Convergence Albuquerque 2010

You win some, you lose some…

Actually, forget the winning part, I’m just happy when I’m accepted. All the notifications are out for Convergence exhibits. I received a couple of acceptance emails a couple of weeks ago, but was asked not to “announce” the decision until everyone had their written confirmation or rejection letters.

You may remember back in January, that I spent a feverish few days entering shows and applying to conferences, and I’ve heard back from all but one exhibit. So the count stands at Acceptances 4 :-), Non-Acceptances 7 🙁 That’s actually a 36% acceptance rate, and I’m pretty OK with that. None of my artwork was accepted this go round, but my garments, and yardage did well along with a couple of accessories.

I already mentioned in a previous blog that my yardage from last December, called “Some Enchanted Evening”, was accepted to the Convergence yardage exhibit, and two of my pieces, the Frosted Florals Dress, and the felted Celebration Bag were accepted to Fiber Celebration 2010 in Greeley, CO.

I got the results from the Convergence fashion show, and two of my garments will be included, as well as a scarf I wove in the Eye Dazzlers Exhibit, which covers just about every thing else except yardage, fashion, and Small Expressions (which I did not get into…)

In addition, this year I was accepted to teach at all of the conferences that I applied to, including one I hadn’t yet applied to because it conflicted with the ANWG conference. So I’ll be teaching at Midwest, MAFA, and ANWG, and I look forward to another busy inspiring summer in 2011. My schedule is as always, available on my website, http://www.daryllancaster.com/schedule.html. There may be some confusion about my web domains, I seem to vacillate between www.weaversew.com and www.daryllancaster.com. I’ve had the weaversew domain for so many years now, I hate to give it up, but the information is the same in both, as one domain is parked within the other one. Either works, and both will get you to the same place.

I added in this blog post this afternoon, two in one day is a bit much I know, but I was curious to see if something I did earlier this morning might help or heaven forbid, correct the fatal error messages. I actually went back to the original post where we started noticing the errors, and deleted all the revisions. There happened to be 10 that day. I had had trouble getting the photos to all line up the way I wanted them to with the text. So far, this is the first post in about a month, where I didn’t get the fatal error message about six times during the writing process. Could it have been that simple?

Just a roll of the Dice…

OK, so I am officially overwhelmed… (And I can hear my dear husband saying, “and this is something new?”) I’m looking at the days ticking by, knowing I leave for a very long time with seven back to back teaching assignments, and looking at the to do list which is multiplying exponentially each time I cross something off, and I’m starting to panic. I’ve been there before, all I have to do is reread my blog posts last June, and I know I’ve been there before, bought the t-shirt, and lived to tell about it.

I have a spread sheet across my desk, in addition to my lengthy to do list which spills over my desk, and on the spread sheet are all of the exhibits I plan to enter, and conferences I need to send proposals for, and contracts I have to write, before I leave February 13th. There are 12 exhibits, three sets of conference proposals, a set of contracts along with a 2-3000 word article for their fiber publication, and the first thing I had to do was figure out what work I had available for exhibit, and what show to send what work to (or actually just the images). I was told awhile back that it is a no-no to send applications with the same work to more than one exhibit at the same time. If the work got into both, your name would be mud when you tried to extricate yourself from one of the exhibits.

Well that leaves too little work for all these exhibits, so I will do my best to put something in all of them, you can’t get into the show if you don’t apply, and actually getting the work accepted, is all basically the roll of the dice. 25% acceptance would be wonderful.

Yesterday I wrote the proposals for the MAFA fiber conference for 2011, and emailed those, and I sent out the first of the exhibit proposals, which is quite the complicated process. Each show has very specific requirements about what the digital format of the images is to be. I read, and reread the applications, and still have this haunting feeling I’ve missed a step. There is always that ominous line that says, any application without …, will be immediately disqualified.

Today I got off the application for another exhibit, this one in Missouri, and then I photographed the yardage for the Convergence exhibit. That in itself is quite the process. I have to rip my studio apart, move looms out to the hall, hang the yardage, set up all the lights, cover the window because after two days of torrential rains and flooding, the sun decided to come streaming in the window casting sunbeams all over my yardage. And of course this is the first time I’ve used the new Nikon D5000 I bought in December. And I couldn’t figure out how to use the stupid thing. I had to call my tech support husband three times… But it did take a great photo.

Convergence applications are especially cumbersome. Plus I had to cut a piece out of the yardage because a touch sample had to be included along with the application. And I had to come up with a good title. The yardage exhibit is called Enchanted, referring to the Land of Enchantment, which is of course New Mexico. Convergence 2010 is in Albuquerque in July. So I called this yardage, “Some Enchanted Evening”. It really does look like the colors of the mesas and the mountain ranges in New Mexico. I think. I haven’t been to New Mexico in more than 30 years.

Now I’m going to go and put my studio back together again. And then I’m going to bed.

Big Splash!

After a day of bill paying, paperwork, printing monographs, and errands, I made myself clear my cutting table and dive into getting the next project underway.

You may recall I had pulled out the leftover handwoven Splash fabric from the Design Challenge Project I worked on all last year for the HGA Tampa Bay Convergence fashion show. The Design Challenge has been on my mind in recent days, because the latest issue of SS&D is out and the next group of designers have been selected for the 2010 Convergence Albuquerque Challenge. The yarn is gorgeous, I’m a bit jealous, because these are my colors, I sadly had to contend with a Floridian palette. And the yarn for the latest challenge is bamboo and tencel, not the fat cotton knitting yarn, we were given. So maybe I’ll just have to order me up some of this great yarn (at $100.00 a pound!) and see what I can do with it, without the pressure of the challenge hanging over me. Then again, maybe I’ll open up my dye cabinet and see what lurks there…

Anyway, my best west coast weaving buddy Robyn Spady is one of the designers, she lives in Seattle and I’m going to visit her the beginning of June. I know she will have the same trouble I had keeping everything top secret! Congratulations Robyn! What a ride it’s gonna be… (Don’t worry Sally, you’re still my best east coast weaving buddy!)

Anyway, I digress…

I had made up the dress in a brocade to make sure I liked the fit. I did some additional tweaking to the pattern pieces, and then laid out the two panels left from the original Challenge Fabric, side by side on the cutting table, so I could get a feel for how the colors would run from one panel to the other. There are two widths of cloth on the table, both with the same magenta running through the upper portion, which I’ll have banding the bustline. Though the pink was my least favorite part of the yarn and subsequent fabric, (which is why I had it leftover), it made sense to cut it out this way. I couldn’t have fit the pattern pieces any other way. As it was, I technically didn’t have enough for the center front and center back shoulders, and I didn’t even try to match them, but I was able to use my famous trick of butting selvedges together to achieve a wider width of fabric in that area. I try when designing fabric, to have the selvedge edges contain half a design motif, so when they are butted together, which happens more often than you would imagine, the pattern runs flawlessly across the garment.

I carefully cut out the pieces, cutting each pattern piece singly, using a single strand of embroidery floss for the tailor’s tacks, and then flipping the pattern pieces to get the second half. That way I could really control the grainlines and color.

When I was finished cutting out, I had the smallest pile of scraps, some of them should probably be tossed, but this little pile represents the remainder of a year’s worth of work, and a grand adventure, and I’m going to save this little pile, that started out as 10 yards of 36″ wide handwoven fabric! I know I can still use it for something else!

Now I really should go clean my dreadfully dirty house, make dinner, and read another 50 pages in my HTML manual…