Tag: Chaos Draft

Mea Culpa…

Please Forgive me dear readers, no wonder I’ve been getting letters to make sure I’m still alive… I remember well Saturday night Catholic Church confessional when I was a kid, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been six weeks since my last blog post…”

At the beginning of the month I caught this horoscope in my newspaper. Once in awhile I’m brought up short.

I need that reminder frequently.

I’d love to say that life in retirement is blissful and easy and boring. Yeah, no. I only retired from teaching on the road. I didn’t stop my calendar from filling up. I wanted to avoid this photo below, a photo I shot before I loaded my car to teach 8 classes at the NY Sheep and Wool Festival 9 years ago. It popped up on Facebook as a reminder…

I need these constant reminders that as chaotic as my life is now, it was much much worse…

I did take on a number of private students this fall. I’m pouring a lot of money into producing the YouTube videos, and paying my daughter a salary to make them happen, and I could use the income. (No, I don’t make anything off of YouTube, I’d need a couple million subscribers.) And I wanted to see what it was like to be in my space, using my equipment and supplies to do what I love.

And I’m enjoying the experience of having students in house. Cooking for different types of diets is a bit daunting, but I’m managing that, good skills to develop. But the calendar is rather full, one group leaves, another one comes in. That should slow up in another few weeks, but I also, in my quest to learn all the things, signed up for things I didn’t really have time to fit into the schedule. They were remote right, so they should be able to just fit right in… Between the student on Saturday, and teaching in Michigan on Monday and Ontario on Tuesday… I’m finding the need to print my schedule out hourly. That’s a first.

Still, no regrets… My guild was sponsoring a workshop with Jennifer Moore, whom I adore, the expert on double weave structures. For those that aren’t weavers, double weave means you are weaving two (or more) layers of fabric simultaneously, one over the other. There are advantages to this, but our focus was on weaving blocks, where the layers could change place, side by side. And the warp was her famous Rainbow warp, I used 4 ends of 8/2 Tencel as I moved through the color wheel.

Though I did have experience with double weave, this was a fun and challenging workshop, and I finally was able to get a warp on the new to me 25″ Macomber that I rescued and rehabbed. It wove like a champ…

And while I listened to a guild presentation last week, a different guild than the one that sponsored the double weave workshop, I sat and made cordage from leeks (the green parts), which I had sliced very thin lengthwise and let dry, giving a little spritz to soften them up when I was ready to use them. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to make cordage for basketry.

And in my spare time, I’ve been mulling over a draft I got from a friend, it has been making its rounds. This one is for something called Drunken Squares. It is a wicked cool fabric, and the draft was sent to me in the form of a profile draft. If you aren’t a weaver, skip this paragraph, it won’t mean anything to you. If you are a beginning weaver, this is a profile draft, meaning it isn’t something you can weave. You have to substitute each block in the threading and treadling with an actual structure. Each block is a unit. What you put into that unit depends on what structure you want. And since this is a six block structure, I thought I could do it with my 12 shaft loom. I tried, for a month. I got it to 10 shafts, and then when I spent another week or two I realized I could actually do it on 8. Most of my friends have done the draft effortlessly with 16 shafts. I don’t have that many. I plugged the profile draft into my weaving software (Fiberworks) and went to the block substitution tool. I worked for hours. I ended up with a tied weave, on 8 shafts, but it needed 14 treadles. I have 10. So I worked for hours more… In my spare time.

I got something I thought would work, 8 shafts, 10 treadles using more than one at a time. And no, I’m not ready to share the draft. I worked too hard on it.

I wound the warp, and went to my small 25″ 8 shaft Tools of the Trade floor loom, and looked at the treadles, and decided that this poor little loom, which I’ve had since probably 1982, could use a really good treadle scrubbing. I used a magic eraser, they are amazing for removing years of gunk, and gave the treadles a good polishing with my go to loom feed, Howard’s Feed and Wax. Even though my poor little loom still has its nose a bit out of joint since the acquisition of the Macomber, my treadles are very happy.

I beamed my warp. This is 10/2 perle cotton, in colors I had on the shelf. I had to drop one stripe to fit on my 25″ loom, but that’s OK.

And I got everything working and started to weave. I did it. There is such a personal triumph when you focus on something really challenging, determination keeps me going. I refused to admit defeat. And it worked. I did it. The drunken squares are really drunken rectangles, but I didn’t care.

While I was working on the loom next to it for the doubleweave class, I glanced over and thought, duh, just change the size of the blocks… ’cause that’s what we were doing in the doubleweave class. There are days I’m freakin’ brilliant, and there are days when I think, where did I leave my brain?

So I did another block of the repeat, and now I have real drunken squares. I remember years ago working on a two shuttle structure and having the shuttles constantly falling in my lap. And I designed a fix… This is a small loom with a small weaving area. So I took the second back beam (there is a second warp beam which automatically comes with a second back beam) and I slipped the cover on it I had made years ago, inserted a 5″ wide plastic ruler, and slipped the whole thing on the front to make a shuttle rest. I’m amazed I found all the parts considering the studio move.

And we are back to filming videos again for my YouTube channel The Weaver Sews, after a 6 week hiatus. Each video takes about 20-25 hours a week between my daughter and me, to produce. In my spare time… hahahahahah!

I finished filming the videos for my summer shirt. Just in time for fall, which has been delightfully summer weather… Handpainted skeins circular wound into an ombré effect warp. I sell this draft on my website… Also, the pattern is my 1000 swing dress cut into a shirt length, with the neck and in-seam button-down placket (no buttonholes to make!) from my 700 or 1700 Tunic. Those patterns are available in my eShop. Videos will soon be released on how to do the collar and armhole facings, last week’s video drop featured the in-seam buttonhole placket.

I planned this fabric from a few handdyed skeins while my husband was dying, worst week of my life. Took everything in my brain to focus on anything but what was happening to our lives. I’ve held onto this fabric for five years waiting for it to tell me what it wanted to be. I can’t tell you how proud I am of this shirt. I did add shoulder epaulettes, since I couldn’t get the shoulders to match. It is one of my favorite cheats. The contrasting fabric is a heavy weight linen. Here is a photo of the original skeins I used to create this fabric. I called the fabric Chaos. Fitting…

And so my retirement life isn’t any less chaotic. And as I vacuumed and dusted my weaving studio this afternoon, I thought about how much, as chaotic as it is, I love my life. There is always something calling to me, wanting to be designed, engineered, played with, created, or even cleaned, cooked or washed. And now as I cook I think, gee, can I use this for making a basket? Will it make cordage? And the animals always demand time. I’m never never never bored. There is a lot of life to cram into my remaining days and I want every minute I can get. Because we never know. I want to learn all the things, do all the things, and be all the things, in my spare time…

Stay tuned…

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile there is a tropical storm moving in tonight.  Finally, a typical summer…  At least we need the rain desperately…

Meanwhile, I launched another pattern for download.  And I’m beginning to add Lookbooks for some of the patterns.  I’ve had a number of requests from potential buyers to see what people are doing with the patterns.  I know this is a thing on Ravelry, and it does help to see what people do with the pattern, and how it fits all different body types.  This is one more thing on my never ending to do list, but I’ve managed to post three of them, one for the vest below, and one for the 700/1700 tunics and the 100 jacket.  I don’t know if it helps, and obviously the patterns are too new for purchasers to show what they’ve done with them, but I’ve been using these patterns for years, especially the jackets, and I have a collection of mostly in progress, not completely finished versions from all of my workshops.

What’s important here is that if I used a photo of you in your garment, I cropped all body parts, so you wouldn’t be recognized.  Still, if you object to my using your garment, please let me know.  And if you have a photo of a garment you made in one of my classes and/or from one of my patterns, especially a finished version, please let me know at theweaver@weaversew.com

The 800 Zippered Vest is fully lined to the edge and has bias bound edges.  The vest has a stand-up collar with front separating zipper. View 2 uses the lining as a seam finish on the side, shoulder and neckline/collar seams.  Optional yoke on both views.  This pattern does not contain directions for sewing.  The directions, which contain metric equivalents are available for free from my website https://www.daryllancaster.com/Webfiles/800ZipperedVestDirections.pdf 

In addition, a lookbook of garments made from the 800 Zippered Vest is available here https://weaversew.com/wordblog/800-zippered-vest-lookbook/

I’ve only got one more pattern to go in the current collection, which will give me a total of 12!  The pattern for the 1800 jacket is done, it is a combination of the  800 zippered vest above and the 400 jacket with waist darts. The directions are rewritten, I’m waiting for the final edits from someone I hired to make sure what I wrote makes sense.  The conversations between us are hilarious.  Usually she writes that something doesn’t make any sense, and I respond that it would have it they were in class because there would have been an entire class lecture on the fine points of that technique earlier in the morning, and then she responds that people who buy the patterns won’t have been privy to that lecture, so I have to spell it all out.  So I’ve added so much to each of the directions for each of the patterns.  I keep them separate because whenever something is unclear, I can edit easily and post on a page of my website, without generating an entire new pattern download.  The directions are always free, so if you already traced a pattern from one of my classes and need the updated directions, please find them here.  As always, if something isn’t clear, please let me know, I’ll try to fix it.  And there is the goal to have a YouTube channel to explain many of the techniques I feature in my patterns.

Meanwhile I’m already thinking of how to combine the patterns and what silhouette I want to work on next.  A scoop neck top with sleeves…

Meanwhile, I met with a consultant about video equipment and improving the image of my online teaching via Zoom or whatever platform works for the guild hiring me.  And they are hiring me.  My October Calendar is really filling up with remote guild lectures and a few short workshops.  I’m beginning to get cancellations from next year, and I’m really good with that because I don’t see us returning to a normal any time soon.  I don’t see me hopping on a plane, dragging 170 pounds of luggage, staying with people, and teaching a 5-7 day class working intimately with students, and returning safely to NJ.  Right now there is a list in NJ of 31 states that you have to quarantine from after traveling to…  So I’ve edited some of my lectures to list what can be done remotely.  I will start on the half day seminars shortly.

So I now have a couple of Canon SLR’s that actually were designed to also work as webcams, in addition to 4K video.  I have an AC battery adapter so the camera battery doesn’t die in the middle of a zoom meeting.  I have my tech guy coming this week to run an ethernet cable to the garage weaving studio so I don’t have to rely on WIFI.  I have the cable company coming to upgrade my modem so I can get 1GB of internet speed.  And I purchased a sound system and video lights for recording videos, all that of course contingent on my daughter, who works for me now, learning how to use them.  Right now she is creating a logo.

Meanwhile, I’ve mentioned my long time association with Silk City Fibers, which is now a division of Lion Brand Yarns.  Alice, who is the director of that division is an old friend and coincidently lives in my town.  We are in regular contact about what’s new there and my opinion of the market, the type of yarn, the marketing, and anything else that comes to mind.  Last week I was asked if I wanted to be a “weaving influencer”.  I suppose I am an influencer.  A few thousand friends on facebook, been teaching this stuff since the early 80’s and using their yarn since then as well.  I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years, have about a thousand subscribers, and earlier posts have been viewed thousands of times.  And of course I always have an opinion.  I’m not always right, but my opinion always comes with a thought process that shows how I got there.  I met with the powers that be at Lion Brand, via remote conferencing, and largely I said, if you want to toss me yarn, I’ll make yardage out of it, document what I do and what it does, and make clothing out of it to sell my patterns.  

And so, at the end of last week, Alice dropped off a small bag of assorted cones, two of them yarns I’d not worked with before.  Left to right is Nile, a cotton tape yarn, Cotton Bambu, a heavier parallel plied yarn, great for supplemental work, Linen 14, a fine linen yarn I’ve had experience with before, and Bambu 7, bamboo yarn, pretty much a SSF staple.  There was about a half pound of each, which doesn’t seem like a lot to work with, especially if the goal is yardage.  But that never stopped me.  

I thought about the yarn, and then looked through my stash to see what I could add that was part of their current line.  Not much, since my shelves are full of older discontinued styles and colors of Silk City Yarns, all wonderful, but I thought I’d try to stay current.  I was able to add these. Clockwise from upper left, Saphira, Skinny Majesty Variegated, and a possible weft, Bambu 7

 

First I had to figure out exactly what I had.  I use a McMorran Yarn Balance and a scale and I can come within a few yards of knowing what’s on the cone.  

I played with yarn wraps…

…and adapted the draft from Chaos, which you can purchase from my website here…

…and came up with something that reminded me of summer rain.  Think Tropical Storm Isaias.

Meanwhile, I haven’t actually wound a warp or set up a loom since the huge studio move last winter, which seems at this point like a lifetime ago.  When I returned from Oregon the beginning of March, the heat had just been installed, but the entire world shut down, and I dug in and made a bunch of new garments, in the basement sewing room, still thinking I had to submit five new works for the Convergence Fashion Show as a guest artist (of course that conference was postponed until 2022). And I started on what seemed like an impossible task at the time, creating downloadable patterns from the ones I developed for classes.  I was sitting on a lot of handwoven yardage I had stockpiled, and now my stash is depleted.

So I did what I do best.  Create with a small pile in front of me, and see where it takes me…

First up was winding the warp.  There are many ways to wind warps, but I wanted to see the colors unfold, so I chose to just do a straight wind off of the draft, as opposed to winding individual chains of each color.  The winding was slow, but the sleying would be much faster.  The first thing I discovered was the Nile tape lace had to be unwound from the cone like a toilet paper roll, instead of off the top, like typical coned weaving yarns.  When exiting from the top, the tape seriously twisted and I knew would never lay moderately flat in the woven surface.  So I put the cone on a spool rack, with the rack facing away from me at about a 30 degree angle.  The cone unwound easily in that position.

Next hurdle was of course the dreaded slippery rayon, and Silk City Fibers has lots of these.  I’ve used them for years.  This was one called Saphira, a pretty shimmery yarn with slubs.  The color I had has actually been discontinued, but a similar one is available with a black core instead of a white one.  Winding a warp with a yarn like this is problematic because any break in movement, like the turn around at the top of the warping mill, causes the yarn to pool around the base, getting caught as the movement resumes.  I usually use a nylon stocking around the cone as a drag, which works really really well, except in the move, they are hiding and I can’t figure out where they went.  So I used the mesh covering from an Asian Pear, which when tucked around the base, stopped the pooling and the warping could continue.

I loved the way the colors built on one another.

By dinner time yesterday I had the loom’s beater sleyed.  Each of these steps was sort of like reinventing the wheel.  The chair I usually used for sleying was now in the basement in my sewing studio.  So I had to come up with new tools and devices, figure out where my regular tools were now living, figure out where to plug in the magnifying light (in the ceiling as it turned out), and how to adjust the split HVAC system that was spilling copious amounts of frigid air right on me.  I figured that out and the room was really comfortable.  The new studio worked well.  I’m happy and can’t wait to actually spend most of my days out there even when I’m Zooming…  

I started threading after dinner.

Meanwhile, my beloved brat of a dog Ranger got his manhood clipped last Monday.  He was very depressed and had to wear the “innertube of misfortune”.  And of course, that meant he couldn’t wear a bellyband, so my fear all week was that he would pee on everything in my house.  We were good until late last night.  He saddled up to a shelving tower of handdyed yarn skeins and lifted his leg.  So I got to use the new dye sink in the studio and wash all of the offended skeins as I cleaned up the mess.  The dye sink worked really well.  And incision or no incision, he is now wearing a belly band.  The relationship between the two males dogs is slowing changing, it will be interesting to see where this goes.  The week for the most part wasn’t nearly has challenging as I thought it would be.  I got a lot accomplished locking myself and the dog in my office for hours at a time while he healed.  He liked the constant companionship.

Meanwhile, did I mention we are getting hit with a tropical storm tonight?  Note to self, pull in anything that isn’t nailed down, like umbrellas, etc.  Better yet, send Brianna out to do it…

Stay tuned…