Tag: County College of Morris Main Gallery

Bringing up the bodies…

With apologies to Hilary Mantel…

I wish I could have taken a picture of me following a County College of Morris Dodge Caravan heading west on Rt. 10, loaded with 20 dress forms, all stacked like bodies, on the way to the college gallery with the second load for the exhibition. It was pretty hilarious.

This has been one of the most intense but awesome assignments of my life, to organize a retrospective of my work, and all the moving piece parts, assign labels, write 15 artist statements for the 15 categories of work, some 90 pieces, including wall/art pieces. Enormous.

My best friend in High School said to me on Facebook, “I knew you when…” and “Is this like getting an Oscar?” Wow. What a lovely thing to say. I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never gotten an Oscar and have never done anything to deserve an Oscar, but this retrospective is pretty important to me. I think of it more like a lifetime achievement award. Slow and steady. Because one of the sponsors of the show is Morris County Teen Arts, there was a request to go back as far as I could with work to tell the complete story. So there is a macramé vest I did in 1972. I’m still proud of that piece. I was 17 years old. (And Macramé was all the rage.)

So the last couple of weeks, I’ve done nothing but dress bodies, and store bodies in my guest rooms. The forms I purchased through Amazon were really inexpensive. About $21 each. But… each form costs $25 to ship via Fedex, and the hip measurement of each form was only 33 1/2″. I do not know of a single adult human being with a 33 1/2″ hip. I don’t know who they were designed to fit. Maybe that’s why they were so cheap. So I invested in a few rolls of large bubble wrap, and armed with a tape gun, and a box of shoulder pads I found in the attic from my production days, I bubbled up some 41 dress forms to fit my garments.

All the forms were stored in my corner guest room. I also invested in something like two dozen shirt forms, for the smaller less important pieces that were necessary for the stories. The gallery director came up with a 40 form limit for the existing gallery floor space, and so I needed to also fill the walls.

On Tuesday, I moved everything to the living room to wait for the van. The dogs were initially curious but ultimately bored, nothing I do is of much interest to them. Unless food is involved… That was my workout for the month. I moved probably 40 pieces down a couple flights of stairs, one at a time.

And so everything for the show is now at the gallery. Except the demonstration loom. I designed a 4-shaft fabric, that sort of looks like my 8-shaft fabric, (a variation on my Custom Runner draft in my eShop) on a 25″ floor loom. I started with a poster from one of my Magic Puzzles. This one is called Sunny City. It was sort of sepia-toned and nostalgic. All the yarns are hand-dyed with fiber-reactive dyes.

I got the loom set up in record time. 5 yards beamed.

And I played around with wefts, struggling to decide if I wanted to focus more on the soft palette of vintage looking colors, or showcase the interesting combination of structures which would require a darker warp. In the end I settled on a mid-grey Alpaca/Silk, from WEBS, but I didn’t have enough on the cone for the 4 1/2 yards I would ultimately be weaving. I went to the WEBS site and not only did they still have the yarn, but it was on sale! Score! There is a second cone coming soon. (But I won’t be weaving this off until the fall. The loom will be at the college until the end of the summer.)

Here is the flier for the show, or rather both halves of the postcard. The show technically ends the end of March, moves to a smaller gallery (just the bodies) and everything else goes into storage while the college puts on its students’ final show. Everything gets remounted the beginning of May, there is another opening, and I give the keynote address for the Morris County Teen Arts Festival. The show will remain in the Main Gallery through the summer. Apparently CCM is redoing its website, so if you Google the gallery, the information is from last October and that won’t be helpful for this show.

We recorded a 12 minute video on ‘how to weave’, and there will be three Structo/Leclerc Sample Looms there for gallery patrons to try. I’ll swap them out each week to freshen, re-warp, etc. I gave a number of my teaching Structos to one of my guild mates who will be taking over the Learn-to-Weave program for my guild, so I needed to clear one of the 4-shaft looms I had set up previously with some random structure. I chose the Leclerc Sample Loom which had a linen warp and wove off the couple yard huck lace sampler. I still had linen on the spools so I figured, this should be easy, I picked one of the designs, and started to weave off the rest of the spools. This was a couple months ago. I’m still weaving. I’ve determined this loom is magical and that it is a warp that will never end. I know a pre-warped Structo spool, back in the day, could hold 20 yards of 20/2 cotton, and this linen is a similar weight. Dear Lord… The spools came to me with the loom, a hand me down from my late mother-in-law. I had no idea how much linen was still left, but how bad could it be? Bad…

I weave an hour or so a day, and still I look back there and it looks the same. I keep hoping I’ll start to see the end soon. I need this loom. Five of the six sample looms are ready to go. I have a five yard carpet warp waiting. Sigh…

So that’s a wrap up of Daryl’s Greatest Adventure, a 40 years look back over an amazing body of work, which isn’t even half of what I’ve done, because there is a ton that has been sold and I didn’t even count the hundreds of garments I sold in my 10 years of craft fairs. I promise to take pictures, and my daughter, who is currently on a Star Trek cruise to the Caribbean, promised to film a documentary when she gets back.

My only real problem now, is I have nothing to wear to the opening, since everything I have will be on exhibit… Hmmmm…..

And I should mention that today, in spite of everything else that is happening in my life, is the 22 year anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis. 2/22/2002. I will never forget this date. And so it is fitting that I’m mounting a retrospective of what I’ve accomplished in the years since that diagnosis, and there have been many of them. I wish my late husband could have been here to see this accomplishment. I was one of the lucky ones to have lived through a cancer diagnosis…

Stay tuned…

But mommy, I want him…

I’m continuing on my attic cleaning and making more stuff for the guild sale with my mother lode of scraps of handwoven fabrics from the archives. I made two more squirrels, from leftover bits of mohair, and while I was working on the second one, I plopped the other one on the ironing board.

Mulder the studio cat of course had to check out something that looked suspiciously like what he hunts in the middle of the night…

And typically had to check out the back end.

Satisfied said squirrel did not pose a threat, and being of a soft mohair and cuddly surface, Mulder decided to curl up next to him.

The face pleading, can I keep him, can I?

Sadly he can’t keep him, because the dogs would destroy the squirrels and anything else I have that’s stuffed in about 10 minutes. They gleefully dive right into anything with stuffing. So Mulder can’t have his little buddy…

I’ve been able to create another jacket from the mohair scraps of a different colorway. I had a well meaning friend tell me they were really ugly, and that kind of stung, I rather liked them, and they were fun to make, and super functional, I’m hoping there is someone who will appreciate them at the guild sale.

Almost ready for the final pressing…

I worked out an alternative to the white mohair stocking ornament tops. I ran out of the white mohair fabric, so found a soft white yarn and just crocheted round and round…

And I cut out a dozen little bear ornaments for the guild sale. I spent hours looking through my vast button stash, trying to find three of something that would work for each of the bears, and getting them sewn on, making little “kits” so I can sit and put them together while on zoom meetings or listening to a podcast, or Textiles and Tea, whatever…

Of course my trusty studio assistant had to leap onto the ironing board and keep everything in order… Sigh…

I managed to make two of them…

On Sunday, a local sheep farm, part of the NJ Fibershed, held a community dye day. A lot of work for the teacher Pamela Jenkins, a natural dyer from Maryland, and we had dyebaths to use with our pre mordanted yarns, (alum and cream of tartar) plus a station for botanical printing (results were disappointing, I think better compression would have helped) and a chance to use an indigo bath using Polygonum Tinctorium Indigo, which can grow in this climate. Interesting thing was using fresh leaves, and puréeing them in a blender with ice. This is appealing to me, since I never wanted to start a fermented indigo vat. I don’t have indigo on the property so I’d have to plant some. I waited to rinse my skeins which were 65% silk and 35% wool, for about 48 hours, a suggestion by the teacher. They are now dry, and some of the color did wash out, but I’m sure the volume of dyestuff vs the amount of yarn/fabric we dyed, really wouldn’t yield strong results. Still, it is a pretty palette. Willow, fresh indigo, butternut husks, elderberry, hollyhock flowers, and artemisia.

The day after I posted my last blog I got this gorgeous bench in the mail. Or rather shipped. I ordered my custom bench from Walt Turpening exactly a year ago. I wanted the gradation in the woven seat. Walt custom winds the cotton cordage to achieve the gradation. We spent a lot of time with measurements, loom and body, to determine the best bench height. Unfortunately the two looms I expect to use the bench with, are both empty. It is on my list this winter to get them both warped so I can try out the bench.

Meanwhile, I did finally clear the table loom with the Bateman blend. I didn’t get a lot of yardage, and it was really tedious. I’m happy with the results, and am thinking of designing a laptop slip case. I have one from Peru and want to copy how it was done.

The loom next to it had a 4-shaft doup leno structure threaded on 8 shafts. I wrote an issue of Heddlecraft Magazine, (Issue #19) on doup leno, a technique where using half doups on shaft two allows the loom to crisscross certain threads creating an open airy structure that is very stable. The warp and wefts were hand-dyed cashmere so this is super soft. It seemed like the warp that never ended, and I finally got up and looked at my original drafting notes and realized I put five yards of warp on this little loom. Nearing the end of the warp, and wanting to squeeze in a couple fat yarns for headers, I discovered this cool tool that now I can’t live without. It is called a “Poke” Shuttle. I never heard of such a thing, but they were selling them in a few lengths at Red Stone Glen for their open house last June, made by Bluster Bay Shuttles. They just felt so lovely in the hand I bought three. The yarn just grips around the end of the shuttle allowing it to be able to poke through the narrow shed. It may have a different purpose, but I loved it for this task, and of course all Bluster Bay shuttles just melt in your hand…

I managed to get a long scarf and a pretty cowl from the handdyed cashmere.

Meanwhile, my daughter is finishing up the edits in a video we shot last month, a one hour studio tour, which can be shown as a guild program. I wanted to recreate the studio tour I did for the HGA back in the fall of 2020 for Spinning and Weaving Week 2020, and wanted to document all the looms with warps. I am getting frequent texts with screen shots from my daughter down the hall with absolutely hilarious Transcription malfunctions. She first allows Adobe premiere to close caption the video, and then goes back and corrects. Textile terms in a transcription program are absolutely hilarious, looms become loons, and limbs, and lamps. Really, my diction is pretty spot on, you just have to increase your vocabulary sir! But the best Transcription malfunction I’ve ever seen is this…

It is supposed to read, “I would have sectionally warped 30 yards of mohair at a time”. There are no words…

And to wind up this blog post, I’ve had a lovely wonderful thing happen this past week. Something I can’t even wrap my head around, and keep pinching myself to see if I dreamed it or not. Long story short, assuming this all happens the way it is spelled out in the contract sitting on my desk, next spring, County College of Morris will feature my huge body of work both artwork and garments, dating back to the 90’s in their Main Gallery, a retrospective of sorts, along with video, audio, and a hands on component (aren’t you glad I have all those Structos) for about 6 weeks, transitioning to a smaller gallery for their year end student exhibition, and then back to the Main Gallery to coincide with the Morris County Teen Arts Festival in May, where I am to be the keynote speaker. Then the exhibition of my work will continue on until the end of August. It is especially lovely that this is my county college, and that both of my kids took classes there, and I even taught there for a semester way back. I have hosted two externs from there as well. So this feels like a perfect conclusion to a lifetime of work in the field. I’m especially touched that they asked me to give the keynote to the next generation of creative people. I have a lot of work to do on that address.

I hope the fall brings you beautiful colors, cooler weather, fun things to do with fiber, and friends to do those fun things with… And no Mulder, you still can’t have the squirrel…

Stay tuned…