There’s a knot for that…

Dearest readers, I’m back from the Pacific Northwest, exhausted, crazy busy, and picking up the speaker for the Jockey Hollow Guild meeting at the airport in just a few short hours, for another three day workshop in weaving.  I have so much to tell, so much joy and hard work, so worth it, but alas, no time to tell it all in…

Meanwhile, during my 3 mile walk this morning with my trusty office assistant and walking partner, I mentioned my poor wind chimes.  Another casualty of the wicked winter from hell and actually, just age.  My late husband gifted me these beautiful Mongolian wind chimes perfectly tuned and the sound is just magical.  They stopped chiming, and I discovered that the wind catcher thing that hangs from the clapper thing that makes the tubes chime had blown off and landed about 100 feet away in some bush, which I accidentally found during yard clean up a couple weeks ago.  With the lovely weather I really miss my wind chimes.  I had just tried to tie it back on, but alas, all the cords had rotted away, and the next wind storm we get, I’ll have a pile of tubes sitting in the pond.  The chimes hang off the balcony outside my bedroom, basically right over the pond.  

Anyway, my assistant came up to the studio for work, and we took a look at the situation.  She said she had a tube of black nylon cord that could work, and scampered home to get it.  Have I mentioned she lives 484 steps from my house?  

I brought in the chimes, and proceeded to discreetly mark the tubes, take accurate measurements of how far they suspend, trace the root of the seven cords, for six tubes and the center clapper.  I made drawings.  The problem was, each cord started attached to the center welded pin down the middle of the tube.  I had no idea how we were going to manage that.  

Cynthia looked down the tube and looked at me and said, I think that’s a hangman’s noose knot.  REALLY?

She tried it out on a peg from my warping wheel, and after a couple of tries, figured it out.  We dropped the cord down the tube with a fishing weight, turned the tube over and then dropped the weight back up the tube so the cord would loop over the welded bar in the middle of the tube.  Then she made this hangman’s noose knot. She pulled the long end and the knot slipped right down the tube in place.  I have no idea how she knew how to do this knot, something about making 5000 rosaries for a Catholic organization she once worked for, my eyes crossed and I just thought the whole thing hysterical.  We carefully worked together, figuring out each step and each knot as we reassembled the chimes.  We got it outside and hung it up and I wanted to cry.  My beautiful wind chimes started singing again, and I could have hugged her.  I actually think I did.  Bosses aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing, but she made me so happy.  Who knew?  A hangman’s noose knot, from a Catholic rosary, for Mongolian chimes…

Stay tuned, there is so much to tell!

Leaving On A Jet Plane…

I came in my studio one day last week, and my assistant Cynthia was listening to a John Denver song, clearly coming out of my Echo Dot.  I asked what station she was playing and she said she had created a John Denver station on my Pandora.  We listened and laughed and sang along at the top of our lungs…  Of course, Leaving on a Jet Plane came up in the rotation.  I remembered many of the harmonies.  What fun.

Meanwhile, I’m actually leaving on a jet plane, Saturday morning, Brianna, weaver Sally Orgren from my guild, and me, we are all heading to Seattle, and then to Whidbey Island to take a weeklong advanced weaving class with Madelyn van der Hoogt.  I booked this at the end of last summer, actually right after MidWest conference, because, life is short, and none of us knows what tomorrow will bring, but I wanted my daughter to have a chance to study with Madelyn and well, I wanted to too.  Though I’m not that interested in complex structures, you sure couldn’t tell from what came out of my studio this week…

I’m on a roll.  As fast as I make something, I’m thinking about the next thing.  And oddly enough, there seems to be time to do it.  Life is beginning to run like a well oiled machine, thanks to so many people who are working behind the scenes, like Cynthia, and my handyman Rick, and the pond guys, and the plumber guys, who have done wonders cleaning up my exterior and trying to salvage the ponds and the exterior plumbing from the winter from hell.  All the pumps, outdoor lines and filters had to be replaced.  We discovered that a patch in the pond, I didn’t know it was there to begin with, failed and one of the ponds was leaking, the one where the fish survived, so they were transferred to the second pond, and everything is up and running but the pond level is very low until they can patch, but the weather has to be above 70 degrees.  Hahahahahahahah!

The website, web shop, blog, hosting company, all seems to be running well and efficiently, and super fast.  With no effort from me except a lot of money.  Isn’t that always the case…

So I get to go to the studio and make stuff.  I am so happy.  Really, this is what the goal was and now I’m there.  I start traveling heavy duty in another month, but for now, I have two back to back workshops that I’m actually taking, the other with my guild with Heather Winslow, warps are on the loom and I’m ready for that, which happens three days after I return from Whidbey Island.  

So back in June 2010, my guild did an exchange, called Potpourri, where everyone the previous fall put yarns in a brown bag and sealed it.  Brown bags were exchanged and the idea was you had to weave something with the yarns in the bag for the person whose yarns they were.  You can read the blog post about the exchange here.  

Back in April of 2010, I actually began to figure out what to do with this…  These were the yarns Sherrie had put in her bag and I had to weave something out of it.  That’s a very large cone of fine pink kid mohair.  The other two cones are unmercerized cotton.  ?!?!?!?!?

Here is the post where I figured it all out, after counting out the 100 yards of the pretty knitting yarn and knowing I wanted to highlight it.   This is the actual draft I made up. 

I have to say that I was pretty freaking proud of this, it was really out of my wheelhouse and I’m not a complex kind of person, but I figured out how to do what I did with what I had to work with and well, I patted myself on the back.  When I presented Sherrie with the yardage at the meeting in June, she didn’t seem really enthusiastic, I reread my blog post and I think her words were something like, “How Couture.”  

Many years later she came to a meeting with the bolt of fabric and said, she was cleaning things out, came across the yardage and really didn’t know what to do with it and did I want it back!  Well heck yes!  I felt bad that she really didn’t respond to it, maybe the color, size of the motifs, whatever, she is rather petite, but I stuck it on my shelf and it sat for another couple of years…

Until last week.  Bottom line is I looked at the patterns I developed for classes, played around to see what fit on the yardage, and to my complete surprise and delight, the front couple yards and back couple yards matched exactly and I was able to do this.

Getting weft patterning to line up is really really hard, and I can’t believe how effortlessly it matched.  I was not able to match the shoulders, so I added linen epaulets.  The shawl collar/band would not match up, so I got the idea to cut it on the bias.  The linen/rayon I had on my shelf warmed up the pink and created a nice detail and gave me the extra fabric I’d need to make this work.  It is my walking vest pattern, with the armhole from my Daryl Jacket C pattern, with side seam pockets and a shawl collar. 

I could not find any buttons that would work, so when all else fails, cover your own.

I finished it up last night and pulled another piece of handwoven cloth off the shelf, this one from a Diane Totten workshop on Crimp cloth.  I have a plan, and can’t wait to dive into this.  

Meanwhile, I want to give my assistant something to do while I’m gone, so I went back into the archives to the binder that has all the yarn wrapped cards from the years I wrote the color forecast column for Handwoven Magazine.  They should publish the whole series in an ebook, because there are some great resources and inspiration in there.  But I have the actual wrapped cards that they used for photography.  This one was called Down on the Farm, from the Spring/Summer 2006 forecast, published in the Sept/Oct 2005 issue of Handwoven Magazine.

Together we pulled all the yarns from my shelves that remotely went with the palette, and then from there I finalized my selections and she is busily, as I write, winding all the dyed skeins into pull balls so I can wind a warp when I get back from Seattle.  I can’t wait… 

This will be a run of handwoven scarves, and my stash of scarves is empty, the last one sent as a gift to my daughter’s pediatrician, now adult doctor, who every time Brianna goes to see him asks when he is going to get a handwoven scarf from me.  He has been asking for 25 years.  It was time…  And now I have to weave some more.

I spent the weekend up at Peters Valley school of craft, where Brianna and a team of volunteers from my local weaving guild, refurbished all the looms, I replaced 12 Macomber loom aprons, with Brianna right behind me removing and replacing as I sewed them up.  Everything looks fabulous, and Saturday night, we all went down to the store/gallery on campus for the opening of the show, Act 2: Art as a Career Sequel .   Since Art is my career, I didn’t qualify for the show, but Brianna, my lovely talented daughter who works for a vet hospital during the day, got a piece accepted, only 50 pieces were selected out of more than 600.  I adore the piece, it is from her Gender series, called The Gender Game.  The figures are woven in a summer/winter pattern with porn video tape.  It is a pretty powerful piece. 

And so, life marches on, there are some great things happening in my own little corner of the world, and I try to stay informed as is realistic, but not get too caught up in the rest of the world politics.  Election time will be soon enough.  Otherwise I’d be paralyzed from the helplessness of it all.  Spring is slowly coming, I finally have daffodils peaking out of their little heads, and I have fish swimming happily in the cleaned up ponds.  There is a pile at the curb of junk from the yard, for bulk pick up on Monday, thanks to my handyman Rick, and I’ll be flying off to Seattle to study with Madelyn soon. 

Stay tuned… 

Over the Rainbow…

I did it.  My tech crew and I did it.  This has been an issue for so long I can’t remember when I didn’t have tech issues.  I had a lovely old fashion cry this afternoon, I haven’t done that in a long time.

Last Monday Pair Networks took on the job of moving my sites, both weaversew.com and daryllancaster.com, which are linked, to their hosting services.  I’ve needed to move off the hosting company I had for a long time but couldn’t until all the other items were in place.  Which they finally were.  I’ve been emailing back and forth between my personal tech support and their moving team, trying to figure out what they are talking about when they ask specific questions and very proud of my self when I figured it out and answered them.  All by myself!

Yesterday they had copied all the files from the website, the blog and the store and made up a dummy site that I could check before everything went live.  The website was pretty easy to run through, and the store as well.  There isn’t that much on them.  Links seemed to work, and photos for the most part went where they were supposed to go.  I did find a couple of errors that I never caught initially which I made a note to fix.  I also noted that my prospectuses needed serious updates.  They aren’t incorrect, they just aren’t current.  Add that to the list.  

But the blog.  My lovely life story.  I have almost 800 posts spanning just about 10 years.  There have been 46,000 comments and lots of views.  There is a counter at the bottom of each post to show how many people view a post.  Recent posts always give me a little thrill when the count goes over 1,000.  Which it eventually does.  I have about 600 subscribers, but a lot of people just view my posts on an RSS feed.  Occasionally I’ll get spikes in posts like the one from Cuba, where people share it with friends since it has nothing to do with weaving.  

I clicked on and skimmed over a little less than 800 posts over the last day and a half.  It was gut wrenching when I saw the ones where my husband passed, and the ones where we said goodbye to my son when he went off to boot camp, there is a lot of history there.  I often search my blog when I can’t remember when I did something or what I saw when I was there.  Like last night.  I watched the final episode of Project Runway All Stars, which is the only show I watch on TV, I adore it, and last night was no different.  I was rooting for all three finalists.  But one of the episodes this season took place at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan where the contestants toured an exhibit about Isaac Mizrahi.  I did a head scratch because I went to that exhibit.  It was fantastic.  But that exhibit ran between March and August 2016.  In fact I went to the exhibit 6 weeks after my husband died.  Which means that series of PR All Stars was shot in 2016.  I knew that because I did a blog search and there it was.

Anyway, as I went further back in the blog I started seeing some pretty respectable numbers of page views, most were in the 5,000 range.  I was blown away that anybody cared about what I did back in 2013.  Then I hit a couple that had 70,000 page views!

 

I kept going back and hit this one and nearly collapsed on the floor.  

Yeah, 123,000 pages views.  I’m going to guess that because I had keywords and people did searches that the site popped up.  They might not have actually stuck around and read the post, but for a brief moment let me bask in the love that 123,000 people saw my page.

Note to self, always add keywords to the metadata of each post…

It was almost anticlimactic when I saw this one at only 110,000 views.

 

So the move is finished.  I had my office assistant place a store order and all was working there.  And I got the FTP transfer information from Pair and by myself, all by myself, I changed the settings in Dreamweaver so I can just click on the little “put” arrow and any changes to my web pages and content will actually happen.  The speed was so fast I wasn’t sure anything actually happened.  But it did, and I burst into tears.  I did it.  Kevin, I did it.  I hope you are watching.  You said I’d figure it out, and with a lot of expensive help, I actually did it.  The final test of course is if this blog post gets to all of you, that it loads quickly without timing out, and that you all get your notifications.  The I’ll go off and have a well deserved celebratory glass of wine and pack for a lecture tomorrow in South Jersey. (In fact it did not go as planned, I couldn’t load images, I had to tweak some more things, talk to Pair tech support, and I’m going to try this again…)

Meanwhile…

I finished the jacket I started last week.  All of the handwork is done now, the photo still has pins everywhere.  I love this jacket.  I love the fabric  and can’t wait to weave more.  I searched my blog for a photo of the original yarn when I bought it on Bainbridge Island, WA back in 2016, I had only purchased two skeins, the ones on the left, but the dog ate one of them forcing me to purchase two more at full price from Yarn Barn of Kansas.  I was lucky.  I have four of a different colorway and I can’t wait to warp up a loom to use those skeins.  The yarn is Noro Taiyo Lace.  The warp was a 2 ply shetland, mill end from WEBS.

And I looked longingly at my shelves of stash, which my studio assistant has spent the better part of the last week organizing, refolding fabrics to keep the edges from fading in the light, and generally moving things around.  She pulled the bulky Krokbragd sampler I wove last spring in a Tom Knisley workshop with the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild, and asked me where it should go.  I looked at it, re-looked at it and then did this…

I love this tote.   I love that I have things that make me happy and make me proud and make me just smile because life can be pretty dreary and depressing what with those proverbial handbaskets we are all traveling in and a spring that has seriously failed to launch…  (There was another dusting of snow this morning). All of my outdoor waterlines froze and ruptured over the winter, yes I drained them and blew air through them.  They all still ruptured.  The ponds are in terrible shape, the pumps are shot and if they do manage to go on, they blow the circuits in the house.  There is a lot of money going to be poured into the exterior again this spring. 

But for today, just for today, I did it.  I crossed over that rainbow into hopefully a smother future technologically and that Pair Networks will be way more reliable and responsive and the upgraded speed will be felt all around.

I love you all, thanks for your patience…  Stay tuned… 

testing 123…

So sorry for this post, there will be a real one coming soon!  

We are trying to figure out why there is a Gateway Timeout when I try to load, and I just want to warn everyone that in the next few days I’m going to attempt the impossible, change all this to a new hosting company.  Which is already giving me a major anxiety attack.  But it has to be done and is the last part of the equation.  So the blog and the store and the website and everything will be moving just as soon as I initiate things, so if you can’t get onto the blog or the shop or my website, don’t panic.  That’s my job!  Meanwhile…

This is what I’m working on…

Snow days 2.0

I’m going to be perfectly honest here.  This has been the best couple of weeks.  And I learned something really important.  The last three weeks have been dotted by four nor’easters as we affectionately call a weather system on the east coast, one that comes up from the south, bends around and hits us from the North East causing tidal flooding and all kinds of nastiness.  One of the storms produced two feet of snow, and another produced almost a foot.  I did a lot of shoveling.  I was lucky I never lost power, many of my friends in the area were without power almost as long as we were during hurricane Sandy.  I never lost cable or internet, or Verizon, I just sat in my lovely snug house and studio, and took advantage of all the snow days that happened when everything on my calendar was cancelled.  Everything.  I actually got stuff done.  I went to my studio and I made stuff.  And when the last storm hit, I made even more stuff.

This is a pretty big deal for me.  It has been a long time since I was able to do what I do best.  For many reasons, mostly not things I had control over, but in reality, this series of storms showed me I had a lot more control than I thought.  I belong to a lot of groups.  I have a couple music groups with occasional performances, a local art critique group, a sewing guild, a knitters group, a lace makers group, a couple of weaving guilds, I go to a yoga class, and get asked to volunteer for various things all the time.  Mostly I’m out every night.  It has become apparent that although I love the camaraderie and opportunity to learn and interact with my peers, and stretch my skills and be a better person, I’m failing to acknowledge what I love to do most, and that is make stuff.  I’ve been so focused on getting the business end of my classes under control, getting content up on my eStore, getting class patterns and handouts updated, and all the paperwork that comes with running a house, and a business, and fielding contractors and tech support, taxes and technology, I’ve failed in the most basic way to honor that which got me where I am.  And it took a bunch of nor’easters to point that out.

My calendar runneth over and not in a good way.  I’ve already started to back away from commitments I just blindly attended because I felt like I should.  And it isn’t because I didn’t enjoy it.  I can’t do everything.  Really.  I mean really really.

When we last left off, I had finally after two and a half years, finished off the Bubble cloth from the Karen Donde workshop.  After ruining the fabric I was preshrinking for the body of the garment, a rare event for me, I selected something different and spent one of the snow evenings cutting out.  Once everything was cut out, it was just a matter of figuring out how I wanted to put it together.  It needed a closure and I grabbed the new Lucet I got from Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati a couple weeks ago, (because my daughter stole my beautiful wood one) and whipped out a cord for a closure.  This is a great vest pattern for using just a scarf for a pretty border.  It is one I use in my classes.

Exactly a year ago, I was felting the undercollar for a Threads Magazine article.  I had the cutting table cleared off, and covered with plastic, and I had the olive oil soap and hot water and when I finished felting the undercollar, I tossed a large chiffon silk scarf I found in my mother in law’s closet after she died, and put a bunch of wool fleece on top, in careful layers, trying to match up the floral design of the scarf.  I felted that baby, and then looked at the finished piece and tossed it on my shelf until I could figure out what to do with it.  

So the other day, during the latest storm, I pulled it off the shelf, lined up the yokes of my new collared vest I talked about in the last post, and outlined the neck and armhole areas with basting threads.  I sliced down between the armholes, left the sides intact, no side seams, and then peeled away the silk chiffon from the wool, as best I could, it was pretty felted, cut away the felt, and then created this wrapped edge bundling the silk.  I used an alpaca tencel mill end from WEBS to do the wrapping.

I added a zipper because I love simple warm vests that zip up the front.  This little vest, fits like a glove, is super warm, and other than two small cuts down the armholes, I did not waste a single thread of the silk scarf.  

I’m sort of embarrassed about yesterday.  While the rest of the world was out marching for their lives and the importance of keeping the dialogue going about sensible gun control, including many of my close friends and my sister and her family who were in DC with 800,000 other people, I was viewing art with alumni from Montclair State University at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.  It was an absolutely awesome day.  The Barnes has been on my bucket list for a long time.  Stupid I know, I live less than two hours away.  If you don’t know what the Barnes Foundation is, look it up.  They have the largest collection of impressionist art in the world, 181 works by Renoir alone.  We had a private tour, and a beautiful luncheon.  A lovely lecture by the administration at the University, keeping us up to date on what’s happening at the University and of course a plea for more money, but the Barnes collection just blew me away.  Room after room of African antiquities, PA Dutch works, 14th century paintings and illuminations next to impressionist works and modern paintings, up to the 1950’s, all on the same wall.  Paintings and object d’art, were stacked to the ceiling.  The name of the painter was almost invisible, a tiny little plaque at the bottom of the gilt frame of the painting, because Barnes believed that the painter, the title, the year it was painted were all irrelevant.  It was only about line, color, shape and relationships between artworks.  There was a symmetry to how everything was displayed, and I discovered painters I’d never heard of, seen works I’ve never seen before, not even in books. The Barnes collection never travels. I was safe in my world of art, while a battle raged on in the outside world, and I spent the day in an art museum, and loved every minute of it.  I will say that I’m a voter, and I pay attention, and there are many ways to make a difference in the world.  Knowledge is a wonderful thing.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.  And please note…  this is my blog, my post.  Do not get into a political discussion on gun control, I have a delete key and am not afraid to use it.  My blog is a safe space where all were welcomed and accepted and encouraged to be part of the fiber world and there are plenty of other venues for that.  

And while I was mindlessly eating dinner tonight, my daughter began to leaf through the new Peters Valley brochure and when she came to the fiber section, she squealed and held up the lead page and there I was, with the cutest picture I’ve seen of me in a long time.  I was weaving, and making stuff.  It is what I do best.  I hadn’t seen this photo before.  I almost spit my wine across the page.  It made me really really smile.  I’ll be teaching two beginning weaving classes at Peters Valley this summer.  And next week I’m heading out to assess the condition of the weaving studio there after a very long hard winter in northwestern NJ.  April 14-15 is clean up day prepping for the season at the valley and my daughter and I will be there most of that weekend (except for a few hours Saturday afternoon when I have to attend the bridal shower for my dearest friend’s daughter, there are some things that take precedence, family is one of them.) Come if you are in the area, all of the studios need cleaning up and prepping for the summer workshop season.  

Stay tuned…