Slow and Steady…

I’d like to think I’m a patient person. I suppose it depends on what or whom I’m required to be patient with…

I’ve undertaken a couple of major projects in the studios, which completely thrill me, yet create stress, and challenges, and a couple of probably unrealistic deadlines. That’s my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I work best under unrealistic deadlines. Except when my body doesn’t want to cooperate…

Though my fractured shoulder is improving, little bits at a time, I’m impatient. I’ll admit it. I carry on with great fanfare, but secretly cry a little bit each time I am held back from what I want/need/have to do.

The Rainbow Double Weave Jennifer Moore Workshop sampler turned into a completely reversible jacket is nearing completion. This wasn’t so physically challenging, I just had to sit for hours hand sewing. And I mean hours. About 90% of it is sewn by hand. Including the entire interior. All that remains is the collar, and I hope to get that finished up this week. At least get it mounted on the jacket and ready for handwork.

I am just so in love with this jacket; it is how I imagined it in my head. I combined my 800 vest, with added seam allowances on the front, with the armhole and drop shoulder sleeve from the 1700 tunic, patterns from the Daryl Lancaster pattern collection. There are two layers of wool suiting to create the garment, basted together, with windows cut out, where the double weave cloth fits between the layers, and both layers are then sewn to the double weave cloth in reverse appliqué. Once the individual sections are completed, the outer garment layer is sewn together by machine, and the entire inner layer is sewn by hand at all the seams and hems. There are days I think I’m absolutely brilliant, and there are days where… I’ll leave it up to your imagination 🙂

The fabric inspired by the Magic Puzzle Company Busy Bistro Puzzle I fixed with my daughter, has proven one of my most difficult physical challenges. I use a heavy end feed shuttle, which is tough enough on my poor fractured shoulder, but the loom I’m weaving on, new to me, is a monster. 12 shafts and 54″ wide. The beater alone could kill you! Yet it is gorgeous and comfortable in the hand. Assuming the hand isn’t attached to a fractured shoulder. The most difficult part though, is lifting the shafts. Most picks required lifting 6 of the 12 shafts, and each shaft had 225 inserted eye heddles, which I didn’t remove because there was room on the sides to store them, and I spent so much time putting them on to begin with! Trying as hard as I could, I just couldn’t consistently lift 6 shafts and get a consistently clean shed every time. I’m past my mid-60’s and my joints just can’t lift what I could in my 20’s.

I’d lay awake at night, with my fractured shoulder aching, especially when bad weather approaches, and think, how am I going to weave this… If you ever watched the Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix series, you might remember how the main character, I’ve forgotten her name, could see chess moves happening across the ceiling. That’s the way I sometimes think, I can see the mechanics behind a draft, and how things need to move up or down to create what I want. And what I wanted was a clean shed opening. When that happens in any other situation, I revert to using two feet to help lift, break apart the tie-up, and figure out a logical treadling sequence that will get me what I want with a lot less physical effort. I watched the ceiling in the dark and saw how I could do it. I flew out of bed in the morning and went to the software and reconfigured the tie up and crossed my fingers. (An apology to my non-weaving readers, this all makes no sense, just know it worked.)

The original tie-up and treadling
Revised tie-up and treadling using two feet.

It was miraculous, and magical and I just wove like the wind, or maybe a slight breeze because I’m still dealing with a fractured shoulder. I use to be able to weave like the wind. Maybe someday soon. But I’ve got a deadline now, and I’m frantically trying to pace myself to get what I need to get done before April 15th. That’s the deadline to submit the five garments I’m planning to exhibit at the Convergence Fashion Show this summer, sponsored by the Handweavers Guild of America, in Knoxville, TN, as an invited artist. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to send, but I want more choices than I have, from what I’ve made in the last two years, and I’d love for this puzzle inspired fabric to be one of them.

So given my arm limitations, I’ve just resigned myself to only empty one pirn a day, with 2/12 wool, which is about what my shoulder can handle. Still, that’s about 15″ and that adds up. I looked at my warp beam, and was shocked to see the I’m on the last round of paper. This was a seven yard warp. I’m almost there…

What really surprised me, is I’ve had no tension issues at all so far, which I completely expected given the dozens of different yarns I’m combining together in a dozen different structures. It will be interesting to see what happens when the fabric is off the loom and washed…

On a completely different note, spring is here, though we are supposed to get one last frost tonight through Tuesday, but in celebration of my late husband’s 71st birthday last Tuesday, my daughter and I went to the garden center and bought a couple flats of cold weather greens, and some pansies. We got everything planted, started the spring clean up in the yard, which means bags of animal excrement, because, well, if you have dogs, you know what spring means…

The garden center was just a riot of color…

And last Tuesday I was interviewed for the Handweavers Guild of America series Textiles and Tea, which I adore; The Textiles and Tea interviews are the highlight of my week. They are live interviews, over zoom, but also simulcast over Facebook, and of course recorded. You don’t need a Facebook account to watch, it is a public site. The recording will eventually be posted on the Handweavers Guild of America YouTube channel, (it might take a couple of months) but for now, if you missed the interview, you can watch it here. Kathi’s questions were thoughtful, and fun to answer. Apparently there were 600 people watching in the webinar, and another couple hundred watching the live Facebook feed, which they said was a record. I don’t know, I just had fun answering the questions. Everything for me has a story, which is why I still have something to say after almost 14 years of blogging. I know few people blog anymore, and far fewer people read the blog than did a half dozen years ago, but that isn’t why I write it. I used to journal, but it is more fun to type what I’m thinking and be able to add cool pictures, and then be able to go back and search for what I want, because blogs have that built in feature. And it is there forever, or as long as I pay for the hosting fees…

So dear readers, spring is upon us, and that means outdoor stuff, and I have a lovely garden with ponds and fish and places to sit and weave, all coming to life, and I’ll have a garden full of salad fixin’s, and I think, each spring, that this season I’m going to spend my time outdoors and do fiber-y things, and by fall I realize that none of that happened. It is an amusing cycle, but still, I am determined each spring and we will see how the year progresses… Deadlines await…

All in a Day’s Work…

Actually, that title should read, all in a month’s work, but whose counting?

This has been a year so far, enough said…  Obviously we are desperately seeking to return to some kind of normalcy, and to each of us, that means something different.  My girlfriend came over yesterday, never came in the house, we sat across the deck from each other and chatted.  They we played recorder.  We were working on the Brandenburg Concerto, and though I’ve been practicing, I hadn’t played it with anyone else.  And because it is such a lengthy score for something like 10 recorders, I am playing my part using Parts, which means in the music world, only your part is in front of you, not the whole score, so you don’t have a clue what anyone else is playing until you hear it.  If you lose your place, good luck finding a way back in.  But my friend and I managed to get through 1/3 of the score and it sounded pretty amazing on my little deck in my gorgeous gardens.  The birds always sing along…

My friend said to me, that when things return to normal, the first thing on her agenda is a salon appointment.  She has higher maintenance hair than I do, so I get that.  I think my first priority is to get my hearing checked.  Yes, it was on the list anyway.  I know I have a hearing issue, I’ve known since I was 18 months old and was basically deaf.  But that was fixed and my hearing is actually fine, actually a little overly sensitive. According to the people who have checked it in the past, my hearing is normal, but I have a processing disorder.  I hear what you say, I just don’t understand what you say because unless I see your face, and am basically lip reading, it all comes in as a jumbled mess, especially if there is any background noise.  I’m OK with instrumental music, but not when words are added.  I watch my son sing along to things coming out of his phone, and none of it sounds like anything I can recognize.  I’m sort of use to it and adjust.  But the other day, when I went to the post office to mail a book to Canada, I had to have a conversation with the employee in the post office.  Both of us were of course wearing masks, heavily gloved and well over 6 feet apart.  She answered my query, but of course because I couldn’t see her mouth, I had no idea what she said to me.  I explained that and asked if she could speak really slowly and separate her words carefully.  She pulled her mask down and said, “No, I can’t, I’m Hispanic and we all talk this fast.”.  We both started to laugh and it was such a lovely moment where we both acknowledged that the world is messed up and nothing is normal.

Worse though, is my eyes.  I fear I have developed cataracts, and that with use everything gets cloudy and I can’t focus and I’m really struggling between three different pairs of glasses to get the job done.  So hearing and eye appointments are top of my list.  Those are sort of essentials for me…

My days are filled with typical things, a curtain valance ripped from the wall.

The culprits.

Fortunately my handyman was able to come in with wall toggles, and a mask and gloves and replace the brackets ripped out of the wall in short order.  I sat in the dining room watching.

My gardens are lovely and I spend my meals sitting by the pond and enjoying what my late husband started and a well coordinated crew finished over the years since his death.  Being outside like that I’ve noticed more of what actually happens in nature and it isn’t always pretty.  We have a Blue Jay terrorist in the neighborhood.  I always knew they were nasty little beasts but didn’t realize they were actual carnivores.  Right in front of me, one flew in and stole a tiny baby robin from the nest.  The bereft mother robin tried to save her baby and of course the blue jay won that round.  I was just as bereft and couldn’t stop apologizing to her.  We just looked at each other with despair. There were two other birds left in the next, so she and the dad continued to feed the babies while my friend and I played recorders on the deck. This morning I went out to see why the power was out to all my outdoor fixtures and the garage.  I found blood all over the deck and a bit away on the walk, another dead baby bird.  Again, the mother robin flew up and looked at me as if to say, the world is cruel, and we just have to carry on.  My daughter cleaned up the carnage and I figured out the electrical problem.  All in a day’s work.  

My birthday was Friday.  This is an important year, I turned 65 and am now on Medicare.  Such a huge relief.  As much as I appreciated having access to the Affordable Care Act this past year once my cobra from my late husband’s policy ended, I can’t tell you how worried I was about getting sick on the road because my very expensive insurance did not cover me outside of North Jersey.  So this is a big deal.  I made it to Medicare.

My birthday was actually lovely.  My sister and my girlfriend made homemade cards, because you can’t really go and hang out in the card store and read cards.  There are about 250 birthday wishes on facebook, and I haven’t made a dent in commenting, liking or whatever.  Patience everyone.  I live with my adult children for now, and my son came in from his overnight shift Friday morning, cooked an awesome brunch skillet, we had wine and he headed off to bed. Yes, I realize I was drinking at 10am.  Don’t judge me…  My daughter made sure I had plenty of wine and had ordered sushi take out from our favorite place the night before (they sell out quickly).  So we have a gorgeous sushi platter, wine, and I never got out of my pajamas the whole day.  I had spent the day in edits for my pattern support materials and was completely cross-eyed, but we sat down to start fixing one of the puzzles I got myself for my birthday.  Three hours later, and some additional wine, and voila!  This was one of my favorites.  I want to fix it again soon.  Without my daughter so it will take longer.

And so dear readers, it has been a busy month of editing and testing, and reworking and testing some more.  Today I launched the 1700 Drop Shoulder Tunic pattern, earlier in the week I launched the 700 Set in Sleeve Tunic pattern.  What’s the difference?  My 700 tunic has a set in sleeve.  It is more feminine and creates a better shoulder line, I much prefer it personally.  It is the same sleeve I use in my jackets (patience, we are starting on them next) and it frames the upper body well. 

But there was a need for the drop shoulder version, the sleeve and armhole are more like a man’s shirt sleeve, construction is different, and for the men in my classes this is a much preferred look.  And for my younger students, or anyone wanting a more gender neutral garment it is more appropriate.  The hood variation with the drop shoulder is pretty much my daughter’s wardrobe.  View the pattern here

What I really want to point out dear readers, is the huge amount of technical information available for free on my website.  All of the directions for the patterns I’ve published at this point have been reformatted and refreshed, metric equivalents added, and they have all been heavily edited by a sewing professional editor.  They are available here for free. No need to buy the pattern to take a look.  

Those who have taken classes with me know I love using 15 denier nylon tricot as a seam finish.  I highly recommend it for the tunics.  I’ve procured a good amount, in about five colors (grey is back), and had my store tech support send me information about how to build a color choice into my supply listings.  So if you want Fusi-Knit interfacing, there is one link, just choose from the drop down menu if you want white or black.  And there is a link for 15 denier nylon tricot. Just pick the color you want.  A 1 yd by 54″ pack is only $4.  You’ll have to cut the bias strips yourself, but if you are ordering red dot tracer pattern paper and some interfacing, you can also pick up a pack or two of tricot.  I haven’t figured out what to do about shipping because it is so ridiculous.  The computer adds a shipping amount per item. Which I set.  Which is fine, unless you are ordering multiple items and then shipping gets just silly.  I have a query out to my tech support to figure out an alternative way.  If your shipping comes to $60, or some ridiculous amount, know I will absolutely refund you the difference over what it costs to ship.  I pretty much refund any amount more than about a $2.00 difference (there is the cost of the packaging to consider.)

As I build my instructions to be used by people who don’t take my classes, I understand that the next step for me will be accompanying videos.  My daughter and I have a lengthy agenda.  I fear I’ll start traveling again before I get to accomplish it all.  Meanwhile, in an unrelated conversation with my editor from Threads, when I checked the proof of the Q&A column I answered on Stay Stitching,  which will  appear in the next issue I believe, I found out that the video I made for them on Stay Stitching is available for free under their basics heading. Access it here. This is such an important step during the construction process for me, and it would have been one of the first videos I produced to go along with my written information.  But I don’t have to now, it exists already!  I did 8 other videos for them about a year and a half ago, and over the last year and a half they were slowly edited and released.  I believe the rest are all under the Threads Insider membership.  There is some terrific content there, well worth the subscription.  And I think the first two weeks are free, so as long as you are binge watching…

So dear readers, stay safe as things start to open up.  Enjoy the outdoors, though sometimes it too can be cruel.  Play with yarn, learn a new song, read a book, cook something awesome.  This is a time of exploration.  

Stay tuned…