Daryl's Blog

I’m not sure whether there has been some cosmic shift or it is all just the coming of spring (however delayed it is in NJ), but the last week has been one of more ups than downs, and I feel like I’m finally coming out of winter and looking towards the future.

First, there is the annual attempt at clearing the looms.  This off -season for me had me doing everything else but that.  Though I did get a major warp on my big loom, I have lots of smaller ones languishing with dusty forgotten warps that usually don’t get woven off until I need the loom.  With all the other stuff going on in my life, large articles for Threads, the upcoming jurying for the Reno Fashion show, a brief vacation to Cuba, creating a new silhouette with ten samples and 19 pages of illustrated directions, not to mention the effort my assistant and I have put into creating digital content up in my online shop, yeah, weaving off old warps wasn’t at the top of the priority list.  

So I stupidly signed up for the swatch exchange for my guild, we have a year to weave samples based on a five card design challenge draw.  I got black, metallic, checks, and rep, and a card that made no sense, but referred back to black.  So by the June meeting, I need a loom cleared, new fabric designed, and samples woven and mounted for the guild challenge participants.  What was I thinking…

Meanwhile, the beginning of May, my guild is hosting Heather Winslow for a workshop on Millennial Fibers.  I volunteered the additional loom, besides the one I’m bringing, because Heather likes an extra loom in a round robin.  Which is an outstanding idea I might add.  If I taught weaving in a round robin (you weave samples on all of the different looms people bring)I’d make them provide an extra.

So I have an additional two looms to make ready for those warps, which I got in the mail this week, the warps, not the looms. 🙂 

We are on target…

Problem for me, is my upcoming schedule, which is pretty tense and dense.  This all has to be done now, not two months from now, because well, life always gets in the way.

Last week we had a two foot snow storm which basically shut down every calendar event on my packed calendar and gave me the longest snow day I’ve ever had next to the 10 days without power during Hurricane Sandy.

The first loom I needed to tackle was the small floor loom.  I probably mentioned it in my last blog.  This loom had a workshop warp on it, left from last October from a Kathrin Weber Workshop, the handpainted warps are all hers, there were four different warps involved including the black one.  First we sampled plain weave, twills, rep and then turned Taquete (summer winter). I took advantage of the lengthy snow week, and steadily wove off the fabric, in the turned taquete structure, with a tencel weft, and got an amazing fabric.

I washed it, laid it out across my cutting table, extended as far as I could with stuff propped under it to give me more surface area and laid out the cloth, and the pattern pieces, cutting doubles of each section.  I cut the yokes crosswise.

And though I didn’t have enough for the collar, I split the collar in two, and used the rep sample area, with a seam up the back, and made a coordinating collar.

The vest is from my newest pattern, and this view on the pattern has the lining (black linen here) as the seam finish, meaning the vest fabric doesn’t have to have any seam allowances.  The directions can be downloaded here for free if you want to see how it is done.  I also wrote about it in an issue of Threads Magazine last fall. 

Anyway, this was just the most fun thing I could make during this long snowy wintry week.

I planned the warp for the swatch exchange, designed, yarn pulled, and now I’ll have to wind that and get it on the loom.

The next loom I needed to clear had a warp that I swear was like that “song that never ends…”  I took the class in fall of 2015, right after my husband was diagnosed with cancer, so I don’t have a lot of recollection of the next bunch of months, but the loom seemed to go with me whenever I had to demo, whenever I had a few minutes to kill (hahahahaha) but I never felt like the end was in sight.  I was determined that by the time the week was out, I’d have this bloody thing off.  It was a four yard warp to start, in a round robin class, and for some reason, mostly involving time, almost no one in the class wove a sample on it, leaving most of the warp intact still on the loom.

I found a gorgeous khaki colored wool on my shelf and my plan was to make one of my other vests, the one with the armhole and neck bands, and use the fabric from this loom, assuming there was enough, to make the bands and really show off this fabric.  The fabric was from a workshop called bubble cloth with Karen Donde, and it involved units of teal tencel and rust colored merino, which when vigorously washed would give different shrinkage to the units.  The sample from the class was actually really lovely, but I had no idea how much fabric was left on the loom and how much it would actually shrink down.  

Meanwhile I tossed the wool for the body into a bucket, like I always do, in hot water to pre-shrink.  And I found a really pretty subtle hand painted yard of silk charmeuse in the right shades, and tossed that in the bucket as well, I figured they were both in the same value range, it wouldn’t be a problem.  I right away saw some bleeding happening from the dye in the handpainted silk, (I didn’t paint it, it was a remnant, I’m not sure where I bought it), and I should have pulled it from the water and gotten another bucket.  But I was, I admit, lazy and thought, it won’t be a problem.

It was a problem.

Alas, I can’t use the wool.  I thought about trying to use the transferred dye which absolutely would not come out no matter what I tried) in some sort of design on the back of the vest, but after looking at other options in my stash, I decided to use this gorgeous brown melton, a gift from a student, probably a better choice anyway, and I can still use the lining, though 15 washings later there is still a touch of red still coming out, and of course the lovely fulled finished length of fabric, which I screamed for joy when I saw the knots come up over the back beam.  I have enough length to get the front bands, and two slightly narrower armhole bands.  I can’t wait to sew this one.

And as a huge nod to the future, I had a fantastic experience this morning.  I, sitting in bare feet at my desk in NJ, gave a lecture to Weaving Indiana, right from the comfort of my own home.  Yep, it was terrific.  Just like I was there, at least it seemed to me.  I heard the tail end of their business meeting, and then I was on!  I could see their group and they could see me, and I gave a slide presentation, projected on their end on the wall screen, and they got to ask questions, and it was a fantastic two hours.  Here are a couple of screen shots, they could see me in the upper corner and I could see them.

I was hoping this would work well, you don’t need much to do this.  The most important thing is internet access, I’m using WEBEX conferencing software, which I will invest in if there is interest in doing this again for a guild.  There is nothing but an app to load on the guild end, I pay for the use of the software.  All you need besides internet access, is a computer, with external speakers and a projector, the camera in your laptop is enough for me to see your guild, and I have a camera on my end.  This guild had a really fancy tech set up, with a camera mounted up on the screen and a speaker system, which is why it took a bit to get it all synced, but tech guy Josh was there on their end, and I had my office assistant here on my end, and it worked.  It really worked.  I can give a lecture to any guild across the country as long as they have internet access and a laptop, projector and external speakers.  Email me if you might be interested and we can talk more details.  I’ll eventually put up a section on my workshop listings of what lectures would be suitable for this format. Basically anything, because I use so much PowerPoint.  Imagine the future where I lecture to Indiana in the morning, from NJ, get to eat lunch in my own kitchen, put up a blog post, and go and walk my dog.  That future is today.  

I’m heading out to walk the dog.

Stay tuned…

What a couple of weeks this has been.  Last Thursday, I was on a plane to Cincinnati, to give a lecture to the Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati, followed by a two day workshop on fit.  The workshop was everything I hoped it would be for a number of reasons.

My flight was uneventful, which was important because I left as a major nor’easter was brewing in the North Jersey region, so I missed the brunt of that storm.  I am teaching this particular class at Convergence Reno in July, and wanted to get a feel for the timing and what would happen if I added the additional silhouette, which I killed myself creating all of February.  I made 10 sample vests, wrote the handout, and made multiple copies before I flew to Cincinnati last week.  I blogged about that in my last post.  The vests worked well, and a number of students traced the silhouette in addition to others, I have a lot of options, and right before I left, my trusty office assistant Cynthia helped me upload all of the directions for my patterns onto my eShop, they can be downloaded as PDF’s for free.  Don’t get too excited, they won’t help you because they don’t include the pattern, which you have to take a workshop with me to actually be able to get, but the directions are there, which will cut down on my printing costs, and those who traced an early version of the collared vest last year, can actually see how it is put together.

I did get a feel for the timing, and though I’ll have a lot more students in Reno than I did here, 20 vs 13, I know how much pattern paper to bring, and having the directions for free in my shop will help with printing costs.  And I reconnected with a guild I haven’t worked with since 2005.  Back then I did a jacket class, and Judy Dominic, one of my favorite people, and an outstanding fiber artist, came to that class with a basket of odd things and declared she wanted to make the jacket out of what was in the basket.  It was and still is one of the most challenging jackets I ever had to help a student through in the course of a workshop, and I was thrilled to see it again, it still looks great on her.  The back and fronts were tapestries that she had woven, too thick to seam, and the sleeves were painted cotton, which I had her quilt to counter the weight of the tapestry.

Before leaving for Cincinnati, I spent hours updating my website.  When I was in Cuba the end of January, one morning at breakfast, I was talking with a potter who was on the tour with me, and we were taking advantage of having internet access and he was showing me some of his work.  I went over to my website to show him some of mine, and it was to my complete embarrassment that I hadn’t updated the garment part of my gallery since 2015, and the artwork part of the gallery hadn’t been updated since 2011.  And the opening collage of me and my work, on the home page, though it looked pretty, was of work that was more than 10 years old.  It has been 10 years since I did the Convergence Fashion Challenge. That piece didn’t need to be front and center.   So I freshened everything up, I still have to upload photos of my paintings because when I’m out and about, that subject occasionally comes up and it is nice to be able to go to my website and show them off.  I’m going to train my assistant in updating things on my website and I’ll have her work on the paintings.

My daughter has come home to live for a few weeks while she does an unpaid externship for school.  She went back to school to get her vet tech license, a two year associates degree program, which is stretching into three, since we all lost a year or more with my husband’s illness and death.  She brought her cat home with her, which has been an adventure, he is adorable and constantly in your face, and all over my studio, which is just the best place to hang out.  I love him but will be glad when she goes back to her apartment.  Everything takes a lot longer when there is a cat involved.

In addition, she brought her dog with her, mostly he is boarded because he can’t really live at her apartment.  Though he got along mostly with my dogs, they are all the same breed, it took much of my day to deal with crowd control while she was at work.  I told her that it wasn’t realistic for me to have all three dogs, and she would have to make other arrangements.  I’m sure there are those who think I’m a bad mom, but I was getting nothing accomplished, on deadline for Cincinnati, and not in any kind of mood to train another dog.  But the picture of my daughter and the three of them in my living room is the picture of domesticity.  Trust me it was not.  My Ranger is in the window seat, and my princess Saphira is on the couch to the left.  Brianna is petting her dog Trygve.  They are Norwegian Elk Hounds

Did I mention that though I missed the first nor’easter that happened last Thursday into the weekend, I didn’t miss this one.  Fortunately we never lost power.  I don’t know why we were so lucky.  There was close to two feet of snow, 26″ recorded in the next town over.  It felt like it.  But this snowstorm was gorgeous.  Heavy, wet, damaging to trees and shrubs, but gorgeous. 

Storms like this are mother nature’s way of saying, I’m cancelling everything on your calendar and you are getting a much needed rest.  Yes, there was a lot of shoveling.  But the kids were here to help, and it wasn’t icy, just wet and heavy, and we did it in stages, a half foot at a time as it came down.  Meanwhile, with all my meetings cancelled, guilds, knitting groups, lace groups, etc., I decided to sit at a loom, it has been so long, and weave.  This warp has been on the loom since last October, it was from the Kathrin Weber workshop I took with my guild.  I’m hoping to have enough fabric  to make a collared vest, shown above, Kathrin and I have been trying to collaborate on a silhouette and I think this will really work.  Stay tuned for that.  The color was a lovely antidote to the whiteout of the storm.

Meanwhile, the latest issue of Threads Magazine arrived and in it was my four page article on putting in a centered zipper.  I made the dress last fall, from a coral stretch denim, they chose the fabric and the dress, and I got to keep the extra material and made a lovely skirt, my new favorite, which I wore in Cuba.  I had my doubts when I was making the dress, but it looked great in the photo with the article.  I’ll take a photo of my skirt and a lovely charcoal linen top I knitted to go with it, eventually.

 

And I just got word today that my next article, for issue 197, will be 8 pages.  It is a complete step by step to make a bound buttonhole.  I worked all of January on the jacket and some 25 step by step samples, and I can’t wait to see it.

Stay tuned…

I do this to myself, embark on a Herculean task that no sane person would even try, and then put a deadline on it.  I’ve no one to blame but myself.  

First off, I waited until the last minute, the day before the deadline for an exhibit, to photograph the garment for said exhibit entry, and of course had all sorts of technical issues, including a failing card reader in the computer, note this is less than a year old.  I eat card readers for lunch.  The expensive lovely one I had purchased before my husband died, got fried last year when my computer went haywire and I had a new system installed.  Sigh… The new expensive one is due in tomorrow, and then I’ll have to call my tech guy in to install it.  It is always something.  There are days when I feel like nothing will ever go smoothly again.  But that’s a silly poor me thought, because truth be told, just about everything in my life goes smoothly, I have a lot to be grateful for, and the end result of all the shenanigans on Wednesday, was this…

And this…

The vest wasn’t actually for entering the show, but I never formally photographed either piece, and that step is really important.  Both pieces represent new silhouettes I offer in my garment construction classes, especially the five day retreats.  The swing coat is a deluxe variation of the Daryl Jacket, lots of darts, a shawl collar, and a longer swing version with side pockets.  And piping, and bound buttonholes, and a lining, and this is a lot of work.  But gorgeous.  I’ve had great response to it.

Because someone will probably ask, I hand painted the warps myself, and wove the fabric, it is mostly rayon.  The weave structure is original, a combination of plain weave and twill on 8 shafts.

The collared vest came out of an article I did last year for Threads Magazine, issue 193, Oct/Nov 2017, on using the lining as seam finish under one of their columns called Sewing Saves.  I taught the technique for years, but hadn’t really done a newer more updated piece with it.  I used the leftovers from this coat, turned crosswise to make more of an ombré, and I loved the effect. The vest is lined with black corduroy, and the black lines across the yoke and side and shoulder seams are the lining coming through to the front.   I’ve had the vest at the last few classes and students really really wanted the pattern.  It is a variation on the Daryl Jacket, but with the collar change, and no band, the fit and configuration were enough of a difference to need a complete redraft off my regular Daryl Jacket pattern.  And then there was explaining how to do it.  

So, spending all of January building the samples and the jacket for a summer Threads Magazine article on making bound buttonholes, followed by the trip to Cuba, we are now getting dangerously close to spring and the start of my travels, I’ve accomplished nothing of what I originally thought I’d do this winter in the studio. Getting this vest pattern into production was really a priority.  I want to offer it for students to trace in my two day fit workshop at Convergence in Reno in July, but I hate to go to Convergence with something untested.  And so Cincinnati, you get to try it out.  I’m heading there March 1, like in a week, and I’m desperately trying to finish grading all sizes, making all ten sizes into samples that students can try on to determine size, and then writing the extensive handout with all the illustrations, that has proven to be quite a challenge.  There are some tricky techniques to construct this thing, and to make it more difficult, a couple of options or views.  

Anyway, I’m getting close.  All of my garment samples use old bedsheets, because the fabric is very stable and will stay true to the original pattern size, and because they are fairly lightweight and will pack down nicely with the other 50 some samples I have from the vest with armbands, walking vest, swing coat, tunic, and three variations of the Daryl Jacket.  

I just finished vest #6 tonight.  I have four more to complete.  But I have to order more zippers from WAWAK.  I went to Joann’s today, and not only was the selection terrible, but one zipper was $6, and WAWAK has them in 26 colors for about $1.15 each.  Fortunately they ship quick.

I spent three uninterrupted days this weekend hand drawing the little illustrations, bringing the handout to about 19 pages.  I  wanted to be able to follow it, proofing while I completed the remaining vests, and have already found many errors, some silly, and some critical.  I surprise myself sometimes…

So I check things off my to do list, and more things to do quickly fill up the paper.  I keep thinking, if only I can get through this event, or this project, or this article, life will ease up.  So far I’ve been miserably wrong about that…

Meanwhile my trusty office assistant and I have created digital downloads of many of my monographs and they seem to be selling well.  It is lovely to get an order and not have to stop what I’m doing, print and ship.  I’ve already saved a ton of ink.  I’m now thinking about offering the extensive handouts for each of my pattern silhouettes as digital downloads for free.  For each pattern you trace in a workshop, you need the bound book of directions.  That’s a lot to print and ship ahead to a workshop on speculation, and if I decide to tweak a sentence or two, the extra books are then obsolete and throwaways.  Having digital versions means that the download is always the most current version.  This is what I think about while I’m sewing endless collared vests…  

Stay tuned…

 

We sat around a dining table over mojitos, a couple of my tour mates and I, one of the last evenings of our trip to Cuba.  I asked how my fellow tour mates planned to respond when the casual friend or acquaintance wanted to know how the trip to Cuba went.  All of us agreed that you can’t just say, “Oh it was really fun, or it was a lovely vacation, or it was warm and sunny and beautiful”.  None of those adjectives even begin to tell the story that is Cuba today. 

I will say that if I had to summarize my experience, it would be life altering.  I learned so much, appreciated so much, felt the Cuban pride all around, met the most resourceful and resilient peoples I think, in the world.  In spite of overwhelming poverty, crumbling infrastructure, lack of supplies, credit, minimal access to the internet, they hold their heads up with pride. There is no violence, little crime, free health care, women’s services, maternity care, maternity leave, free education, and equal rights and equal pay for women, and they survive.  They have survived for 450 years having some country or other occupy them, they have survived numerous invasions and slavery, yet they have held on to their arts, music and culture in whatever form that takes, and they do what they have to as a community to thrive. 

There is little crime in Cuba, no guns.  Though to be fair it is pretty easy to police that on an island.  But people don’t need guns.  Drugs are not prevalent because no one can afford them.  The Cubans are educated, well dressed, work hard at whatever they do, and make do.  It was a privilege to spend a week on their island.

You cannot begin to understand Cuba without a background in the socio-political history from the time Columbus landed (FYI, it wasn’t in the actual United States) and wiped out the indigenous population and the following Spanish invasion. Then the British invaded, and back to the Spanish in exchange for Florida.  A series of rebellions ended Spanish rule and then followed US military occupation.  The slave trade in Cuba was huge, necessary for the production of sugar, and slavery ended about 20 years after it was outlawed in the US in the late 1800’s.

Cuba gained its independence in 1902, but with that came political corruption and crime and gambling and control by the mafia.  In any case, that was how it was explained to me.  Cuba is mostly defined now by the 1959 revolution when the people took back their country and drove out the gambling, the wealthy, the crime and started to live as a socialist country under communist rule.  With the collapse of the Soviet block in 1992, the Cuban’s entered something called the “Special Period”. They are sort of adrift, especially since the US embargo, which has been in place since the revolution in ’59, has prevented them from benefiting from the global market we all take for granted.  Yet the people we talked to, listened to in lectures, professors, leaders in the community, urban planners, artists, writers and architects, all told the same story.  They put one foot in front of the other and make do and celebrate what they have and what they can do with it.  Tomorrow is completely unknown.

The printing school of graphic arts boasts a press from the 1700’s.  Everywhere you look are cars from the 1950’s in showroom condition.  You know they don’t have access to parts, they figure out how to make them from whatever they can find. 

The buildings are all made of concrete, plaster and brick because that can be made on the island.  There is little wood, small tropical trees don’t produce what would be necessary to build a house, maybe just the front door. My understanding is that there are 3.1 building collapses a day in the country.  Yet there is an amazing respect for the standing infrastructure, no graffiti, no trash, no money to repair, restore or replace, yet they make do with pride. 

Streets are made of cobblestones, actually rocks used as ballast in the 17-1800’s from sugar deliveries to New England. Ships needed ballast to return safely to Cuba.  Rocks from Massachusetts.  They have lasted for a couple hundred years.  They will live on.  The Cuban cab drivers bicycle their passengers over the rocky cobblestones with grit and training and raw determination. 

On every corner, in every restaurant there are musicians.  There is a musical pulse to this country.  Everywhere you look there is art and sculpture. Some of it is good art and some of it is not great art, but it doesn’t matter.  Everyone is encouraged to contribute somehow, to be creative, classes are set up in community art centers for kids to come after school,  classes in dance, music, theater, pottery, painting drawing and printmaking.

It is not lost on me the irony of some of the fans of the Eagles Football team that just won the Super Bowl Sunday night were looting and burning their city in celebration of their team’s win.  Why do people do that?  I was struck by the incredulity of the wealth of the Europeans that had established palaces and estates in Havana prior to the revolution, that imported the best of everything, Sèvres Porcelain, Aubusson Rugs, Baccarat Crystal, Czech glass, Chippendale furniture, and when they fled in 1959 during the revolution, the citizens didn’t loot and destroy or sell off a bloody fortune in antiquities, they kept the buildings locked and when the wealthy didn’t return, they converted the buildings into museums.  Like the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas . The next time I’m at the MET in the European rooms, I will shake my head at the rival collection of antiquities I saw in the museums of Cuba.  Life has been frozen in time on this beautiful island, and most of the buildings date back to the late 1800’s.  Except the cars.  You have to love the cars.

Nothing is wasted here.  Some of the way junk is reused just makes you smile.  It is a painters paradise, to bring out an easel and paint would have been a dream come true, but when in and out of a tour bus for a week, there is little time for such a luxury.  So I will settle for some beautiful photos that I’m hoping I’ll be able to paint one day.

Cuban Educational Tours (CET) organized the trip for Peters Valley.  The tours and lectures were designed for the group that came, we were mostly crafts people, artists, or people that supported artists like spouses.  It was bittersweet for me at times, this being my first solo trip without my husband, because I found myself thinking, Kevin would have loved this, he would have taken a gazillion photos of this, he would have had so much fun doing this.  But he wasn’t there and I was and I was surrounded by the most interesting and creative and thoughtful and educated people.  Conversations on the bus alone were worth the trip. 

We saw dance performances of traditional African movements, celebrating the traditions of the slaves,  and a performance of Don Quixote with the Cuban National Ballet.  OMG!  The talent, the training, the commitment, the professionalism blew me out of my seat.  We saw a percussion/dance troupe, using chairs as their instrument, the sound was clear and rhythmic and beautiful.

We listened to Troubadours, and Cuban musicians, and we danced (fortunately I have no pictures of that) and we loved and yes, we bought the CD’s.  Carefully wrapped in paper and stapled.  There were rarely CD cases.

We ate amazing meals, lots of rice and beans but fish, chicken, pulled pork and beef.  There was lobster pizza and of course free flowing rum, and the island drink Mojitos.  That green is muddled mint.  About every 15 minutes we were handed another bottle of Ciego Montero, “the No 1 en Cuba” bottled water and were told that in reality, it is the only bottled water available in Cuba. 

We visited a pottery studio, a print making studio, heard lectures from Nationally respected artists, and got an art lesson from one of the professors in the University.  Even having to have his words translated, he made more sense in 10 minutes than the four years of my fine arts degree.  To have an idea come to fruition, you need the time, resources and repertoire or skillset and there is a constant flow of adjustment that moves back and forth from these concepts that result in the final work.  You can’t design an idea for 16 shafts when you only have 8, unless you have the skillset or repertoire and time to do pick up.  We visited an arts academy, created from an abandoned pre revolution golf resort, and we visited a trade school that trains youths in restoration skills in plaster, concrete, brickwork, plumbing and electricity and ironwork.  There is a lot of need for these skills in Cuba, as you can imagine.

Our accommodations were really lovely.  We stayed four nights in the Meliã Cohiba hotel in Havana, and two nights in Casa Particulares or private homes in Trinidad, a beautiful crumbling city on the southern coast of Cuba.  There really isn’t a hotel infrastructure that can support of lot of tourism, but resourceful Cubans have opened their homes to let outsiders come and stay with them. 

Bathrooms were an adventure.  I’ve talked to many friends who have traveled to Latin American countries and nations that don’t have the toilet infrastructure system we do here in the States.  I found myself really appreciating a basic toilet seat.  We had them in the hotels, and maybe a couple of the restaurants, but mostly, no.  Sometimes no running water, the toilet lady, who collected a coin to give you a couple sheets of toilet paper (which you weren’t allowed to throw in the toilet) would have to manually flush the toilet with a bucket of water.  I don’t know how she managed that, and I didn’t want to know.  You learned to carry tissues and wipes with you (which you couldn’t throw in the toilet) and hand sanitizer.  And in spite of judicious use of sanitizer, we all managed to pass around a wicked stomach virus with the results I’ll leave to your imagination.  I was one of the lucky ones in that when it hit me, I was safely in the hotel in the middle of the night where I had a toilet seat and toilet paper I could flush.  Gratitude. 

There is so much we take for granted here in the States.  We have known no other way of life.  I am truly touched by the generosity and resilience of the Cuban people, the way they talk about each other with pride.  They way they listen to every word coming out of the US because the US controls so much of their destiny.  They have five TV stations, one is from Venezuela, the others State owned.

Oddly enough, one of my favorite tours was to the Christopher Columbus cemetery.  The guide was hilarious, spoke perfect English and the stories of the dead were just the best.  And again, the wealth prior to the revolution.  There was an exact replica of the Pietà.  Yeah, that one.  Life size and perfect.  Because they could.

And we visited a tiled city started by artist Fuster, and enthusiastically embraced by the whole community.

I understand Peters Valley is sponsoring another tour to Cuba in November.  Go.  It should be required for every US citizen.  Go before the embargo is lifted and Cuba becomes America’s playground.  You won’t regret it.

Enjoy the rest of the photos…

I have a studio assistant, or really an office assistant, a lovely woman who has fast become my sounding board, my tech support, occasional warp winder, walking buddy (we do three miles 3x a week around town, accompanied by my beloved brat of a dog Ranger) and we joke that between us we have a complete brain.  

It isn’t that she is fabulous at technology,  it’s that she isn’t afraid.  I know that sounds odd, but like my late husband, when she doesn’t know the answer, she starts a query, starts a “chat” or starts pushing proverbial buttons.  She always figures it out.  My husband complained that I’d always gave up too soon.  Which is odd, considering what I do and how I do it in my studio life.  But technology never fascinated me, it was always something I had to do to promote my business, streamline my life, and live in the 21st century.  Back in the day, my studio assistant was actually a programmer, and business analyst.  She excels at Office Programs (pun intended).  

Anyway, one of my goals, once I got my eShop upgraded and cleaned up (my late husband set up the eShop back in 2005, which in technology equates to the stone age) and it was no longer supported and functioning, plus there was the issue with my blacklisted site…  My highly paid regular tech support eventually figured it all out, and though I won’t reveal sources, he was able to unblacklist my site going through a family member who worked for Google, and all is well on that end.  So the next step was to clean up the eShop and look towards the future.

Many of you know I’m getting tired.  I have not applied to any conferences for 2019, and I really don’t want to.  There is so much I want to do in life, that dragging around 70 pound suitcases no longer seems appealing.  I would still love to teach my 5 day retreats, I do adore my students and a bit of travel, but the grueling pace of travel, the prep, and the shear volume of variety of things I teach is keeping me from moving into the next phase of my life. 

I still have lots to contribute, and with the technology available today, I should be able to do that without leaving home and even (don’t tell anyone) working in my pajamas, in spite of the extensive handwoven wardrobe I have…  So my office assistant and I have been stealthily working over the past couple months, to reformat my monographs, many of them more than 10 years old, to clean up the fonts, (yes, many were still using Comic Sans, which in today’s world is a standing joke), the photos, the headings, the text and to create digital downloads of them.  It has been quite the process.  

Testing the downloads and figuring out how to upload and link and cleaning up the look of the site (yes that was using Comic Sans as well) has been a daily challenge.  At one point Cynthia, my office assistant said, as we reviewed a download on my Samsung Tablet, once she figured out how to get it to download on said Tablet (after calling Samsung, who thinks to do that?) and downloading the app that allows downloads, she said to me, “You need page numbers.”  That created an entire new set of problems because the books were written in PowerPoint 2003 or 7, but not in 2016, which apparently now requires Master Slides, or something like that, and hours later, we have page numbers.  

Scrolling through the digital file on my tablet I came up with the idea of an index or table of contents right up front.  What if you wanted to know how to do Turned Krokbragd in the Advanced Inkle book, are you going to scroll through some 80 slides of a PDF file to find it?  So that meant that we had to go back and create a table of contents for each of the presentations.   

The maximum size of a PDF file is 8mb so a couple of my monographs needed to be broken into pieces.  Which isn’t a bad thing.  So there is the Closures Monograph, the Bound Buttonhole Monograph and one on Zippers.  The content remains basically the same (without using Comic Sans) as my printed monographs, but they are cleaned up, fresh looking and consistent.  And you only buy what you want.  I’m still working on the Seams and Edge Finishes Monograph, again that will be broken into smaller downloadable parts, but there are a number of digital versions of my monographs available now in my eShop.  I got an order yesterday morning for my two inkle books from someone in Japan, which made me so happy because it was my overseas supporters who were missing out on much of the information I have to share because of cumbersome and expensive shipping and customs issues. Download and done.  No spending $650 a month on toner and paper.  Done…

And we are investigating using conferencing software to be able to create virtual guild meetings, I’m scheduled to do one in Indiana in March, which will mean again, no travel, cheaper rates, and I can work in my pajamas…

Meanwhile, I’m heading to warmer parts shortly, an educational tour of Cuba with Peters Valley, I’m very excited and instead of shopping for new clothes, I spent a couple days (while Cynthia was reformatting monographs) altering some of what I wasn’t wearing anymore in my closet.  I shortened things, resized things, and made some of the clothes I had fresh and fun.  Seems like the season for upgrades!  I even upgraded my old standby point and shoot camera yesterday.  And while I’m gone, my contractor is moving in for yet more repairs.  And Cynthia will keep plugging away at the office stuff.

So here is what’s available so far… Click here to access all the books below…