Daryl's Blog – Page 161 – The World from a Weaver's point of view!

Busy Days

The days are just getting away from me, and my to-do list is starting to get a bit out of control. And I feel like I am moving through Jello, going through the motions but not accomplishing much. There are lots of things on the calendar taking me away from a good solid day’s worth of work, plus I am procrastinating big time, starting the new presentation on Website Success. Once I’m into it, I know I’ll get lost in it, and not come up for air for about six weeks, so I’m hesitant to jump in.

Meanwhile, I have an article to write for Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot, and a book review as well. I have to finish the remaining two placemats for the exchange, I have to write up and get out the contracts for my guild, and get the information to the newsletter editor, and I have to review 5 scholarship applications for the Music Parents Scholarship for this year. Those are probably due first.

And, big news, I have to finalize my contracts for Convergence 2010. Yep, I finally have contracts in hand. It took longer than usual because there was a lot of back and forth as to what I would actually teach for them. This is an unusual situation, and kind of complicated, and partly what triggered my bout of whining a couple weeks back, about being a ‘has been’…

Convergence is an international conference for not only handweaving, but many other disciplines in the fiber arts, and one that can keep you visible and open other opportunities. I have taught at every Convergence since 2000 in Cincinnati. Therein lies the problem. First off, I am known in handweaving circles for my garment construction classes for handweavers, I have those classes down to a well oiled machine, there are only so many ways to teach garment construction, and I’d like to think I have streamlined the process to work for conference and guild situations of mixed skill levels and all body types. I’m good at what I do. But trying to reinvent oneself each time for Convergence, where cutting edge and up and coming teachers and topics get first priority, is pretty darn impossible. I try to come up with new workshops and seminars yearly, but it isn’t enough. So, I am grateful to the HGA for giving me a full plate at the next Convergence, but I know that after 10 years, there are others out there that are developing newer and more cutting edge kinds of workshops, and I’ve been told by many that mostly I am thought of as the ‘Go To Girl for Sewing’. Even my ‘Photographing your Work” seminar, though extremely well received when I give it, many have opted to hire a ‘professional photographer’ instead to do the seminar. Most don’t know my original degree was in textiles and photography. But I digress….

So, I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about where I’m going with all this, I’m not “washed up” so much as having to look down the line to what’s next for me and where can I take my skill set and stay personally challenged and still make a living. No answers are coming, but I’m more comfortable with the idea of just seeing where life takes me for the moment….

So, I am teaching at Convergence in Albuquerque, see the full list of what I’m teaching on my website Schedule.

So, with all this stuff on my plate, what did I actually do today? Not any of the above…

I started a new project! Unless you have a fantastic memory, have been reading this blog since back in December, and have actually been keeping track of the six projects I outlined back then, you don’t remember Sandstone Layers or Project Two! The yardage for this was woven back in 2007, and it is one of my favorites. I’d like to make a jacket out of it, but I am longing for a different kind of jacket look than my last couple, and I found a great jacket in the January 2008 issue of Burda World of Fashion. It is sort of slouchy, and has a big belt, and a great big flowing collar. Some of the engineering still has to be worked out, but I spent all afternoon yesterday and this morning tracing the pattern, and then fitting it onto the dressform. It took much longer than normal, because there were so many pattern pieces and because the jacket was actually designed for plus sizing and I had to regrade the smallest size in the pattern down another three sizes.

I tried it on the form, and liked what I got, except for a couple of areas, one being the asymmetrical hem. I thought the angle and pitch of the right side was too much. So I pinned up what I thought was more appropriate.

Once I added the belt to the jacket pattern, it was pretty clear I would have the same problem as the last Burda jacket I made, the waist was too high for me. I am really long waisted. So I knew I would need to chop all the body pieces above the waist and lower the whole waistline, carrying the belt loops with it.

Of course as I puttered with the pattern, I got sidetracked here and there, wondering what sort of buttons I had in my stash that would work with this. I have bins of buttons, some in order, but most not…

Recently a friend who was cleaning out her deceased aunt’s house, gave me a cookie tin of buttons, lots of Bakelite, and some pretty interesting shell buttons, sadly with a coating of powdery mildew, and I rooted through there and found some I thought worthy of cleaning and set out with a tooth brush and some Softscrub.

After a couple hours of trying to find three buttons that I liked with the fabric that were the right size, I took a couple of the whitish abalone buttons and turned them over, and voila! The perfect color buttons were hiding on the back!

The flash is making them look a little too white, but they are beautiful and creamy pink/green on the back, and perfect for the fabric. And my favorite belt works as well. So, now for the layout…

This is going to be another one of those layouts that when I’m finished cutting, I’ll just have dust left. I love when this all works out. I won’t line this jacket, but will figure out what if anything I’ll interface with since I want the collar pieces to drape well. Stay tuned…

Soft Pretzels and Cup o’ Noodles Soup

First off, my cold is getting better. I’m starting to feel like me again, and I’m catching up, my house isn’t so cluttered and dirty, and the sun is shining. So, all is well again in the world.

I had what I call a puttery day. I caught up on housework, went through some paperwork, filled another book order, and sat down to weave off the second scarf from the workshop last week. This one wove like butter, I still had shredding problems because the reed was the wrong size for the warp yarn I was given, but I dealt with that. Loosely spun novelty knitting yarns need to be in an 8 dent reed or less, not a 12. Sadly I was told to bring a 12, so the yarns were shredding like crazy. C’est la vie…

The scarves turned out so pretty. Largely that was because Barbara Herbster, the instructor has such a great feel for color. That alone made the workshop worth it. So now I have two lovely scarves, I will donate one to my church service auction on Friday, a fun fundraiser, following the spaghetti dinner. And I’m already poking around in my stash looking for what I have so I can put on another warp and not have two naked looms.

I spent the afternoon in this building. This is the snack bar for the Boonton High School Athletic Fields. Last year this time, the new athletic fields were being completed, and since they are the most ‘state of the art’ fields in the County, the County Track finals are being held at our High School fields today and tomorrow. So they needed volunteers for the snack bar, and my daughter called and asked if I would put in a few hours. It is actually an easy job. I haven’t worked this concession stand before, so I stood and watched for awhile, and soon found a need. I took charge of putting salt on the frozen “soft” pretzels and getting them heated in the oven. I found I could fit 16-18 in the oven at once, and it was clearly one of the most popular things on the menu.

Actually, “soft” pretzels are one of those comfort foods from childhood. Sidebar: I grew up in a southern NJ suburb of Philadelphia. If you ever lived or traveled regularly to Philadelphia, you know that soft pretzels there are definitely not like the soft pretzels from NY. They come in strips, the long narrow soft pretzels are torn off the strip, and covered in copious amounts of yellow mustard. My fondest food memory as a child along with Philly Cheese Steaks and Hoagies… My dad use to treat us to soft pretzels when we went to the Audubon Shopping Center, outside the E.J. Korvettes, there was a pretzel stand, and a strip of three soft pretzels was 25 cents. Since there were three of us, we all got one, covered of course in yellow mustard.

OK, so I stood in the snack bar today, salting and baking a few dozen NY style soft pretzels. And while they were baking, I was filling containers of Cup o’ Noodles Soup with water and production line heating them in the two microwaves, so they’d be ready when someone asked for a cup of soup. Oddly enough, that was a popular item as well. And even odder was the fact that very few candy bars were being sold. We basically sold out of soup by the end of the track meet. Could it be that kids are starting to eat healthier? Probably skewing the statistics, these were all athletes. I get to go back tomorrow, and since I am more flexible with my work schedule, I will go in earlier to get the hot dogs cooking, the meatballs heating, the coffee brewing, and the soft pretzels baking.

I sat down tonight, and wove another placemat for the guild placemat exchange. The cloth beam is filling up. I will say that I’m really enjoying weaving these mats, I rarely ever weave anything for the home, so this is a real treat.

Score: Mom 6, Brianna4

OH, I almost forgot, apparently the Boonton Bombers Track Team is currently in first place! Yeah Bombers!

I won!

Even though I felt crappy all day, still trying to get over my cold, it was a pretty good day. I accomplished a lot of catching up, spent a few hours in the morning filling out camp forms. I will say that is my least favorite job in the whole world, camp medical forms. Six pages of detailed information on my daughter for summer camp, I feel like I need a medical degree to get them all straight, what goes to the Girl Scout Council, what gets copied and sent to the Physician, what comes back from the Physician and forwarded onto the Girl Scout Council, I have a headache just thinking about it, oh wait, the headache is from my cold….

I got my dress, Frosted Florals shipped to Kansas City today, for the Surface Design Association Conference Fashion Show later this month, and I filled a book order. I got to dust my very dirty house, and started the general tidying up, always a task, but I felt some order take shape in my life…

So over morning tea, I checked in with my favorite bloggers, I’ve mentioned Tom and Lorenzo, my all time favorite fashion bloggers, followed by Susan Hinckley, who does “Small Works in Wool“, little treasures from recycled wool sweaters. Her blog is fantastic. Earlier in the week, she celebrated her 100th blog, and being her birthday month (mine too), she had a give-away, one of her lovely drawings (on the left). If you wanted to win, you had to leave a comment. So I did.

This morning, I logged on and found that Susan had posted another blog, so I tuned in… Well, who would have thunk it, I won! You have to check out the post to see how much fun it was to wait for the drum roll and have Guy Smiley announce the winner!

So that set the tone for the day, never mind I feel like crap. I got my tax refund today as well. Should have bought a lottery ticket while I was at the grocery store, refilling the larder!

Mother’s Day

I hadn’t planned on blogging today, I just wanted to curl up in bed, it has been a long weekend, but all the blogs I scrolled through tonight mentioned Mother’s Day and I just couldn’t let this day go by without a comment!

First, I’d like to think of this as a day to remember all of those who mentored you, who taught you something about life, who were there to bail you out when you needed it the most, and who let you fall and discover on your own what you were made of. There have been a number of these amazing women in my life, some were teachers, one was my mother in law, some were friends, one was my editor, and yes, of course, there was and still is my own mom, who I just adore, and owe so much of who I am to her.

And so I am a mother too. My husband and I married, with the knowledge that most likely we wouldn’t be able to have children, I won’t go into all the sordid medical issues, largely involving DES, a drug given to pregnant women in the 50’s, but we weren’t marrying for reasons of procreation, (Bless me Father for I have sinned, I know what I told the priest who married us…) and we had a great life and a lot of fun for 12 years of marriage until one day in my mid 30’s, I found myself pregnant. The doctors were sort of surprised, we were even more surprised, and so unceremoniously began my career as a mother. Two children later, the rest is history as they say.

I will be really honest here and say that the baby years were not my favorite. I had two hyperactive ADHD kids, and they kept me on my toes, and even to this day, their favorite past time with me is to have me recount all the stupid kid tricks they did as toddlers (and actually not much has changed there, my son is 19 and still doing stupid kid tricks…)

But it was all worth it. I adore my kids, as teens and young adults, they are really interesting people, with great minds, creative brains, serious ADD, and they keep me laughing and looking foward to whenever they are around. This is one of my favorite photos of the two of them, my son on the left is three years older than his “little” sister on the right. This was taken back in 1997.

So today, once I got back from church, dropped my daughter home to help my husband fell the birch tree, (we pulled into the driveway and he was standing there holding the ropes that would guide the tree down, waiting for someone to come home, poor man…) while I took off for Morristown to my recorder rehearsal. (I play alto recorder for a consort). When I returned, I went to change my clothes to my gardening attire, and pull my laundry from the washer, I do my things separately in cold water, gentle cycle, and mostly hang my clothes to dry. To my complete horror, there was some serious laundry things happening in my laundry area (which is off the master bedroom ), my son decided that his basement lair needed a massive clean up, school was almost out and most of his friends would be returning from college and there would be some serious partying to do, so he kindly put all my clothes in the dryer, on a temperature that wasn’t good for my clothes, fortunately I only lost one sweater, actually two, but since the second one is one of my favorites, and brand new, I’m not ready yet to call it a loss, even though it is now two sizes too small…. Mother’s Day didn’t start out well. Poor kid, he was only trying to help…

Anyway, my daughter gave me cards, chocolate, my son flowers, and a gift card from Bath and Body Works, of course in my son’s case, it was my credit card that paid for the gifts since he isn’t working at the moment. But it was a sweet thought, and they both remembered, and made a big deal out of it, and the cards were pretty funny. So my son cleaned his room. That was an amazing Mother’s Day gift!

I spent the entire afternoon in the garden with my husband, planting the haul from yesterday’s blog. We found the perfect locations for everything, including what will be an 80 ft. Sequoia, and the sun was warm, and the air fragrant, and the ponds gurgling, and the wildlife everywhere, life doesn’t get any better than this. Chipmonks scampered, birds twittered and sang and flew all around the yard, a fat groundhog happily munched on the helicopter pods from the maple tree, and I plotted how to rid my yard of said fat groundhog so he would stop maurading my vegetable garden. Not one pea plant managed to grow this year, he bit them right off. I wish I knew how he managed to get into the fenced garden…

Anyway, dinner was courtesy of my free Stouffer’s Lasagna, which I get every Easter from my Shoprite instead of a ham. I popped it in the oven, went back out to work, and it was ready to eat in two hours. Add a salad and it was the perfect Mother’s Day dinner… I did almost zero work on it!

So, tomorrow I get back to work. I have to ship my gown to the Surface Design Fashion Show in Kansas City, and tackle the back log that seemed to propagate in the studio while I was playing in a workshop the end of last week…

Dreary Day Reprieve

Finally, some sun shine. Honestly, I haven’t been home enough to even notice, since my last blog Wednesday afternooon, I have been largely out of the studio/house.

Wednesday night was the business meeting for my guild, Jockey Hollow Weavers, and the new board was “sworn in” so to speak. So now I am officially the program chairperson, and I am off to a running start.

My daughter is a member of the guild, and they always welcome her and are so supportive of whatever she comes up with. While we were going through the show and tell, she happily sat sculpting rose candles from the red wax left over from the Bonne Belle cheeses at the snack table.

Barbara Herbster was the speaker for the evening, and she talked first about how she uses a supplemental warp to create her beautiful scarves, some of the supplemental warp threads containing lycra to make the middle ruffle up.

Barbara has one of the best senses of color, and it was inspirational looking at her work. Barbara was one of my most creative weavers who wove for me during the years I worked on the forecast column for Handwoven Magazine. I could always count on her to come up with something spectacularly original, keeping with the palette, theme and inspirational photograph I’d give her.

Thursday morning I packed up the 8 shaft loom, and headed out to a workshop with Barbara at the guild, it was a two day workshop on supplemental warp. Barbara pre-wound the warps, and gave them to us to beam, some were chenille, and some were bamboo. I got one of the bamboo warps. I struggled a bit to get it onto my loom, I had a sectional beam, which normally shouldn’t have been a problem, but there was a mis-communication about size and spacing, and it beamed incorrectly. So I spent the day struggling through the first scarf, finally cutting it off at the end, and re-beaming the warp.

Barbara wound each warp based on a photograph of some kind of flowers she took during her last vacation. It was a great way to wind a warp, much like I used to do with the forecast column.

Friday night, after the workshop, I unpacked the loom, and the bags of stuff one carries to these kind of workshops, and headed over to the Paper Mill Playhouse, to see their current production of 1776. May I say that was one heck of a piece of theatre. A standing ovation, the passion of the times of the days leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the total dysfunction of the first Continental Congress, and the hilarious witty lines which could have been written about the current Congress some 200+ years later, made for a terrific evening.

This morning I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a truck. Actually, I am coming down with a cold, I feel crappy, but still managed to get to my American Sewing Guild meeting, where the speaker was one of the guild members, Tomasa, who is currently attending FIT, and she demonstrated to the group how to draft a bodice pattern on a dress form. I actually learned a few things, she was a very good teacher, and the group was really enthusiastic. I am liking this group of women more and more, and look forward to the meetings.

I came home from the meeting, and jumped into the car with my husband and we made the hour long trek south to Rutgers, for their spring plant sale. Plants from Rutgers University you might ask? Who knew? They have gorgeous gardens, spreading over acres, duh, they do have an agricultural school, and have a fabulous plant sale every spring as a fund raiser. My husband and I always look forward to spending a weekend each spring at some nursery or garden center picking through the usual perennials, and shrubs in search of that one plant that catches our fancy. Well, we hit the mother-lode here. We were like two starving children in a candy shop.

We filled the car with all sorts of unusual specimens, trying to figure out where we were going to plant all these gorgeous creatures. We have about a half acre of great gardens, ponds, perennials, all sorts of wet and dry areas, sunny and shady, and it is all pretty lush at the moment, due to all the buckets of rain that have come down in the last week or so. So lush in fact, I was sort of shocked at how everything had grown about two feet since I last checked.

We found some really unusual things, including the small fern like tree on the left of the photo above, which is actually called Dawn Redwood, yes, that kind of redwood, it is a sequoia from China, thought to be extinct until discovered by the Japanese after WWII, grows to be more than 80 feet. We couldn’t pass it up. And we think we have the perfect spot for it, but will have to fell a dying birch tomorrow, before we plant it. We have lost all of our birches in the last few years, from some birch blight, but happily that just gives us more room to plant stuff.

The photo on the left shows a Mahonia, an odd looking holly type of plant, with even odder flowers, which will be perfect in the shade by the bay window in the front. After I paid for all our specimens, my husband went to get the car, and when he didn’t return, I found him back in the nursery talking to one of the volunteers, about this jack-in-the-pulpit variety, that he couldn’t resist. So I went back to the check out table for one last plant. Apparently this one is a male, which it is when it is suffering from transplant shock, and will eventually settle down and become a female and produce seeds once it likes its new home. I looked at both my husband the volunteer like they had two heads each, but snatched up the plant, the story is too good to pass up.

So, tomorrow, after church and recorder practice, I’ll put on my gardening clothes, and start digging. I’m looking forward to a mother’s day in the gardens, I promise I’ll come back with some amazing photos of our yard. It is really gorgeous. I just hope my cold doesn’t get in my way from spending the day outdoors. No rain for the next few days, yippee!