Daryl's Blog

So here is the second part of yesterday’s progress report.  It isn’t unusual for me to have a couple of projects going at the same time.  It is rare that I meet one of those unusual people that works on one project and sees it through to the end before starting on another.

And it is exhibit deadline season.  Of course I have more than one iron in the fire…

You may remember this photo from a couple of blog posts past…

I took four 9 1/2″ wide scarves from a warp I did probably last spring.  I played around with them to see if I could turn them into a dress.  I loved the very 60’s silhouette, and made a muslin, which I couldn’t show because I sent it off to Threads Magazine for a column I was writing.

The scarves worked as woven, but they presented a couple of problems when reworked for a garment.  First off were the very long floats formed by the supplemental ribbons.  No problem for a scarf.  Very problematic for a dress.  And the width, the scarves were only 9 1/2″ wide.  If my hips were a mere 36″ around, which I can assure you they aren’t, I could have probably just stitched them together with narrow seam allowances and called it a day.  But I had only four scarves and wider hips…

And the fabric itself is a warp face slippery, I mean winter ice storm slippery rayon and tencel.  Not completely stable, and very very ravely.

Of course, being the clothing guru, I was not willing to let any of that stop me.  I’ve seen much more challenging fabrics come through my workshops..  🙂

I will say though, I dragged my feet on this one.  I measured about 60 times, over the course of a week, because once I made that cut into a scarf, there was no turning back.  I’m sure you identify.

 

The first issue was to address the problem with my wider than the four scarves together hips.  You can’t see it because the pattern is the same color as the table mat, but the hips actually extend way beyond the scarf, almost off the table.

In addition, the underarm side seam needed extra as well.  So I resorted to my old standby, butt selvedges, and used the cutout from the armhole for the additional piece needed on the underarm seam, and some of the lower part of the scarf for the side seam.  I decided not to actually create a seam, since it was so close to the actual side seam, I thought it would be way too lumpy with all those seam allowances.

I carefully joined the selvedges together as invisibly as I could but the problem of the long floats stared me right in the face…

Once spliced, I could cut out the garment with the full width of the pattern.

I thought about and actually tried fusing a narrow crosswise strip of fusible knit interfacing around the perimeter of the garment sections.  This helped the very ravely rayon problem, but not the long float problem, and honestly, the more I handled the fabric, the more unstable I knew it was, and I’d never be happy with the finished dress, especially if it did get into an exhibit.  It would need a lining and more detailed finishing than the fabric could support.

So in the end, I opted to fuse the entire back of the garment with the inserted textured weft interfacing I usually resort to for this purpose.  I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t make the fabric firmer or more stable than I wanted, but I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Then I transferred the markings to the garment sections, with running tailor’s tacks, so I could sew in the darts.  I left the back seam allowance on the selvedge, but marked the seam line as well, since the back seam is actually curved, but I wanted to take advantage of the finished edge.  By marking the seamline for the center back with a running tailor’s tack, I had a guide for stitching on an invisible zipper.

The back zipper is in, and so are the back darts, and I pinned the back onto the dressform and squealed in delight.  How cool is this…

Stay tuned…

The thing with not having any kids in regular school anymore is I don’t get those mid marking period progress reports.  You know the ones, where you find out how well your kid is doing before the actual report card comes in?  For some kids, it is knowing whether or not they are in danger of failing, and for others it is knowing how close to an A they are in each subject.  I had one of each.

Now that my daughter is in college, I don’t get any reports at all, except what she chooses to put up on Facebook, something like, “I think I did OK on my bio exam…”

I sort of miss them.  So as a tribute to all the progress reports I ever got for my kids (we didn’t do them when I went to school) I thought I’d post one of my own, on my own progress on a couple of things I’m working on in the studio.  This will be a two part post since I am currently tearing through two projects at the same time…  And I have details!

The first post tonight, will be an update on the delicious yardage that is now on my loom.  I finished threading over the weekend, and sampled all kinds of wefts, really not sure how I wanted to weave it and wanted to check the sett before I committed to the whole yardage.  So I wove about 15″, sampling a dozen wefts, and then cut the sample into three, keeping the middle one as a “right from the loom” sample.  The one on the right was hand washed and air dried, and the one on the left was washed and dried in the machine.

In all cases, I liked the dark navy rayon bouclé second from the top, the best.

The warp is actually a series of Fibonacci numbers, Google it if you don’t know what they are.  I used the numbers 5, 8, 13, and 21 to determine the width of the stripes, and assigned randomly plain weave and 2/2 twills in opposing directions, along with a supplemental ribbon and I love love love the effect.

I put the supplemental ribbons on a separate warp beam, so they could tension independently.  A smart move over 9 yards of warp.

And I have my little set up to make life and weaving within reach…  I use tall narrow plant stands, the kind you find in garden shops in the spring, they are perfect to drag over to where you are weaving to hold tea, cell phone, extra bobbins, scissors, pins, etc.  They take up almost no floor space and are handy to move up close when your bench doesn’t have side pockets.  I find sitting on a folded sheepskin to be much kinder to my sitting parts…  (And I keep Sharpie Markers in colors that match the warp handy for when a warp comes up with a small spec of missing color from a too tight bundle wrap before going into the dye bath…)

This yardage is really making me smile.  Not only am I flying along like a speed demon, it is weaving like butter, and before I knew it I was into my second yard.  I was admiring my fabric, and I noticed that something just didn’t see quite right along one of the supplemental floats.

I peered through the warp to the fabric that was coming out underneath the warp as it rolled onto the cloth beam, and damned if there wasn’t a mistake, and it took me quite some time to figure out what it was.  The threading was actually correct, but the supplemental ribbon and it’s adjacent pink silk thread were crossed in the reed.  I didn’t pick it up for more than a yard.  Damn I hate when that happens…

So there are now big pink raw silk floats on the back side of the yardage.  I was able to fix the mistake of the crossed warps, but I’ll have to by hand once the yardage is off, carefully reweave the mistake warp, if this yardage is going to be entered into an exhibit, it has to be perfect.  I couldn’t figure out how I missed it in the washed samples, and then realized that the mistake was in the middle section that I didn’t actually wash.  I flipped it over and sure enough, there was the mistake like a giant neon sign…  Duh…

So I’m through a couple yards, and back on track, I’ll deal with the mistake in the yardage later.  For now, I’ve never enjoyed something so much, it is lovely to look at and lovely to weave and worth all the work on the dyeing and warping.

Tomorrow, the dress…  Stay tuned…

My buddy left again on Wednesday for another long month in Saudi Arabia.  I miss him already.  Just having him around for all the holiday festivities made everything much brighter.  We tried to cram in as much as we could, not only work on the house, critical stuff, and parties (also critical stuff), and a long overdue trip to see my mom in Maryland, (really critical stuff) but the most important thing to me, was we made it back into NYC so Kevin could see my piece at the World Financial Center Gallery.  We went last Friday, which if you have a calendar from last year in front of you, you would know that it was December 30th, the day before the free for all that is New Year’s Eve on Times Square.  This day should come with a disclaimer as it is not for the faint of heart.  I can’t imagine actually going to Times Square on New Year’s Eve, I’ve lived outside NYC for the last 35 years, and I’ve never done it and have no intention of doing it.

Anyway, traffic was abysmal, it took a couple hours by bus, a ride that should have been 40 minutes.  Once in the city, we headed south towards the WTC site, and walked over to see my piece in the Crossing Lines exhibit.  If you haven’t read my blog post from the beginning of December, this won’t mean much to you.  You can catch up here.  I’ll wait…

We ran through the exhibit (since we were running about an hour and a half behind schedule), Kevin snapped another photo of me with my piece, and we walked over to the Winter Garden, which is still so hauntingly beautiful by both day and night.  He got some wonderful shots with his Nikon d5000.

We wandered out to the water front, that would be the Hudson River, and New Jersey beyond, just at dusk, which was gorgeous.  The view to NJ is beautiful, you can just imagine how spectacular the skyline would be if we were standing on the Jersey side of the Hudson looking back at the tip of Manhattan at twilight.

We headed over through and around the construction site, to the World Trade Center Memorial, it just opened this year, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and it is breath taking.  We got advance tickets, free of course, but you still have to get them online ahead of time and go through TSA type security (at least we didn’t have to take our shoes off, it was cold), and I have to say, as tragic as this event was, and as difficult as it was to come up with some kind of sacred memorial that pleased everyone, this is in my books the eight wonder of the modern world, or is it nine?  What are we up to?

The foot prints of the twin towers, two giant squares, were turned into HUGE waterfalls, and all around the perimeter, etched in marble or granite, some black stone, were the names of everyone who died on 9/11, including the Pentagon and the flight that crashed in PA, all the first responders who died, and those who died in the first attempts to bring down the trade center in 1993.  What was particularly touching was the etched names of women with “their unborn child”.  Sobering, poignant, yet incredibly uplifting.  The deafening sound of the steady waterfalls filled the empty void with something alive yet temporary, like life.

We got onto a northbound E train, and headed over to Rockefeller Center to see the tree. There were massive bodies, hard to move a step in front, I was very glad my husband was 6’3″ tall and I could find him easily in the crowd.  We managed to see the tree, and get some kind tourist to snap a photo of both of us.  Then we crawled out of the melee and headed over to Times Square.  The day before the festivities has it’s own sort of energy, but I have to say, I don’t do crowds, I don’t do bright lights, and I hate excessive noise.  I was close to a meltdown by the time we walked through Times Square and we headed over to the Port Authority and grabbed a bus home.  We got to a Panera close to where we live in NJ and settled in for some quiet chat and decent soup/sandwich combinations and some much needed  comfort.

Anyway, I’m glad we went into NYC last Friday, and I’m glad Kevin got to see my piece.  It was important to me.  And I’m really glad I got to see the WTC memorial.  I will return often.  And I’m glad we picked up a couple of cheap 2012 glasses from a street vendor in Times Square, and wore them to the annual New Year’s Eve party in a neighboring town.  Our friends have a projection TV system, and here we are standing in front of “Times Square” on the projection TV, just after midnight, celebrating the New Year.  I’m so glad I was in a cozy home theater room in our friend’s house in Montville and NOT in the actual Times Square…

And now, a word from our sponsor…

So here is the deal…  I write this blog for free.  I have fun with it, and it serves my need to express myself in a way different than fiber.  I’m thrilled with the 500 plus subscribers that read my blog, and your comments mean the world to me.  But I have to earn a living in here somewhere.  So please bear with me for just a moment while I shamelessly advertise all the opportunities to study with me this year.  I posted my schedule as I have it so far on my website, click here.  There are many opportunities to study Garment Construction with me including a couple new offerings at WEBS, (where I’ll get to visit my daughter at UMass) along with a  5 day workshop in Asheville, NC, my regular annual class at Sievers School of Fiber in Wisconsin, an eight week class at the Newark Museum in NJ, and many new online opportunities at Weavolution.com.  I teach lots of different classes, including warping techniques, inkle weaving, color and inspiration classes, photographing your fiber art, and of course the Weave a Memory class, the technique that gets mentioned lots in this blog. I love the online format, I teach in my bedroom slippers and don’t have to get on an airplane!  I’m also teaching at the Conference of Northern California Handweavers, Convergence, and the American Sewing Guild conference in Houston.  Sign up early and often!

OK,  commercial announcement over…

Now for some pretty for the week.  I am slowly and methodically getting things done in the studio.  Lots of interruptions, all good, like the emergency call this morning, “can we move the dinner party to your house tomorrow night?”.  Crap.  So instead of finishing up beaming my warp, I cleaned my downstairs.  Thanks for helping Larissa and Brianna!  The house needed cleaning anyway, and I feel better when I move around a tidy clean smelling environment.  The remnants of Christmas are gone, and my looms are calling…

Can I say I’ve never loved a warp so much in 35 years of weaving?

And I finished the muslin for the scarf dress I’m hankering to do, but I can’t show you that, since I just shipped it off to Threads Magazine for a small article for them.  Obviously on making a muslin…

So Happy New Year and onto some creative adventures…

Stay tuned…

 

I will admit that I am rather annoyed by the whole holiday season which is loud and expensive and in your face and I avoid malls and excess shopping and crowds and excessive baked treats (ok well maybe only partially on the baked goods) like the plague.  I find it hard to conduct business, everything takes longer, including shipping, and I can be a real Scrooge when it comes to the holiday spirit.  We have too much stuff, and what’s important to me now, is very different than what was important to me 10 or 20 years ago.

So I braced myself, for the onslaught of holiday merriment, and I have to say, I rather enjoyed myself these last couple of weeks.  Just having my family here made me happy, catching glimpses of them around corners, while they did mundane things, etching their faces and expressions into my memory, because soon they will be gone again.  We all went to Maryland for a few days to visit my family, I had Christmas dinner with my mom and bonus dad, and my sisters who mean the world to me.  My husband did a good job with my gifts, considering I asked for and wanted nothing.  He got me things I could consume, like wine and chocolate, and an OTT-lite.  You can’t have enough of those.  He got me theater tickets and an arts weekend in Princeton, which he bid for in an online auction through Art PrideNJ.  Those are things that are important to me and that make me feel good about spending the money.  There were also a couple of art works from a couple of artists from an auction he attended at Peters Valley, while I was teaching in Alabama.  And my favorite gift of all was a collection of images of the labyrinth and meditative walks from our trip to Taos in 2010, bound together in a Shutterfly book,   I keep it on my night stand.

And for my gift to my husband, my secret project was a continuation of the one I started last spring for my husband’s 60th birthday.  We have a probably a couple million images scattered around the house in various formats dating back to 1974 when we first met, and I have been painstakingly trying to recreate our many adventures, trips and vacations, and there were a lot I can assure you,into a book using PowerPoint slides that celebrates our life together.  I managed to get through the 1970’s last spring, and I decided that for Christmas this year, I’d continue and try and pull all the images together through the 1980’s.  I spent hours trying to recreate places we went, and what we did.  We were lucky because in the 1970’s, we took almost exclusively slides, and they have preserved well and almost all had dates stamped on them.  Not so lucky with some of the images from the 1980’s.  Polaroids did not hold up at all.  Cheap printing didn’t either.  And my organizational skills back then were largely “stick them in an album wherever…” or “pile them in a drawer”.   There were a lot of hours spent in the month of December using Photoshop to save some pretty poor images.

I can’t tell you how much fun it was to relive some of those past events, with a different eye.  I found some wonderful snapshots, especially ones where family or friends were wearing some of my handwoven clothing.  I sold my handwoven garments through craft fairs all through the 1980’s, and I’d forgotten how supportive my family and friend’s were.

There was a lovely photo from 1985 from my youngest sister’s wedding.  That’s me on the left holding the handwoven jacket that coordinates with the handwoven dress and sash my sister wore as her “going away” outfit.  (I did not pick out the pink dress, I was in the bridal party, you know how that goes…)

Here is a shot of me in my handwoven mohair coat in Salisbury England in 1988

And I found this 1983 image of a very early handwoven mohair coat, that’s me standing next to the first yard ornament we bought for our new (very old) house.

This is my husband and our dearest friend Annika, who lives in London.  My husband has her young son on his back, and Annika is wearing one of my mohair coats, we are all at Kew Gardens in 1988

There was also a news clipping from an exhibit at the V & A (Victoria and Albert Museum) from that same trip to London.  The first major exhibit of Kaffe Fassett’s knitted and needlepoint works along with objects from the museum’s own collections that have inspired the work.  I remember being overwhelmed by all the color.

 

I found this lovely portrait of my husband and me taken in 1986, I’m wearing another one of my production mohair coats.

And in the category of “What Could She Have Been Thinking…”  There were a couple of shots that surprised even me, here I am wearing an odd combination for me, yes it was 1989 and yes I was pregnant and yes we were in San Francisco but still…

This is even more hilarious, here I am pregnant and standing in front of Christian Bros winery.  I have a vague recollection of this pink oversized sweatshirt/dress, and I remember it was really comfortable, but I am a bit mortified I actually wore it out in public.

And this classic, the prize shot for the “What Could I have been Thinking” category came this ensemble I wore to a family reunion in 1981.  Candiss Cole and I bought this same outfit from a craftsman at the Gaithersburg Craft Fair, probably October of 1980.  We were across the aisle from each other, and when we discovered that we had both purchased the same garment, we became lifelong friends because we both had the same taste in the absurd?  So here is one for you Candiss, I know you read this blog!  (The necklace was a series of porcelain flowers from another artist from the same show.)  There is no explanation for the shoes…

And so, the new year begins.  I’m working hard building presentations, new work, writing proposals, filling out contracts, shipping out orders, plotting new venues, and trying to gain control over my house which has somehow slipped through my fingers like sand.  Or dog hair…

I don’t make resolutions.  Not because I’m perfect, but because if they were important to me I’d be doing them.  I do have some roughed out goals, but I always have those, and they get done when there is a deadline.  I’d like to park in my garage bay again, before the next snow storm.  I haven’t parked in it since 2006.  Don’t ask.  I’m starting to find some interesting stuff out there, that should be entertaining for a few days anyway.  I’d like to spin more, and catch more movies and PBS series I’ve missed over the years, now that I can stream Netflix in the bedroom.  I can do both of those at the same time.

So here is to another new year, this one is my 10th anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis, it has been 10 years since that nightmare, hard to believe my babies are grown, my husband is 60, I’m not far behind him.  It has been a great year personally, professionally, and privately.

I wish all of you a new year full of creative adventures, AhHa moments, wonderful surprises, and friendship.  And lots of lots of fiber experiences…

Stay tuned…

 

 

They’re Back!

My daughter has returned from points north, and my husband from points east, or would that be west, depending on which direction you fly?  Half way around the world, that could be either direction…

Anyway, with my family reunited, and the holiday season upon us, it is hard to get any meaningful work  accomplished in the studio, though the to-do list continues to grow with or without me.  And opportunities keep popping up, like, “Can you write an article and have it to us by the first of the year?”  What was I suppose to do, say no?  It was only a teeny short article… (Actually it still is, I haven’t written it yet, course I only found out about it two days ago…)

And this is such a great time of year to visit relatives, and friends, my neighbor/friend’s solstice celebration was last night, and it was the perfect night for a bonfire, no wind, the flickering sparks flew straight up to the heavens.  There were songs and poetry, and readings and burning of stuff that just clogs up the pathways to serenity.  We have theater tickets tonight, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.

So this means that work in my studio comes to a halt, and that life gets in the way, and I don’t ever want to make it sound like I’m complaining. I am thrilled to have a family and friends that I love that get in the way of what I also love.  I worked on a secret project all month, secret because the recipient reads this blog.  And I tried to keep up with cooking and cleaning and laundry which doesn’t seem to care what season it is.  And now that my family is home, it is time to focus on them.

HOWEVER…

My home from college daughter is back and how I’ve missed her and her terrific presence in my studio.  Once she slept for four days straight, she wandered in bored, and I’ve been throwing projects at her as fast as she can knock them off.  First up was the annual Christmas epistle.  Yeah, I know, I write one of them.  I have 147 people on my Christmas/Holiday card list, and honestly, I would so much rather get a newsy letter, all about the family escapades, then a manufactured card with a printed name that tells me that the person or persons are alive and not much else.  So I write my annual look back at the year, and report in to anyone who cares to read it.  With pictures…  And it was a great year…  So Bri and I sat up licking and stuffing and sticking stamps and labels on 147 letters and out they went Thursday morning.  For those of you who aren’t on my actual postal list, you can read the letter here.

Brianna also finished winding all the skeins into balls, and while I started winding the warp bundles for the gradient fabric on the AVL warping wheel, she reworked the new Tools of the Trade 15″ loom I bought on eBay last month, resetting the shaft height, (It was woefully incorrect) and replacing the apron cords.  A good wood oiling and the loom looks and functions like it was brand new…

As I wound warp bundles, Brianna took the thrums and wound them into quills for my color and inspiration classes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brianna jumped onto my computer and finished scanning all my dress patterns into Photoshop Bridge to organize them by pattern type, so I could see at a glance all 376 patterns.  Wow.

Meanwhile, I began to sley the bundles for the gradient fabric.  I’m pleased so far, but I won’t really know until I start weaving how successful it will be, I still have to add the supplemental floats, and experiment with wefts. (And finish threading…)  (And finish beaming…)  (And actually finish sleying…)

And of course, in the back of my head I have visions of sugar plums what I want to make for the Convergence Fashion Show entries, and since I have to write this article, I might be able to kill two birds with one stone, (those poor birds…) without breaking the rule that entries cannot have been published.  I have a plan…

Actually, one of the ideas I had was to take some of the scarves I still have from the batch I ran a few months ago.  Other than the fact that they have very long floats, which would have to be tacked down, I think there is enough yardage between the four scarves I have, to create one knock out dress.  I played around with the dress form, and I’m thinking this could look pretty great on a runway.  And I could use another summer weight handwoven dress…

So, I’m off to the theater, with part of my family, and I most likely won’t post before Christmas, so no matter what you celebrate (I just read about a group who celebrates the birth of Sir Issac Newton (Newtonmas) on December 25, with all kinds of science based gifts and food), I hope your days are bright and full of yarn and creativity, and that the new year brings good health and lots and lots of projects!

Happy weaving/sewing/knitting/felting/creating!