Daryl's Blog

Last night I went to the theater.  My husband and I have had subscription seats to the Papermill Playhouse, a wonderful theater in Millburn, NJ, for more than 25 years.  We have seen an amazing variety of shows, all first rate, some even better than when we saw the show on Broadway.  I cannot tell you how much I look forward to going to the theater six times a year at the Papermill, and then there is the requisite high school production, and since my son is a Musical Theater major at County College of Morris, we enjoy shows there as well.  He had one of the male leads in this fall’s production of Hair.

Anyway, last night was the perfect January production, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Lynn Redgrave.  It was a wonderful production, the timeless and hilarity of an Oscar Wilde production is welcome anytime, but especially in a cold snowy January. The costumes and sets were exquisite.  Like a good book, theatre can take you away and make you laugh and sing, and teach you something, an make you take a different look at the world around you.  There was a wonderful quote from Oscar Wilde written in the Playbill,

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”

And now for an update on Project Three. I know I skipped over project two.  If you go way back to the archives for this blog (you don’t have to go that far back, I only started this in December) you will see the description for the fabric I called Leaves and Berries, in Project Three.  I have a deadline to meet, this one for entry in the fashion show for the Surface Design Conference in May in Kansas City.  I had two garments in the show in 2007, and I’d love to have another one or two in this year’s fashion show.  The deadline is February 1st.  There is nothing like a deadline to kick you into overdrive, and make you focus on the task at hand.  It is when I am at my best, and can really hyperfocus.  I will do a photoshoot right before the deadline, and photograph the dress from project one, which is almost finished except for some thread loops for the hooks at the center back.  And I am hoping to get another “wow” piece that will photograph well as you can enter up to three garments.

So I looked at the projects I’ve lined up, and picked the Leaves and Berries Fabric.  Since this is a Surface Design Conference, I wanted to use the fabric that had the most  surface interest, and this one fit the bill.  I want a simple coat, one that doesn’t have a lot going on as far as design, this is a very busy fabric, and very linear, and I wanted to show that off.  I found a Burda pattern that roughly had some of the lines I liked when I draped the fabric on the dressform, and an interesting sleeve treatment with a gusset under the arm.  There is topstitching called for, and I have some of the leftover dyed warps I want to play with, making a twist ply rope to potentially couch down the areas that call for topstitching.

I played around with draping the fabric on my form.  I tried a shawl collar, and I liked the stand up collar better, and the unbroken front, with large black buttons, or dark green, depending on what I can find at Acme Fabrics.  Because the fabric is wider than I normally weave, I have a chance of getting a full front or a full back out of a width of cloth, maybe piecing at the selvedges to squeak out a bit more width for the sleeve.  I drew what I thought it would look like, and then made up the pattern.  I sewed the half pattern  together with machine basting, and tried it on.  The coat looked good to me, now to make a quick muslin with both halves.

My husband left tonight for another trip to Mumbai.  He will be gone for about two weeks, so I’ll be able to really hunker down and focus on this coat.  Stay tuned…

About 20 years ago, I studied yoga on a regular basis.  I was able to do a headstand effortlessly.  I did yoga through the pregnancy and birth of my first child, and after the birth of my second child, life seemed to take a detour, and that extra night out of the week to attend a yoga class, just stopped happening.  Years went by.  I attempted to return to yoga about 5 years ago, after my body had been ravaged by a mastectomy and chemotherapy.  I was weak, no muscle tone, 30 pounds heavier, and a lot older.  I found a couple of different teachers, and slowly struggled to get back some of the muscle tone and stamina I had before the cancer.  And last week, in my yoga class, I did for the first time in about 15 years, a headstand.  It was the most wonderful feeling to have conquered the years of distress my body suffered from age, cancer, raising children, and I felt like I could climb a mountain.  Actually I felt like I had climbed a mountain.  Those little personal triumphs are what make us want to wake up each morning and dive into the day.

Weaving is like that.  That’s why I love show and tell at a guild meeting.  Each time a member shows something they have done, it is like they climbed their own personal mountain.  Weaving is a challenging lifelong commitment to learning, struggling, working through, and ultimately having those incredibly personal triumphs that no one else can understand, and no one else needs to.  Because you have done something that you never thought you could do.

Around this time last year, I was knee deep in panic mode.  I had been asked to be part of the Runway Challenge  project for the HGA Convergence Fashion Show in Tampa, which took place last June.  The project involved three pairs of designers, each consisted of a weaver, and someone from the sewing/surface design field.  We were given yarn, dyed in the carnival like Florida colors, and we had one year to work with our partner, on a collaborative ensemble for the runway.  Each team would produce a “look”, and the garments would be modeled as the highlight of the Tampa fashion show.

My partner, Loretta Dian Phipps,  was an energetic surface designer, beader, and felter from Texas, whom I’d never met.  We embarked on something that I still can’t believe we actually pulled off.  It was probably the highlight of my textile career to date.  I’ve never worked so hard, or stretched so much, or reached beyond what I ever thought was possible.

We had to keep an extensive journal, and I just spent the last couple months, creating a digital slide presentation on the entire year long process.  It was a long beautiful journey, and never having worked on a collaborative project before I found it frustrating, wonderful, scary, nail biting, glorious, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

I sat down to create the presentation of the year long project, partly because my guild asked me to, and partly because I wanted to remember it in a cohesive succinct way, and pull all the piece parts together, so I could sort of “scrapbook” the whole process.  So, 81 slides later, I’m just doing the final text edits, and spell checks, and text formatting, but the presentation is done.  So I spent the last couple of months reliving the whole year, and enjoying every minute of my very personal mountain climb.

I’d love to be able to offer the presention CD, for a modest price, to guilds, for them to walk through and learn from our journey.  First I have to clear this with the HGA, after all it was their idea, and then see how it reads with my guild.  I’ve never offered one of my lectures without me before, just the slide presentation, and this would be the project to do it with. Stay tuned…

So this brings us to Project Six.  Was anyone who has followed this blog since the beginning counting?  Were you wondering where project six was?  Well, Project six is what to do with the leftover fabric from the coat, I have a good hunk left, and I’d love to be able to wear it and remember my struggle and triumph, and I know I’d get to relive it all again as I sewed this into something wonderful.

Wow, what a difference a few grainlines make.  I totally re-did the back of the dress, paralleling the zipper and the selvedge.  I took additional darts, at the side seams, and adding a second one on either side of the center back.

One of the real problems of the original dress, was the zipper.  I was afraid that the pleated fabric of the bodice was too thick to have an invisible zipper, yet I didn’t want any machine sewing to be visible, so a centered zipper, even hand-picked, wouldn’t have worked.  And I was right.  So I changed to a shorter invisible zipper for the skirt part of the back, and I’m in the process of engineering a hook and eye system for the bodice, so the pleating will just meet.  Right now, for the photo, there are a couple of pins strategically placed!

So for now I have to clean up the tacks, do lots and lots of handsewing.  The v-neckline is actually on the selvedge, so I could just easily tack it down without worrying about a facing and added bulk.  It is great to take advantage of selvedges on handwoven fabric whenever possible.

Meanwhile, I spent the better part of the day doing a Digital Classroom Photoshop CS4 tutorial.  A number of years ago, I went back to school to learn the basics of digital photography, my 18 year old son was just a toddler.  I have a degree in fine arts from the 1970’s, with a concentration in textiles and photography, but that was black and white film photography, digital hadn’t come into existence yet.  When I went to the community college for the class, they handed us one of the Classroom in a Book series for Photoshop, and it was wonderful to sit and go through the book, doing the exercises, step by step, at my own pace.  There were approximately the same number of weeks in the semester as there were chapters.

Many years later, and many upgrades later, my well worn and obsolete Photoshop Classroom in a Book manual got replaced.  So I’m about half through the new book, and then will start on the Digital Classroom Manual for Dreamweaver for web development.  I have used the old Microsoft Front Page for my website work, it is so old it is not supported any longer by Microsoft, and my website looks like it was created in Front Page.  So now I have the industry standard, and a huge learning curve in front of me.  But I love to learn new things, and so each day I do another chapter and plow my way through.  I volunteered to take over the Frances Irwin Handweavers Guild website, and promised to rework it when I learn this new software.  And I did something I may really regret later on, I agreed to give a seminar in web development for the Michigan Handweavers Conference in August, as a companion to my popular seminar in Photographing your Work, and as of this writing, I haven’t begun to develop it…  Talk about putting the cart before the horse….  Stay tuned…

Even though I travel around the country and lecture and give workshops to handweaving guilds, up until about two years ago, I hadn’t actually joined one myself.  Way back in the late 70’s when I first learned to weave, I did belong to the Palisades Guild in Northern NJ, but once I became a professional weaver, selling my work in craft fairs, I didn’t really see how a guild would benefit me, and how I could even take the time.  Once I started to teach, giving up the craft fair circuit in 1989, I still hesitated to begin a relationship with a guild, even though I knew many of the members from conferences and from lectures I’d given.  How sad for me…

In 2006 when my fiber mentor mother-in-law Margaret Lancaster died, at age 99 (you can read about our fiber relationship on my website, look at the story called Circle of Threads), I felt like I had lost my fiber family, and as I traveled around, I felt jealous of guild members that had made the guild their family, the members watched out for each other, and when one died, the guild stepped in and absorbed their stash, keeping the fibers productive and the memory of the handweaver alive.

So I decided, 24 hours after the death of my mother in law, to attend a guild meeting as a member.  I confused some of the members there when I showed up, they thought they might have booked me to speak and not remembered.  But then they opened up their arms and welcomed me, and made me one of them and I have loved every meeting I have attended.  I’m now a member of two guilds, one that meets in the evening, and one that meets on a Monday during the day.  The meetings are well attended, by a variety of fiber enthusiasts, not all of them handweavers, some young and inexperienced (like my 16 year old daughter) and some very old, and whenever they manage to get to a meeting it is a cause for celebration.

Today was the January meeting of the Frances Irwin Handweaving Guild.  There are some amazingly talented handweavers, fiber enthusiasts, and sewers in the group, and I feel blessed to be able to bring a project to them and have some real feedback.  I love show and tell, it is my favorite part of the meeting.  I learn so much.  Even the most beginning projects, I learn from and I love the encouragement given to members who show their work.

So I put on my dress, even though not all of the handwork was finished, and there were still tailor’s tacks everywhere, and modeled it for the group.  Many of them were following the blog, and were thrilled to be the first ones to see the dress.  Everyone ohhhh’d and ahhhhh’d until I turned around.  I could tell something was wrong.  One of the difficulties of sewing a garment for yourself is not being able to really see behind you.  I had Sally, one of the members, take a photo of me in the dress, and when I checked the images to see if I was happy with them, I was rather shocked.  I called over another member Margriet, may I say an exceptional weaver and sewer, and asked if my butt looked like the beachball that it did in the photo?  She admitted that it did, and we discussed the problem, which was basically the angle of the grainlines as they moved in on the bias line towards the bodice.  I looked like I stuck a gargantuan pear into the back of the dress.  So we talked about the fix, and I felt much better, ready to take the dress apart in the back, and rework the skirt under the bodice.  I need to straighten out the skirt grainlines in the center back, and take small darts around to the side.

So what went wrong?  Two things, one, the muslin fabric was a solid, not a stripe, so I couldn’t have foreseen this effect, and two, the drapey rayon fabric grew a lot as I sewed and pressed it, not unusual for a handwoven, and to get this to fit my narrow back snuggly, I had to take in about four inches in the upper back, changing the angle of the grainlines.  So stay tuned to see how this all turns out, I will make an attempt to fix this, and do another quick photo shoot.  Meanwhile thanks to all the Frances Irwin Members who had the guts to tell me when what I did wasn’t so great!

PS, you may want to check out the comment from Fran in the previous post.  Fran asked for me to comment on how I accomplish so much, as a new weaver, Fran found it hard to get to the loom, life kept getting in the way.  See what I shared, and please feel free to add your thoughts on how you find time to weave during your busy day.