vest.

Other than the fact that the vest has a full box of pins in it, I finished it. Now I just have a few hours of handwork to do. So I’ll curl up and watch a few missed TV programs and do some handsewing, and try to get to bed early again tonight. I actually started to feel better towards the afternoon, I’m not out of the woods yet, but my immune system usually can fight things off after a day of feeling crappy. Lets hope it can handle this as well.

When pigs fly and other paranormal activity…

What an odd week. Thursday night I drove my daughter to the community college, which was west from where I live about 20 miles. We were as I’m sure you’ve heard, having an early in the season nor’ easter. It was windy, rainy, cold, and just plain miserable, but the further west I drove, the colder the temperatures got, and when I got near the college, I couldn’t believe my eyes, it was snowing! Hard! The snow was coming down in thick wet flakes, and sticking all over the greenery, and the oddest thing, the leaves are still turning and so they are all still on the trees, so the picture of huge clumps of wet snow piled on the leaves still on the tree was something out of the twilight zone. Even made the front page of the papers. It was hard to get a good shot, the car was moving and it was dusk.

Then, an even odder paranormal experience happened yesterday. My 19 year old son was so desperate for money, he agreed to help me clean the house. That’s right, he and one of his friends, joined me for a housecleaning party. This was probably one of the most unusual occurrences, I’m teaching them how to clean windows without streaking, scrub toilets, clean stove burners, dust, vacuum, etc. It was actually fun and they did a pretty good job. My toilet has never been so shiny.

So off my son went, with $25. in his pocket, promising to come back and do the upstairs with me, which of course he didn’t, but paranormal things don’t happen on a repeating basis, so I can only have this one memory of the day my son actually housecleaned.

I’ve been working on the vest I started last week, from the old alpaca and wool throw I made in the 1980’s. And I’m working on my next article for SS&D, but I haven’t been at the loom or sewing machine in awhile and I was starting to hear the call. More like a megaphone shout, but I heeded the call and decided to start on the vest. I wanted to do some extreme details, partly to use it as a teaching piece, and partly because I wanted this vest for me. I had three smallish buttons that I thought would look good with the fabric, and tried them on an existing muslin sample of the same vest style, so I could get a sense of placement and proportion. I also thought I’d like the vest shorter than my original pattern called for.

Then I made a template for the triangular bound buttonholes. The band on the front of this vest, which is the same as the one for the jacket pattern I use in classes, is pretty narrow. I’ve wanted to try to see if I could do this type of buttonhole in this tight of a space, and I’m still not completely sure how this will all work, but I decided to plow ahead anyway, because not knowing how I’m going to do something has never stopped me before.

Then I made a test buttonhole from the actual fabric. The buttonhole came out too big, so I scaled it down some more, and then stitched the grid on the band piece and jumped in head first. It was difficult to work so small and cramped, and more than once I had to take out the tiniest of little stitches. And I spent all morning working on these three little buttonholes and their window backs. But I’m happy with the results and can’t wait to see them on the finished garment.

Meanwhile, I needed to piece the armbands, since I had to use tiny scraps to create them. My original intent was to make bias tubes to cover the butted joints, like I do on my other pieced things, but I didn’t want the contrasting line to compete with the gorgeous buttonholes. So I played around, with my seriously tiny bits of scrap, and came up with this solution, I had a good size wool yarn that matched the fabric well, threaded three ends through my cording foot on my Janome 6600, and did a triple step zig-zag to couch the three ends over the butted joints. I should mention I fused all the little pieces together onto a fusible knit backing first. This worked well to make a flat invisible join on a lofty fabric. I duplicated the couching on the other band, even though it was cut from one straight piece of fabric, just to be consistent.

Then, I went and got my hair cut. 🙂

Candiss and Daryl’s Excellent Adventure

I got the biggest treat this week, a call from my favorite fiber buddy of all time, and probably my closest longtime friend, Candiss Cole. Candiss is a handweaver from Sedona, we met around 1980, across the aisle from each other at the Gaithersburg, MD craft fair, and have been the best of friends ever since. My husband gave Candiss away, and I stood for Candiss at her wedding in 2004 to Rodger Footitt, in a tiny little hamlet in northern England called Bagshaw.

Sidebar: I made the dress I’m wearing, and the vest is another long story, I handbeaded it over the course of 9 years, finishing it up for the wedding. Two beads at a time, a labor of love. The ground fabric was a vintage jacquard upholstery fabric, in the color Candiss and I referred to as Starbuck’s Caramel Macchiatto.

Candiss continued to do craft fairs, while after about 10 years, I stopped to have a couple babies and redirect my career. Her work has evolved and she continues to reinvent herself year after year, each time I look at her collection I think, Wow! Candiss, this is the best one yet!

Anyway, Candiss called, she was en route between a fall show in Maryland, and the show in Westchester, NY this weekend. She had a couple of days to “play” and play we did! Her husband headed off to the golf course, and Candiss and I hopped in my car and headed into Manhattan. On my list of wannasee was the textile woven from Golden Orb Spider Silk now on display this month at the American Natural History Museum in NYC.

ONE MILLION WILD SPIDERS FROM MADAGASCAR SUPPLIED SILK FOR RARE TEXTILE ON DISPLAY AT AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

LUSTROUS GOLDEN CLOTH MADE FROM UNDYED SILK TOOK FOUR YEARS AND SOME 80 PEOPLE TO CREATE.

This is an amazing textile, if you can’t make it to NYC to see it, make sure you look at the link from the American Natural History Museum, there is a slide show of details that my poor little camera phone, (yep, the one the dog ate), couldn’t begin to capture. The story is amazing, and I’m glad I slipped in to catch it before it leaves NYC.

Candiss and I had a lovely lunch together, just like old times, chatting about stuff that only Candiss and I can chat about, old friends, who have spent a lifetime together, and then we went on to see the Cezanne exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ.

First I want to say that the Montclair Art Museum is a lovely old architectural beauty nestled in a residential area of a very wealthy section of Montclair, NJ. It is always a pleasure to venture over there, but alas, I am spoiled, for another 10 minute trip on the bus, I can be at the MET in NYC. So I don’t venture there nearly as often as I would if it were the only game in town.

There has been extensive advertising for the Cezanne exhibit that just opened there, more correctly, the title is Cezanne and American Modernism. More correctly the title should read American Modernism and the Cezanne influence.

There were only a handful of Cezanne paintings and a few of his watercolors and drawings mixed in with well over 80 early paintings of American greats like Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Max Weber, and Arshile Gorky. The American painters weren’t even exposed to Cezanne until after his death in 1906, when Cezanne’s work first appeared at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in 1910, largely in the form of photographs of the paintings and then at subsequent exhibitions including the 1913 armory exhibit. The Montclair exhibition was well done, but I have to say, I kept getting the nagging feeling as I wandered through the paintings, looking at numerous Cezannesque still life’s and nude bathers and impressionistic landscapes, that there is a fine line between “influenced by” and a direct knock off. We struggle with this fine line today in fashion, and I kept thinking that in the artworld, this is almost expected, you learn from imitating the masters. Each of the above mentioned painters went on to create their own vastly different styles, and the early paintings, clearly “influenced” by Cezanne, were sort of a surprise.

Anyway, if you live in the north jersey area, it is a great show, but don’t expect to see a retrospective of Cezanne.

Yesterday Candiss and I met up again, this time at a veritable institution for handweavers, Silk City Fibers.

Sidebar: I live about 15 minutes from Silk City Fibers in Paterson NJ. I’ve had an on again off again relationship with them over the last 25 years, most of my yarns came from them in the 1980’s when I did craft fairs, many from that era remember the old stand-by Contessa, rayon and silk, a staple in most handweaver’s stashes. Silk City Fibers is a wholesaler, which means only those who establish wholesale accounts and buy in large quantity can purchase from them, but there are a number of retailers across the country that carry their lines of yarn, for both knitting and weaving, most know about Bambu 7 and 12. They are Silk City yarns.

I did some color consulting for Silk City Fibers around the time my son was born, (he is almost 20), and I used their yarns heavily in the color forecast column I wrote for Handwoven Magazine for a number of years. They open the warehouse once a month, on the second Saturday of the month I believe (same day as my American Sewing Guild meeting), to handweavers, knitters, and other interested fiber enthusiasts, where they discount their discontinued colors and lines, and offer them for sale. Though I am choking with yarn, and have no need to add to the stash, I jumped at the opportunity to tag along with Candiss and her husband, see Mady, who I’ve known since 1980 ish, and is now probably in charge of everything Silk City, haven’t a clue what her title is, but there were lots of hugs and how are the kids, and how’ve you been kinds of greetings exchanged.

I found some thin rayon rickracky kind of yarn, Skinny Majesty, (I remember the plain old Majesty line, which I still have remnants of floating around on the shelf, twice the diameter of it’s skinnier counterpart), and picked up a few cones to fill in the stash. I also got a number of cones of assorted cottons and rayons that are undyed/unscoured and will really need to get out the dyes and start winding and painting warps soon! I of course haven’t a clue where I’m putting this yarn, but an opportunity is an opportunity and there is always room for one more cone, (or in this case a dozen). In addition, I found a gorgeous fine linen, that I think will work in my adventure with converting my two Structo looms, into one that can weave postcards for my artwork series.

Candiss opened the back of her truck and showed me her latest garments, and like I said earlier, I always feel like, “Candiss, this is your strongest line yet!” Check out her website to get a preview. It was great to see my old friend, and it gave me a wonderful diversion for a couple of days, I’m feeling worn out and burned out, and just want to sleep for a week. Are you surprised? Now I have to focus and get my next article out for Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot. It is dreary and rainy and cold here in NJ today, I’m scheduled for a lunch date, the Thursday Philosophy Club, but I think I’ll crank up the wood stove when I return from lunch. And I really have to scrub every inch of the house because it still smells of the smokey remnants of seriously burned bacon from my son’s cooking adventures while I was out playing yesterday evening. And the dog ate two of the pieces of our expensive chess set on the coffee table this morning, silly me, I heard him chomping but I thought he was eating a bone. Dumb… This dog and I are not friends at the moment…