Working Really Hard…

First, a huge thank you to all of my sewing friends who have stopped their lives to make masks.  I feel hugely guilty I’m not participating, because, as I explained in the last post, I don’t have any materials, my daughter used them all a couple months ago for Australian Marsupial pouches for all of the injured critters in the fires.  I’d have to go out to the store to procure supplies and that would really defeat the point of hiding at home.  My daughter was able to find a small pack of elastic in the bottom of a craft bin, and used some scraps to make masks for us.  She has a fine metal’s bench and rolled floral wire for the nose piece.

And so I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked, or so it seems.  The big news is I actually managed to, after running a test by a bunch of trusted sewing friends, launch a pattern today.  I started with the simplest one I have, to see how this all works.  I edited the directions and the intro to the pattern about 19 times.  To the point where I just didn’t care anymore, which is a dangerous place to be, I can assure you.  So for better or for worse, you can purchase the PDF download of my bias top.  More patterns to follow.

The pattern is available for purchase here, and the directions, which will continue to be free, are now on my website.  It is easier there to keep updated.  And while I was there, I redid my Extra’s page, because the amount of stuff on it was becoming untenable.  Found some fun stuff I had forgotten about, like this essay I did on making paperdolls as a kid.  

I’m always open to opinions and edits.  Obviously the pattern will work for commercial fabrics, but I have always been a handweaver who works with the handwoven community, so yardage requirements are specifically for handweavers.  We are working on the 500 vest now, as I write,  that’s the one with the armhole band. We are into the fourth round of edits.

Meanwhile, we are fixing puzzles like crazy, I always have one up in the living room.  The latest one, a lovely gift from my sister, is really challenging, I’m sorry to say not my favorite.  It is all shades of grey. Dalmatian puppies.   Except for a couple little areas with pink feet.  I much prefer color.  Lots of it.

I finished my dress.  This was a challenge as well.  Just about everything in my life right now is a challenge, but we weavers are made of stern stuff, and we know how to pick up a shuttle and carry on…

I want to say it takes a village, and after my last blog post, and how I wasn’t sure how I felt about the leather, one of my long time friends, Sheila O’Hara, extraordinary weaver who wrote the book on weaving contemporary Jacquard, before digital Jacquard looms became available, casually commented, “Why don’t you embroider on the leather?”  Yeah, no.  Embroidering on leather would be really really challenging, because you can’t sew into leather easily, usually it involves pliers.  BUT…  I could couch yarns, like the kind I wove with…  This was a nail biter, I did samples and tests, but small ones, I didn’t want to waste the precious leather, and once I started in, there was no going back, you can’t rip stitches out of leather because the holes will show.  This was quite the nail biter…

I’m so happy with how this turned out.  And the closure on the back worked out brilliantly.  One of the couched threads as it came off the back neck, I was able to crochet into a loop, and couch it back on to cross the upper back again and end up back at the neckline.  Oh, and the dress has pockets!

The dress fits like a glove.  It actually isn’t supposed to, but I’m packing on a little weight here, because all I’m doing is eating and sewing and sitting on my butt by the computer rewriting directions and intros and cover pages.  I really have to go back to online yoga, since my local yoga studio is shut down for the quarantine.  And stop eating cookies and drinking wine…

And so I was able to cut out the many pieces to make this motorcycle vest in the leftover fabric from the dress and the leftover leather.

I still have almost a full skin and a half to do something fun with.

I’m having fun sitting and sewing, and the 16″ metal separating zipper arrived today from WAWAK.com.  

And so dear readers, I hope you stay safe, more than 2300 people have died in NJ, many of them first responders, EMT’s, hospital staff, store employees, police officers.  I hope where you live it all seems overblown.  I can assure you, it isn’t here.  We are a dense state, and are suffering for it.

Play with yarn, do whatever it takes to be as distracted and productive as you can.  I’ve actually started to pick salads from the garden.  There is something renewing about that.  Stay off never ending news, it is really really painful.  For those of you making masks, I bow down with respect.  

Stay tuned…

Change is inevitable…

I swore I would not go to bed tonight until I put up a long overdue blog post.  I’ve been through a lot of drama, trauma, challenges and difficulties in my life.  And I’ve survived them all, mostly.  As a matter of fact today is the 18th anniversary, 2/22/2002, of my breast cancer diagnosis.  18 years of huge changes, my children grew up, for better or for worse.  My son became a soldier.  My daughter survived a wicked illness, went into the sciences and now she is in the arts.  My beloved husband passed away almost 4 years ago.  I was widowed at 61.  

After my husband died, I thought I’d give myself 5 years to clean out the house, make all the extensive and necessary repairs needed, and figure out what I wanted to do with my life.  So many things happened to so many people I love, and they all played a huge role in where I am now. So almost four years in, I made some huge decisions that have brought me to where I am right at this moment.  

Back in the late fall, I became increasingly aware, that it would make sense to hire my daughter and try to slowly back away from the only life I’ve ever known, that of being a fiber artist in whatever form that took, whether it was craft fairs in the 80’s, or learning to teach in the 90’s while trying to deal with toddlers, conferences, exhibition work, and of course writing and publishing, though it all, I had the support of my husband while I raised our kids and though there were lean years, there were also years where I was a complete crazy person with so much work I had no idea where to begin.  

The problem was, the studio which I’d known and loved since we built it in the mid 1980’s was too small to accommodate both my daughter and my equipment, and yarn and looms and other fiber related paraphernalia kept appearing almost on our doorstep.  We have something like 37 looms between us.  And that’s just the shaft looms.  It was getting harder and harder to work,  and I was getting more and more cranky and frustrated and early one morning around the end of October, I woke up to a voice in my head saying, “Just renovate the garage”.  Was it my late husband?  I can’t say for sure, but I mulled it over in my head, was it even possible?  And of course if that’s the studio, what happens to the existing studio?  And the basement where my daughter is living?  This is a hundred plus year old house.  The basement is really a cellar with a poured concrete floor.  What about all the crap in the garage, and the woodworking equipment, and Brianna also wants a fine metals bench, and all her craft supplies…

It was suggested that we rent a space off site.  I immediately dismissed that idea, I’ve never “gone” to work in the last 40 years, unless it involved getting on a plane to teach a workshop.  I have always had the luxury of being able to juggle office tasks, household tasks, errands, creative work, meal prep, laundry, and social time with people I care about without having to do a 9-5 thing.  Sometimes I work well into the night.  Sometimes I put in 16 hour days.  Sometimes I don’t work at all.  Sometimes my butt doesn’t get out of the chair at the computer desk, like today.  I talked to my handyman.  I talked to my sister the architect.  I talked to my plumber guys.  I talked to garage door people.  I talked to friends on facebook.  I talked to anyone who would listen.  

And so it began.  The garage, which needed to remain a garage, for tax purposes, and I kind of like the warehouse sort of look anyway, needed to be cleaned out, and cleaned up.  I needed lighting, heat, air conditioning and the decision was eventually made to install a dye utility sink with cabinets and counters so I wasn’t mixing dyepots anymore in the guest bathroom.  

Meanwhile my beloved studio became a trash heap.  

Slowly things began to shift, this couldn’t move there until that was clear, that couldn’t be installed until this was painted.  This had to shift to get that moved to over there.  Brianna called it a parking lot, I called it a giant game of tetris.  We have been playing this for two months.  And all this time I’ve not really been able to work.  Though I had a handyman who hung lights, painted concrete and installed cabinets and counters, it was Brianna who assembled probably $3,000 worth of IKEA storage units.  I couldn’t have done any of this without either of them.  We hauled 72″ wall units down the balcony stairs in the snow, into the back door of the garage.  We packed yarn, we moved yarn, we reset yarn on shelves.  I spent evenings rolling fabrics and tying them in bundles.  We moved looms, we moved cabinets and storage units, and slowly we saw it all come to life.

My old studio became a proper bedroom for Brianna.  She built a huge floor to ceiling PAX closet system from IKEA with glass doors, and except for falling off a stool she was standing on and nearly breaking her ankle, we survived.  We compared bruises, cuts, aches and pains.

The trash men and recycling DPW guys hate us.  

The basement would ultimately become my sewing room, we realized pretty quickly that no matter how big a space you think you have, it isn’t enough.  So the garage would be the weaving studio and the basement would be the sewing studio.  ULINE mats tetris’d all over the concrete floors in both the garage and basement.  There is still so much crap in the garage, looms are on top of looms and the shed out back will eventually be a small wood shop once I repair the electric line that no longer works.  

Meanwhile, the two largest looms couldn’t move to the new space until the fabric on them was woven off, because the looms had to be dismantled to get them down the back stairs and through the doorways.  So this happened.  8 yards washed.  All of the mohair and wool warps are hand dyed.  By me.  In the old guest bathroom.  The other loom is waiting for Brianna.

Meanwhile, life happened.  I had a family funeral last week in Maryland.  My mom’s sister passed, and though it is really  hard to say goodbye to the generation ahead of us, it was glorious to reunite with cousins I haven’t seen in years, and meet their grown children, the next generation.  Bri and I were asked the Tuesday before Valentine’s day if we would be witnesses at an impromptu wedding at Luna Parc on Valentine’s Day.  Ricky Boscarino would officiate, and it would just be Brianna and me and the bride and groom.  The bride was Beth Schwartz whom I’ve grown to love like a fiber sister, she is in charge of among other things, the weaving/fiber studios at Peters Valley.  It seemed fitting that Brianna, who worked for her at the Valley all last summer, and I would be there to see her get hitched to her guy David.  And as a thank you, she gave me the most perfect lovely leaded glass panel to hang in the new weaving studio.  

And still, we carried on.  I built and gave a guild lecture on my trip to Morocco in January, and we taught a Learn to Weave class for the Jockey Hollow Guild at the end of that month.  16 new weavers!

I built and gave a lecture on Doup Leno, a lace weaving technique I wrote about in Heddlecraft Magazine, to a different guild in February, and Brianna built and gave a lecture to the first guild that same month, on Krokbragd, a Norwegian rug weaving technique.  Last week we gave another Learn to Weave class for Silk City Fibers at the Lion Brand Yarn outlet in Carlstadt.  18 new weavers!  Those little Structo’s are getting a workout.

I also had to have an emergency root canal last week, apparently a previous root canal started to abscess, and it turned out that there was a rare hidden third root in the molar and by the time I had the emergency procedure, my face was in such pain it was hard to accomplish anything.  I appreciate gifted medical people.

And still we carried on.  Last Wednesday my first private student in the new sewing space arrived in an UBER, this had been booked for awhile, five days of private sewing lessons.  Meg was a joy to work with, I feel really lucky that we finished the sewing studio in the basement in time, and that the space really really worked.  Meg is making a basic jacket from a gorgeous wool she picked up at Mood Fabrics in NYC.  She will be back Monday and Tuesday to finish.  I had my son pick up a door mirror today from Target, you can’t have a sewing studio without a full length mirror.  Duh…

Wednesday my new carriage style garage doors will be installed.  They will be a better R value and have little windows across the upper section.  Somewhere in there I’m hoping to have the split ductless HVAC system installed as well.  Of course all of the looms will have to move out of the bays for the garage door installation, I’m hoping it isn’t raining on Wednesday.  Thursday I drive to Lancaster PA to give another guild lecture, home Friday.  The following week I leave for 10 days of teaching in Oregon.  Boxes are being filled as I write with the materials and handouts I need to ship ahead.

And Brianna stopped at some point assisting in the move, to create work to take to the Baltimore Craft Market, happening this weekend.  She is one of the emerging artist exhibitors under the banner of Peters Valley who has a display at the Craft Market.  She has become quite proficient on the knitting machine, and since all of the looms except the Structo’s have been out of commission, she focused on creating the most amazing dragon shawls and cowls to display.  Of course all last week, every horizontal surface big enough in the house had dragon shawls with a two yard wing span, drying and blocking on cutting boards all over the house.  Here is one of the prototypes.  A couple of photos showed up on Facebook of the Peters Valley booth at the craft market, and I caught a glimpse of her work and of Brianna wearing one of her shawls, in bright blue wool crepe.

This is where the weaving studio/dye area stands at this point, I can’t wait to have the garage doors installed and some heat in there, we have done all of this with a couple inadequate space heaters, in our down coats, and thankfully this has been one of the milder winters I’ve ever witnessed. Behind the white cabinets with all the books, is a hidden hallway for all the yarn.  

 

Some of the take aways here, 

I am never ever moving from this house.  I will die first.

A good puzzle and a glass of wine will get you through just about anything.

We have an enormous amount of textile equipment and will be able to teach most everything and anything you could possibly want to learn.

The two double hung windows in the garage completely frame my husband’s beloved ponds, so I get to see the waterfalls and the fish while gazing out the windows while I weave.

My daughter is a rock star.

My late husband had a hand in this whole affair, I’m sure.

Skilled craftsmen are priceless.

Obviously I’m not retiring anytime soon, I have a couple of big beautiful studios and lots of fiber to play with.

And I’m never ever moving out of this house.  Did I mention that?

Stay tuned…

Full Days and Future Possibilities…

Once again, I’m prepping for my next trip, if it is fall, I’m probably somewhere.  This fall I’ll be bouncing from NH to WA to WI to NC and points in between.  To say I feel like a bit of a yo-yo would be putting it mildly.  I have so loved having these last four weeks to myself, to be busy and productive and unencumbered by house stuff and contractors and children.  My only issue if you will, is that my beloved Ranger is mad at me because I’m holed up in the studio most days and he has taken to lifting his leg around the house and marking his displeasure.  I know he needs to be neutered, but the breeder wants to breed him once more and she owns those rights.  So I have to put up with a dog who is pissed at me and give him as much me time as I can.  And I have discovered what a black light can uncover…

Meanwhile, I have been working fast and furiously on updating a couple of my class patterns with details that have been requested and were sort of at the bottom of my very lengthy to-do list.  I took advantage of some uninterrupted time and really dove in.  Drafting a small detail like a hood on my tunic pattern is more complicated than it seems.  Drafting the hood was nothing.  I did that in about 15 minutes.  Then comes drafting all the sizes.  And while I was at it, I’ve had requests for more of a drop shoulder, common on men’s shirts, so I redrafted the tunic body as well with that option.  Then I had to test it.  I did it in a sheet first, and made it to fit my daughter, who is quite a different body than me, and a lot younger, apparently having a hood on everything is popular among millennials.  She loved it.

Then I tested it on a version to fit me, with the drop shoulder, in a lovely wool I had in my stash, and I have to admit, I would wear that…

Once I know it is correct, then comes the fun part, not only do I have to copy all the patterns multiple times, but I have to design cover sheets for the pattern and redraw the handout.  That meant another dozen or so illustrations, and then once the handout is reworked, converting the whole thing to  PDF and uploading to my shop so students who want the directions for the pattern they have traced, can always have the latest version. If you have already bought a version of one of my pattern directions, you should be able to click on the link you were sent and download the latest version.  It is free, and available here, but of course, you have to take my class to get the pattern.  Please don’t write me nasty letters about me not offering the patterns for sale.  Know that I want to, and that I haven’t had the time or expertise to do that conversion, but it is in the works.  I just need to hire someone…  More about that later…

And while I was on a roll, I went ahead and drafted the pattern for the combined jacket and collared vest.  I had made this jacket a couple years ago, by combining two of my class patterns and a number of students jumped on it, but I had to physically help them do the conversion and there were of course no directions.  So on my list was “draft Noro jacket pattern and write directions.”  Here is the original jacket, woven with Noro Toiyo Lace in the weft.

I managed that last week, making copies of the patterns on Monday and writing directions, which I will say I do enjoy, and I love making those little illustrations, but my eyes were bleary and my brain was fogged by the time I got the proofed version.  And there is no telling that I got it 100%.  Just today I got a lovely note from one of my students who had downloaded my directions for the bias top she had traced in a class.  I had added a swing dress to the pattern, and built a handout.  I apparently left out a couple of critical steps, oops, she figured it out, but wrote to tell me.  So this afternoon, I edited that, reprinted all the incorrect pages for the handouts I prepared for Harrisville next week, and updated the store file here

Here is the test version of the collared jacket with zipper.  This is a lovely woven wool that I bought from Mood fabrics many years ago.  It worked out perfectly for this jacket.  The directions are here.

I snuck away this weekend back to Peters Valley to take a class, something I promised myself I would do every summer.  Sharron Parker is a wonderful feltmaker, and I had the privilege of rooming with her when I traveled to Cuba back in 2018.  When I saw she was teaching at the Valley, I jumped on it.  It was terrific fun.  I have done a fair amount of felting in my day, but I’d rather thread 1400 ends on a loom than do the physical effort it takes to roll felted fabric.  So I assumed I’d be quite sore by the end of the three day class.  

Sharon actually had a lovely plan for helping get from point A to point B, the class was mixed levels and everyone had fun playing along.  First we made geodes and cut them apart.  

By slicing them further, and laying them on stacked batts, and further felting them into the batts, we made some lovely designs.  The geodes did all the work.  Later Saturday night I used my sewing machine back in the studio to outline parts and my needle felting machine to make certain areas more secure and flatter.  I can still go back and do more work, something to look forward to…

She gave us each a page from a Wolf Kahn calendar, and told us to try to replicate the colors by blending, either with a drum carder or hand cards.  I really worked at this to see how closely I could replicate it.  I’m pretty happy with how close I came…

And then with another half dozen ideas for directions to go, I  spent all of Sunday playing with wool and hot soapy water.  I made a small stacked batt piece, and instead of slicing linear like I usually do, I cut into it horizontally and vertically, and loved the effect.  I made a second batt, this one much thicker and more colorful, but I’m so in love with the surface I’m not ready to cut into it yet.

The scraps from cutting out the piece above got felted into a lovely work, because with wool, you don’t have to waste anything…

Meanwhile, I watched my daughter in action as the fibers assistant for the class.  She didn’t disappoint. Felted unicorn horn and matching ears…

She has been up at Peters Valley all summer as the fibers assistant, and has been exposed to so much, but when I taught my yardage class up there three weeks ago, she had signed up to take a metals class working with tin cans way back in January so was unavailable to help me.  Let me just say that I completely get it when she says after each class that the teacher wants to adopt her.  And lucky me, I get first dibs and have made the decision over the last couple of weeks that I do need help taking my own business where I want it to go, especially after losing my beloved Cynthia who moved to southern NJ.  My daughter is really really good.  Of course if you have followed my blog regularly over the last ten years, you’d know that.  There is a lot for us to work out, especially with the financial arrangements, and the thought that I’m taking on the responsibility for an employee and that she is related to me.  Like today, when I was training her (she is between classes at the Valley and came home to help with the final prep for Harrisville), on how to create the composite handouts and upload to the eShop, she kept rolling her eyes and saying, MUTH-ER…  I’m a millennial and I know my way around a computer…  

One of the jobs I gave her today besides binding all the handouts, was to relabel all the Texturized Weft interfacing I sell, because when I bought another 400 yards, I got caught in the trade war with China and had to pay an additional 30% tariff on the two rolls.  I knew the company who designed it was French, but the fabric actually is made now in China.  Sigh…  Anyway, I needed her to cut more of the Fusi Knit, and package and label, and handling 200 yard rolls x 60″ wide interfacing is brutal.  Those things must weight 70 pounds.  She did about two packages and said, I have an idea and she disappeared…

She returned with a bunch of poles and connections from my old craft fair booth, which we keep in old ski bags in the garage because well, you never know what fun things you can do with poles and connectors.  She rigged up this…

 

And then after cutting another package, she disappeared again and came back with more poles, because she wanted an underneath support, so came up with version 2.0…

This is why I need to hire my millennial daughter, who is as bright as her late father, and needs to be in a position to grow her own brand and develop her own life as an artist and develop her own workshops and seminars and I wouldn’t be who I am today without the support of my late husband, and I feel like I owe that to her, she is talented and really really good.  And I’ve already downloaded the classes for her to learn Adobe Illustrator which will allow her to convert my patterns, once scanned into vector drawings…  Stay tuned for that…

And I’m even managed to do some weaving.  The towels are progressing, and I love this pattern, from Webs, their Kaleidoscope towels, because you can change the weft and get all sorts of different effects.  I think I’ve completed seven so far, on a 14 yard warp.

And I finally got the Retro Palette scarves up and running.  I love the subtle coloring of this one, and I got to play with my new toy.  Peters Valley had one of these and I immediately ordered it.  It is a large lit magnifying glass that really helps for tasks like threading and in this case hemstitching on the loom.  I want one in every room…

And because I desperately wanted to squeeze in one more thing, I made a padded bag from the leftovers from a towel run I did a few years ago.  The last bit wasn’t big enough for a full towel, and the guild show and sale is coming in a couple months, and I have a lot of scrap to get creative with…

Stay tuned…