Daryl's Blog

In all of my joyous exuberance of having space and time to actually start making stuff in my studio, I dove in head first and started a whole bunch of projects all at the same time.  Which might in certain cases be a recipe for disaster if one were to be distracted by said multiple projects but I of course am a professional.  I’ve been doing this for 40+ years.  I am not doing anything I haven’t done before, a million times.  Really.  Hahahahah!

So each thing I tried to do, well you can imagine…

At least the dye pots produced some new and fun colors.  Though I was going for a nice yellow.  Don’t ask.  I know what yellow is, I have yellow dye, but using Dharma’s Deep Yellow, a new color for me, I ended up with the orange.  At least it is a pretty orange.

I wound my warp with the Harrisville Singles and ancient Maypole Nehalem worsted from my stash.  I counted perfectly.  I knew exactly how many ends I had to work with.  So you can imagine my shock when I was completely sleyed, yes I warp front to back, and had two inches left over of the Harrisville Singles.  Two inches.  Not two ends.  Two whole inches.  What an idiot.  I love though, that mistakes in fiber are for the most part fixable, since it is just fiber.  You can always rip it out.  Or toss it aside in this case.

I threaded the warp pretty quickly, though I was smart and precounted the heddles and yes, there was a bit of moving around.  (Apologies to the readers who are not weavers, this will make no sense, just trust me that my errors were stupid basic beginner errors and enjoy that even the most experienced of us can screw up.)

I beamed onto the back and tied onto the front and then carefully wound all my pirns, numbered in order of one skein of Noro for the weft.  This is important because Noro has a color repeat throughout the skein and the pirns have to be wound in order and then used in reverse order.

I tied up my treadles, using the little treadle tie up diagram in my Davison, the green book.  You know the one.  From the 30’s.  The one that is designed for sinking shed looms.  And of course I have a rising shed jack loom.  Yeah, that one.  I’ve known for 40 years that Davison is a sinking shed book of drafts.  No problem, just reverse the tie up.  Everyone knows that.  I’m guessing you, dear reader can already see where I’m going with this.

I start weaving and it just isn’t looking right.  I’m looking at it from the left, and from the right and about three inches in I realize, head smack, duh, I tied the treadles as instructed which means I’m weaving upside down.  I could have left it but I wanted to see the right side.  I’m like that.  No problem to reverse the tie up, I was only three inches in.  I continue weaving and am now about 6 inches in and am satisfied at how it will look, and pack up everything for the night.  Which meant gathering the remaining pirns and putting them decoratively by the loom.  I glance at the numbered ends and see number five in my hand.  Number five in my hand.  Not in the shuttle.  Number five was the last one I wound.  It should have been the first one I started to weave with.  I looked in the shuttle and sure enough, there was number one.  What an incredibly stupid mistake.  It will now throw off the entire color gradation of the ball. 

It was after 10, and my intent was to go to bed.  But I knew this was messed up and I didn’t want to face coming back to it later the next day.  When I was a kid, learning to sew, I remember that when I made some critical error, I refused to stop until I had corrected it.  I’m like that.  So I carefully unpicked more than six inches of weft, singles weft, in sticky singles warp.  What a bi**h…

At 12:30 am I had unwoven everything, the weft shredded badly toward the end, but I don’t think I lost too much.  I had to figure out how to carefully wind it back onto the pirn so it would fit, which took another 15 minutes.

Saturday morning I rewove the six inches, emptied pirn number five, and started in on pirn number four.  And I used the inverted treadling sequence.  And I like what I have.  

Meanwhile, I laid out a new scarf run, based on an old color forecast I wrote for Handwoven Magazine, something called Feminine and Serene.  It was a pretty combo, and I began pulling the colors for it.  I love this part, I find stuff I didn’t remember I’d had, use odd bits I’ve saved in bins, combine colors and textures I wouldn’t have thought of, but first all the skeins have to be balled. 

My trusty studio assistant Cynthia came up Saturday morning to finish winding all the balls while I started winding the warp. I had half the twelve yard warp finished by lunch.

I wound the second half by late afternoon.

Sunday morning I thought I’d get started tying in to the previous warp.  When I finish a scarf run, I re-sley the warp ends, three per dent in a divided reed, so all the ends beam individually even though there are three or more threads per dent.  Of course I’m a pro at this, and trust that I don’t make mistakes.

I started tying in the new warp, and something just wasn’t right.  The numbers weren’t working out.  And know that this warp is not random, it is carefully calibrated Fibonacci numbered stripes of twill and plain weave with supplemental warps.  I sell the draft in my eShop, it is called Gradient Scarves.  

It took me almost a quarter of the tie in to figure out that I wound the warp backwards.  Talk about a head smack.  How the heck did I do that, I must have wound a hundred of these warps over the years.  What a stupid mistake.  So I carefully clipped each thread I’d tied on and reversed the warp and reconnected to the other side.  I had fixed that and was well on my way when I noticed that again, the numbers weren’t working out.  After more head scratching and gnashing of teeth, I realized that back when I originally sleyed the warp, after finishing the last run, I had somehow dropped two ends, which were apparently never there to begin with.  I double up and eventually added the two threads back in and then fixed the reed after it was beamed.  

And finally, I started to weave.  So I have two looms filled with long warps and they will be waiting for me when I return from California.  I have a third warp possibility sitting on my cutting table.

The real issue is why I’m making such stupid basic mistakes.  Yes, I’m distracted by a number of things involving people I love that I can do nothing about but still haunt me.  Yes, I’m trying to do too many things at once.  Yes, I haven’t put a warp on the loom in a very long time and I don’t count the half dozen warps I just put on for the 16 page Doup Leno Article I just wrote for Heddlecraft.

The really important thing here, is that in fiber, almost everything can be corrected.  Mistakes are just silly and can be ripped out for the most part and reworked.  I tell my students, about to cut into their handwoven fabric, that pretty much nothing they do in my class will cause anyone to die.  It is just fiber.  And so, in all my distractedness, I stayed with all the mistakes and saw them through to the end and it gave me just a little bit of hope.  Because really, most of life we cannot change and I am always so very grateful when it is something I have control over, like unweaving six inches of pattern out of wool singles, this I can do.  Painfully, but I can do this.  I can’t fix the issues with my children, or my town or my country, or the world, or the stupid weather, but I can fix my errors on the loom.  It is the little things…

Stay tuned…

It is a new year, and there isn’t enough popcorn and Dramamine to keep me sane, (Popcorn for the political entertainment, both national and local, NJ is always one for the front page, and Dramamine for the severe ups and downs of the stock market, I’m a bit nauseous with the whole thing).  So what’s a stressed out 60 something year old to do?  Fiber of course.  And not the edible kind.  I am grateful every day for the ability to get up in the morning, tend to the animals and breakfast, read the paper and then bury myself in stuff related to the execution of interlacing soft colorful chaotic elements into some kind of controlled thing of beauty.   That’s what I’m telling myself anyway…

My holiday celebration was lovely.  With my husband gone, my children and I have had to find new ways of celebrating family events, and we drove to Maryland to visit my mom, who is still alive at 87, and my sisters.  They are my rock and I can’t imagine life without them.  My New Year’s Eve/Day was spent quiet, and alone and I couldn’t have been happier.  I was in bed by 10pm.  This was a good thing…  Though I will say there was lots of nostalgia of past New Year’s Eve’s, spent with a group of friends, remembering days when my husband was alive and how life was in our earlier years.

I really never make resolutions, though this year I’ve seriously rethought that concept.  And you will laugh, because though I like my life in general, in spite of the complete chaos I tend to find myself in, especially with two dogs and a cat and two 20 something children living at home, there are lots of things I’m missing out on because well, there are too many cool things to do in life and not enough hours.  Take the movies for instance.  The day after Christmas, I drove home from Maryland, unpacked and decided that I really wanted to see Mary Poppins, and I wasn’t going to wait around to find someone to go with me, because I’m perfectly capable of seeing it myself.  I took my little self to the movie theater, which I haven’t done in years, bought my $7.99 senior discount ticket, that had an assigned seat, who knew, and entered the theater and OMG, they have heated recliners for optimum viewing and that was just the best two hours I’ve spent in a long time.  I grew up with Mary Poppins.  Between that and the Sound of Music, I knew all the words and the dialogue in between, and sitting there in my heated barcalounger recliner watching the silhouette of Mary Poppins descending from the clouds holding on to a tattered kite, I burst into tears.  I’m not kidding.  The music isn’t memorable, but the story is sweet, and needed in this day and age, and the nostalgia and dancing and Lin Manuel Miranda, and Emily Blunt are just perfect for their roles.  But the costumes.  There is a plaid short handwoven jacket on Jane, you remember Jane Banks, all grown up now, a social activist, that I wanted to scream out, stop the film, I want to get a close up of that jacket.  

I found this image on Popsugar.com.  I’m sure it is copyrighted, but hopefully they will forgive me…

Anyway, the point here is I never go to the movies, nor do I watch television.  Really.  Except for Project Runway, which has gone through all sorts of turmoil after 16 seasons, I have never seen Game of Thrones, only watched two episodes of the Crown, only saw the first season of Outlander, though I’ve read all the books twice,  only saw one charming episode of the Durrel’s in Corfu, haven’t seen Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, you get the picture.  So I vowed, to actually occasionally watch something on Television, or Netflix or Amazon Prime, on my little tablet, tucked in bed because well, people do that.  And like it.  I will say in my defense, that most respectable fiber enthusiasts knit or spin while they are watching, but I need to read the closed captioning to understand what the actors are saying, especially with British dramas, so I can’t multi task.  I’ve now watched 5 episodes of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and just the costumes alone are totally worth it.  When she showed up in court to answer to lewd behavior charges dressed in Jacques Fath, I nearly slobbered on the screen.  Oh and thanks to a dear friend, I found out that there is another Project Runway All Stars, which started Wednesday, on Lifetime, probably the last since the franchise is moving back to Bravo network, hosted by Karlie Kloss and Christian Siriano as the mentor.  Heidi and Tim are starting their own fashion show on Amazon Prime…

The drama at chez Daryl never ends.  January 3rd was a pretty hard day for me, because I took my daughter to the airport at 2:30am to catch a flight to Miami for a Star Trek cruise to the Caribbean, which is all fine, but the ensuing dram of arriving in Miami without her bags, was just a bit much, and at 9:30pm I drove my son to the armory where he will do his 10 days of winter artillery training and then deploy for another year to the middle east.  He is a Sergeant now, responsible for a number of troops, so much different than the first time he deployed, where he was just a Private and people watched out for him.  These are tough unstable times and of course I’m afraid.  Meanwhile, he has lived in my basement since he was 15 years old, and now, turning 29, it is time to move on.  So the frantic packing and cleaning out of his home for his entire life, you don’t even want to know, began just before Christmas, and when he returns a year from now, all of his stuff will be in storage, my daughter will take her turn as a bottom basement dweller, and hopefully move some of her many looms and equipment out of my studio so I can work in there again.  That’s the plan anyway.  So with both of them gone, I hired a crew, spent an exhausting day packing up what my son didn’t get to, and we will move everything of my son’s to a storage unit tomorrow morning (it was pouring rain today, of course) and my painter is already starting to prep the walls and floor. Hopefully when Brianna comes home next weekend, she can start the process of moving herself, her incredible amount of belongings and her cat to the basement.  There isn’t enough alcohol to get me through this…  I wish for my son a safe return home, for him and his unit, and I will do my best to keep his Jeep safe and running, and his belongings safe and stored, and the rest is completely out of my hands.

So the shining light in all of this is the fact that I’m knee deep in a very intense article, which keeps me centered on what defines me, which is definitely not all this swirling chaos.  I’m writing an article on a weaving structure I played around with many many years ago, at the start of my career.  The structure is called Doup Leno  and I’m writing the article for Heddlecraft Magazine. If you are a handweaver you should be a subscriber.  It is a fantastic publication, no advertising, available as a PDF download only, and it does not contain any projects.  There are other publications for that.  Instead, Heddlecraft will explore a structure in depth, and it will be one of those publications that one refers back to time and time again, the images of the samples are clear, the drafts are all given in WIF files to dump into whatever weaving software you use, and for the $19.99 a year, it should be in everyone’s tablet or desktop.  

So, I’m writing an article on Doup Leno.  What is that you may ask?  You’ll have to subscribe to the issue  to see how to do it. Maybe the March issue, maybe May, I’m not sure where I am in the line up, but I learned this technique really really early on in my career, taught to me by a fabulously technical weaver named Lois Chernin, supported by the only place I’ve ever found it in print, a 1980 Shuttle Craft Guild publication, Monograph Thirty-Two, called Doup Leno by Hella Skowronski and Sylvia Tacker.  

I started weaving “professionally” in 1979.   I started my career weaving for another designer, which taught me speed, efficiency at the loom and that with enough hard work, I could earn a modest living.  I eased into craft fairs, starting with my first booth which held everything I’d ever woven in my life, to show my versatility, and then began the arduous process of narrowing down my focus, which eventually became handwoven clothing.  Armed with this unusual technique of doup leno, which for the curious is a loom controlled system of producing a leno effect, where two or more threads do a half twist and are held in that position by a weft thread, I started out with the obvious, spaced warps held in place by twisted threads.  

I had been asked to create a series of window curtains in a very lacy “leno” style, mixed white warps, for my employers, and after producing the four panels, much to my horrid dismay, I almost quit weaving, I realized one panel was an inch too short.  So on my own dime, I rewove the commission, delivered the four panels of the correct length, and had four left for me, which of course did not fit my windows.  I offered them as shawls, in my early craft booth days, but someone who I’ll forever be grateful for, changed my life forever when they said, “cut a hole in the neck and sew up the sides and people can wear them.”  

And so the rest is history, my first “body” of work was a group of tunics, variations on a theme. 

I did well with these very rectangular garments, but the need to cut and fit, and not produce “one size fits most” garments won out, I am too much of a tailor to put rectangles on people.  So the leno fabrics eventually became stripes of leno contrast in yardage, and then eventually, when I realized that most customers didn’t care about the leno, they wanted fit and color at a price point they could afford, I phased that out as well.

And so Robyn Spady, editor of Heddlecraft asked me to revisit this technique, it is pretty cool, one step of a treadle and the threads twist back and forth, allowing for pretty rapid weaving, and so in the middle of all this swirling drama, and a son who will soon be on his way to the middle east, and a daughter who will soon be moving to the basement once the painter is finished, I’m setting up looms, and sampling and assembling hundreds of technical photos, because this structure is pretty technical, and that my dear readers is what is keeping me sane at the moment.  That and wine and popcorn and dramamine…

Stay tuned…

In December of 2008, I picked my new copy of Handwoven Magazine and read a tech column by Syne Mitchell that talked about setting up a blog.  Here is what I wrote…

I received my latest issue of Handwoven Magazine in the mail yesterday, and found Syne Mitchell’s column Weaving the Web, the title this issue is Blog Your Weaving. Syne gave a number of reasons for creating a Blog, and the idea stuck in my head, so much I didn’t sleep the entire night. I was so tempted to get up and work at 4am, but I held off, and now, with the blog created, I decided this would be a good opportunity to cronical my creative journey with 6 new garments, portions of which have already been started, I’ll outline what I have so far in later blogs, and hopefully inspire someone else to just jump in head first and create with what’s at hand.

Apparently I had an issue with spelling back then, chronicle, not cronical, but hey this is my 786th post and I think I’ve done OK.  I wrote this blog, because I need to remember, to celebrate the ability to add images to journal entries, which I couldn’t do easily in my written journals, and to be able to store and retrieve that information when necessary.  And retrieve it I have, there isn’t a month that goes by that I don’t do a search of my own blog for something I can’t remember or for something I want to show someone.  So thank you dear readers and subscribers, for your patience with all of my technical woes, my life experiences, my misspellings, my occasional rants and my complete exhaustion after 4 or 5 venues in a row.  It has been a word filled 10 years and I hope to keep writing for a long time to come.  Because it is a lot quicker to be creative with words than to thread 4000 ends of hand dyed yarn! (And hopefully I’ll be able to keep doing that too.)

I woke this morning to sad news, like everyone else, that George H Bush had passed.  To be able to say at 94 that I made a difference in the world would be the ultimate goal.  I have enjoyed listening to the eulogies on NPR and other places about what a good person he was.  In this divided country, where civil discourse is a forgotten skill, there seems to be unanimous feelings that he was a good man.  That’s all we can ask of someone.

I am making progress on my towels, a few bobbins a day keeps the joints working anyway.  The Bockens cotton linen is weaving beautifully.  The towels are simple and pretty.

I finished the Herculean task of creating a guide for all the pattern pieces in my nine silhouette envelopes.  This was huge, and each pattern piece, and there were a lot, is now labeled with an identifying number.  I retraced all the missing patterns from the vest pack, someone is still sitting on a full set of my vest pattern, much to my great dismay and I hope that one day it turns up in my mail with a big Oops!  It is the grading schematic that I most care about, it took me 35 years to develop it and I’m not happy that it is floating around out there.  I will be testing the new system next week in Wisconsin, so I’ll report back if it worked!

I’ve been slowly making up the garments I started for demo purposes for the Threads Video series I shot in October.  They should air in the spring, but I used demos that I could eventually turn into actual garments, one of which was a tunic from my patterns, so I could demo the application of tricot as a seam finish.  In viewing some of the Threads Insider videos available by subscription, and there are some fantastic ones in the collection, I came across one by Louise Cutting.  It showed how to convert a button placket down a shirt, into one that had in seam buttonholes instead of machine made buttonholes.  I thought that I might be able to actually use that technique, and adapt it for my tunic pattern.  Her method didn’t really work for what I wanted, but I used the concept and came up with my own version.  

Then came the hard part, illustrating it.  So five pages later, 15 illustrations later, I have directions.  I’ve already printed the direction books for Wisconsin, so this will have to be an addendum, but they will eventually be part of the Tunic handout, which will eventually be available for free in my eStore.  Be patient…  I want to do a little more proofing…

This is a season of celebrations, of all kinds.  I’m totally into simple, my life is complicated enough, my to do list never seems to thin out, and suddenly it is year end and I’m putting to bed another business year and all that went with it.  We had a simple Thanksgiving.  My son works retail, and my daughter works in the medical field, neither industry takes off for holiday’s such as Thanksgiving.  So I stayed close to home, until they have their own families to celebrate with, we had a simple feast, my daughter cooked, and my son came home from retail hell long enough to toss some Norwegian Salmon in a cast iron skillet and blacken it.  My trusty office assistant and dear friend Cynthia came to dinner and I did absolutely no cooking.  I was responsible for the clean up, which I did all day long and it was nice to bond with my kids, standing at the sink watching them be adults.  And we are still eating that tart, a raspberry almond paste confection…  OMG!

Last Saturday I drove to south Jersey to where I grew up for my 45th High School reunion.  I will say that I’ve been to every reunion, they have been regularly every 5 years, and it isn’t about High School anymore.  It has been a joy over the years to make new relationships with people from a common past, to talk with and gather with classmates whom I didn’t have a relationship with in High School, for whatever reason.  Most are retired now, caught between children who can’t or won’t launch and aging parents where there are no good long term solutions in how to care for them.  My children are in their 20’s still and my mom is in her late 80’s.  I get this.  The fun part of this story though, was stopping to visit and ultimately stay with my sister on my way to the reunion.  She wanted to see the dress and asked about what I was wearing on my feet, jewelry choices etc.  The dress you may recall, was purchased, a rare thing for me, at a Scandinavian Shop where we stopped for lunch in Door County Wisconsin on the way back to the airport after my week teaching at Sievers.  It is an Icelandic Merino knit dress, and I fell in love at first site in the gift shop waiting for my lunch table.

I don’t have much in the way of footwear.  My go to is booties and tights, and I buy expensive ones that last years.  I don’t think I’ve been in a shoe store in a long time.  My sister took one look at my choice and said, “Absolutely not!  Just no…”  It was pretty funny.  Since her footwear was way too small for me, and I had nothing else, she took me out to a local DSW and we settled on a pair of somewhat comfortable, bearable for the night low heels for $39.99 and then we had to hit the CVS to find a pair of stockings.  I haven’t bought stockings in years, because no one wears them anymore, and it was too cold and rainy to go bare legged…  Once I was dressed she looked at my jewelry choice, rolled her eyes and pulled out her own jewelry box and proceeded to drape about 10 pounds of metal on me.  It was one of the best sister bondings we have ever had, and though I think I would have looked fine with my original plan, I loved that she made this work, and I felt a little more fresh and current and I had an amazingly wonderful time at the reunion.  I danced and danced, and realized that sadly this was my first one without my late husband, and there were a number of newly widowed classmates as well, and I just danced and danced, with no one in particular because I discovered I could still do that.  Even in my little DSW heels.

Remember to keep dancing.  It does the soul good.  Along with weaving and a good nap on the couch.

Stay tuned…