The Proverbial Grindstone

So another two days spent with my butt stuck in the chair, my hand paralyzed in the shape of a mouse, and more of the letters worn off my poor wireless keyboard.  But, I did get two important pages done in the new site.  The 1-1 1/2 hour lectures page, and the 2 – 2 1/2 hour lectures page are entered.  What a job.  The worst part was finding the original images I used for the prospectuses, there are just so many times you can save .jpg’s, and they lose a considerable amount of information.  So I always like to start with the original file.  But where among the thousands of images I have stored in about 5 different back up locations, could each of the images be hiding?

It’s like that in my studio, “I know it’s here somewhere…” “I remembered seeing it in 1994″… “Whatever happened to that…”  Then of course I become a woman possessed.  I won’t rest until I find the yarn, fabric, tool, image, whatever is lurking just out of site…

Besides spending the day searching through my vast archives for original files of some of my images, I also hunted around the studio for my supply of upholstery braiding.  I know it’s here somewhere.  I have to do an emergency costume for my son who plays the coachman in a performance of Cinderella.  Yes, the same son with the car in the previous blog.  I have to make a pair of pants to match a very old Lieutenant’s Doublet from Van Horn and Sons Theatrical Costumers.  The jacket is in tatters, I’ll do my best to repair, but they need me to construct a pair of pants that will look like they go with it.  So far, I haven’t found the braid.  Next check is the attic, and oh boy, there are amazing things stored up there…

Speaking of my son, he announced yesterday that he is planning to join the National Guard.  Well, I’ve been a bundle of mixed feelings all day, part of me knows that this would really be great for him, and part of me is scared to death.  So, I’ll just focus on the costume for today.

10-virgins

I am planning an excursion into NYC over my daughter’s spring break, there are a couple of fiber shows I want to catch, one at the Cooper Hewitt called Fashioning Felt, and the other, called Seduction at the Museum at FIT.  While checking out times and which days they are closed, I checked the MET to see if there was anything new of interest, and I found that they have an artwork of the day, which can be posted to your Google reader, or whatever you use for keeping track of such things.  So, today’s image came up The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, ca. 1799-1800
William Blake (British, London 1757 – 1827 London)
British
Watercolor, pen and black ink over graphite; 14-1/8 x 13-1/16 in. (36 x 33.2 cm)
Rogers Fund, 1914 (14.81.2)

Somehow in all my years of Catholic School, and my years teaching Sunday School in the Reformed Church in town, I never came across this parable.  What’s with the 10 virgins?  So I did a quick search on Wikipedia, and got the scoop, it is a really odd analogy for being prepared for the second coming, but I loved the watercolor. And the whole idea of 5 wise and 5 foolish virgins waiting for a bridegroom who is having on-time issues, has got the creative juices really churning.  So now I have something else to look forward to, a new work of art every day, just go to the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and subscribe to the artwork of the day feed.  This was number 3,000 something, out of 130,000 plus artworks.  I should live so long…

I went to the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild meeting tonight, and the speaker was Barbara Elkins, the woman who started WEBS.  If you are a handweaver reading this blog, you know about WEBS, “America’s Yarn Store”, a 30,000 sq. ft. facility in Northhampton, MA.  When I do buy yarn, I probably buy from them, and it was really great to listen to Barbara talk about how she and a fellow weaver started by renting out looms in order to get more money to buy yarn.  That was 35 years ago, and in their garage.  It was a great story, and I love the store, I’ve been there, Pioneer Weavers meets in the store, and I taught a jacket class for them a couple of years ago.  Barbara was wearing the jacket she made in the class, tonight at the meeting. They are having their 35th anniversary sale, the email just came in my box.  Beware, their sales can be quite toxic to credit cards!  Seriously, they have a great website for ordering and terrific customer support, and I usually get whatever I order within two days. (That would be east coast).

So as I’m driving home from the meeting, in the cold dreary steady rain, visibility zero, I suddenly had a panic attack.  The placemat exchange is due at the June meeting, this was the April meeting.  That means my daughter and I have exactly 8 weeks to weave 14 more placemats.  You do the math…  So, out with the whip, and lets get cracking…

Catch-up, and Stupid Kid Tricks.

My whole family suffers from ADD, and I admit, so do I.  There are lots of pros and cons to this.  We are a bunch of really creative people, who are always inventing new ways to get out of the proverbial box, but living with us is always a challenge.  One of the great features about people with ADD is the ability to hyper focus.  So that’s basically what I’ve been doing morning, noon, and night for the last couple months.  I get into a project, like the web site designs, and I don’t come up for air.  So everything around me can get really neglected.  I try to keep up with the laundry and housecleaning, because I, unlike the rest of my family who thrive in clutter, can’t stay focused when there is chaos all around me.  But I’ve put off a lot of little correspondence things, and I had a couple of orders that needed shipping, I promised Tien I’d send her some interfacing samples from my vast stash.  I had some follow-ups, and a huge pile of bills to organize, banking to do, and general desk clean up.  So I took the day to take care of all the stuff that had been piling around me.  It felt really good to do that.  I’m getting to the harder parts on the website, not that they are difficult, they are just frightfully time consuming.  Each lecture and workshop has to be updated, polished, PDF’s created, and then pasted and linked into the new site.

photoSo then there is my creative ADD son.  He got distracted by his friends in the car, leaving the ShopRite parking lot this afternoon, and didn’t realize there was a huge curb in front of him?  The photo is of course one of about 200 taken in the parking lot by every cell phone in a 10 mile radius.  The photo is already traveling at breakneck speed through Facebook.  I was afraid to ask how the car got off the strip and into the driveway, fortunately the car was a Scion Xa, and the guys said they just lifted it.  More information than I needed to know.

I will say we laugh a lot in my house.

Music, Metaphors, and other Musings…

I went to church this morning.  That in itself isn’t such an unusual thing, after all it is Sunday, but I don’t usually attend church, I haven’t in a number of years.  Without getting into a lot of personal issues and events, the church where I raised my kids, and I, parted company a number of years ago, my daughter still attends regularly, but I couldn’t quite find my way back.  This particular church suffered a number of situations and personalities and events that got in the way of what’s important in life, and a number of those I’d raised my kids with, including myself, just stayed away.  My spirituality was in danger, and I’m quite protective of that.

Anyway, a new pastor was installed today.  It was a sort of rebirth, or new beginning of sorts for this congregation, and many of the old faces were present, those I’d raised my kids around,  and I felt a renewed sense of community.  But that isn’t what this musing is about.  In 1996, as a Sunday School teacher, and local handweaver, I did a program for this church, one Sunday in May.  I brought in one of my 25″ floor looms,  threaded with a 4 shaft bird’s eye, and I put it on the altar.  For the service, each of the Sunday School children came up one by one, and wove a thread across the warp.  Each of the members of the congregation wove in a thread as well.  When someone couldn’t be there that Sunday because of an illness or injury, someone wove in a thread for them.  The cloth, as it took shape, came to represent the community or congregation of this particular church, gold and silver threads, and black and white threads, and the metaphor here, was how critical each thread was to the whole cloth.  If one thread was removed, the cloth wouldn’t be as structurally sound, and there would be a definite hole in the cloth.

There is a wonderful poem, The Plan of the Master Weaver, most weavers have heard of it.

The Plan of the Master Weaver

Our lives are but fine weavings
That God and we prepare,
Each life becomes a fabric planned
And fashioned in His care.
We may not always see just how
The weavings intertwine,
But we must trust the Master’s hand
And follow His design,
For He can view the pattern
Upon the upper side,
While we must look from underneath
And trust in Him to guide……

Sometimes a strand of sorrow
Is added to His plan,
And though it’s difficult for us,
We still must understand
That it’s He who fills the shuttle,
It’s He who knows what’s best,
So we must weave in patience
And leave to Him the rest…..

Not till the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why–
The dark threads are as needed
In the Weaver’s skillfull hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.

Anyway, I mounted the cloth, with this poem in a frame, with the date and event, and it hangs in the auditorium of this church, off the sanctuary.  I spent some time looking at it during the dinner reception for the new pastor.  I thought about so many things in my life, where I am part of something greater, and that each person’s contribution no matter how big or small is pretty critical to the whole, my guilds, my family, my neighborhood, my weaving community, even the classes I teach, and I even thought of it this afternoon, when I went down to Morristown for my recorder ensemble rehearsal.  Here it is even more obvious when someone is missing from the group.  There are two sopranos, two altos, two tenors, and two basses.  If one of them is missing, the music is somehow not complete.

I like that about life.  I like to think that everyone has something to contribute, and that everyone’s contribution is important.  And without someone, there would be a hole in the cloth.  Life is about teamwork.  And getting along.  And holding together in the darkest of times, and the best of times, and all those normal average times in between.

So I went to church today, and I saw a lot of old friends, and I thought a lot about what I do, and my contribution to the “cloth” no matter how big or small.  I’m glad I went, it was good to get away from the computer, and my studio, and just be with people, and I think for now, I’ll go again.

A Quiet Saturday

I spent the day mostly at my desk, working on the next gallery page for my site.  The house was quiet, the men are away skiing in Vermont, and my daughter spent the day working in a kennel.  She loves the dogs, and caring for them, and always comes home quite in need of a shower!  I drove her tonight to her friend’s house in a neighboring county, where she will spend the night.

couchingSo I’m alone tonight, and after I finished fine tuning the collar/facing piece, and getting it and the hem all basted in, I spent some time couching the lime green floss around the collar/facing edges.  This is a bit tricky, I loosened the tension on the upper thread, and loosened the tension on the presser foot, which helped keep the couching from compressing and skewing the collar as I sewed around it.  I had to first pre-thread the floss using a tapestry needle,  up the front, through thelapel underside of the collar at the start of the fold line, since couching is one sided, around the collar, and back through to the underside of the collar, continuing down the other front.  That way when I put the special cording foot on the machine, I could break the zig zag stitching when I had to switch sides, but not the floss.

I took my hand sewing kit, and curled up in front of a pre-recorded episode of PBS’s Great jacket2Performances, King Lear starring Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Obviously it was an unbelievable performance, and I was able to get all the hand sewing finished, the hem, the facings, and the backs of the buttonholes.  The sleeves are next.

It Worked!

I’m so excited, and pretty embarrassed that I finally figured this out after only three months of blogging.  Thanks Tien!  I love you!  Actually, Tien’s suggestion on how to get the pictures clickable and still remain rectangular wasn’t exactly the whole problem.  I had actually found that setting last week, and thinking it would fix the problem, was disappointed it didn’t.  But after talking with Tien, I realized that there had to be a way, she did it in WordPress, why can’t I, and lo’ and behold, I merely had to click on the image URL to give it the link suddenly, I’m cooking with gas!

So being the naturally obsessive compulsive person I am, I stayed up until 11:30 pm, going back through the blogs, and I’ve clicked on the image URL’s all the way back to the beginning of the month, and now all the little images should become big screenfilling images when you click on them!  So I only have to fix February, January, and December, plus work on the website, plus finish the jacket plus go to sleep sometime…….

Oh, and if you get HBO, don’t forget that Alexander McCall Smith’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency series starts Sunday night at 8pm, starring Jill Scott.  It got rave reviews in our paper.