County College of Morris

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…

Keeping very busy…

It’s what I do…

There have been some pretty dark times in my life. We all have them. And we all have different ways of getting through them. My way, is to stay so freaking busy I don’t have time to dwell on anything I have no control over. And so that will be my solution to the darkness that has set over my small family, with my son’s deployment to Syria.

NJ is sending 1500 troops from the 44th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, their largest deployment since 2008, to bases in Iraq and Syria. I am heartsick of course, and will worry constantly for all 1500 of them, because right now, that part of the world is in crisis and no one knows how to fix it. Mid month I joined my son in Trenton for a large send off, speeches by our Senator, Governor, and all kinds of higher ups that said meaningful things, in support of our troops.

My son is the bald guy right in the middle.

At this point, he has deployed, first through Texas, and then will be making his way to Syria. I won’t know until he can get word that he is there, and I don’t expect to be able to hear from him regularly. Internet is poor, and of course Verizon doesn’t have a cell spot in Syria. He dropped his jeep off for safe keeping and final hugs on Saturday, while I was teaching a two day remote workshop, with the Baltimore Guild, each participant making a vest over the two days. While the workshop was wildly successful, I’m glad they didn’t see my tears when I came in from outside, because my glasses had turned dark from the sun. And I’m incredibly glad I was in the middle of a workshop, and had no time to grieve.

Mid January is my guild, the Jockey Hollow Weavers’ Learn to Weave class, which I teach, along with my daughter. I bring 15 Structo Looms, and the weather cooperated. I bring prewound warps in 8/4 cotton rug yarn, and they set up the loom in a pattern gamp. They get to weave all sorts of structures with different wefts to experiment with color interlacements. It was a really fun day, and I’ve passed on 12 of the Structos to another guild member that would like to carry this forward.

I signed up for 8 workshops this year at Peters Valley School of Craft, because they all interested me, and because, I’m trying to book myself into oblivion! The first workshop took place over the last two Sundays, and thankfully it was recorded since I missed the second installment as I was teaching. The class, taught by Natalie Stopka, who is one of the best teachers I’ve ever taken a class from, was on Natural Dyeing, and it was remote. In January. I have never worked with botanical powders, and couldn’t have been more pleased with the results. My dye kitchen worked extremely well, I didn’t have to buy any new equipment, and the kit Natalie sent provided everything I needed for a successful natural dye experience. The second session was working with a fructose indigo vat.

So these are the results. I dyed the samples with madder (salmon color), weld (bright yellow color), logwood (purple to black color), and of course indigo (the chambray blue color). On silk…

On cotton (Note that I also played around with resists with items included in the kit.)…

On wool yarn…

Ombré effect on a silk scarf from my “to be dyed” stash…

Ombré effect on a cotton scarf provided in the kit. I used the indigo to overdye the weld producing a pretty aqua color in addition to the blue.

And to exhaust each of the pots, I used up the remainder of the dye with skeins of silk and wool. The blue indigo is still wet.

There is something about creating color in January that just makes me come alive.

And of course, it is not lost on me that the mother of all projects fell in my lap last fall, a retrospective of my work over the last 45 years, at County College of Morris in their main gallery opening February 29th. There was some major divine intervention that allowed this huge project to absolutely consume me in one of my darkest months since my husband died. I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other to get this all organized. There are something like 90 works involved. The really cool thing is that I’m pouring over archives, storage, attic, scraps, closets, 40 year old slide images, searching for each of the components I need to pull this off. I spent two hours the other day on the floor of my late husband’s closet looking for an image from 1994. I was just ecstatic when I found it.

And in all that I found a few things I’d completely forgotten about. Like this handspun sweater I made from cashmere, somewhere in the 1970’s. It’s been in the back of my closet since then. Miraculously it fit, and I like it, and it is unbelievably warm. It is my new favorite thing to wear. Go figure…

The gallery staff requested I have handling swatches with each garment. I know the public really appreciates it, most weaving conferences require it, and I spent at least five days rooting through the archives, attic, basement, and even my teaching bags, which I no longer need, and my design journals looking for a scrap of the original fabric. I found all but two maybe?

My guest rooms are packed with dress forms, which come in weekly. My cat Mulder of course likes to help whenever he can, especially if there are boxes. And there are a lot of boxes.

Each form is bulked up with bubble wrap because the forms I purchased, which were very inexpensive, have hips that are only 33″ wide. I don’t know anyone with 33″ wide hips. There are no words… But the forms work for me, and bubble wrap adds the additional couple inches I need to fill out the work. I’ve had to do repairs on some of the pieces, especially ones I wear a lot, and even had to reweave a small area on a major piece when I discovered a cigarette burn all the way through. That was one of my more impressive feats. So one of my guest rooms is pretty packed with forms, each one ready to display, with handling swatch and temp label. The permanent labels will be fixed to the wall.

The college van comes Friday for the first load.

And I think the universe is sending multiple angels to help support me, suddenly people who have been off my radar are popping up in unexpected places and encouraging me to get out, meet up, do lunch, and just be with people. A former guild member reached out to see if I’d help her jumpstart back into spinning and we had such a delightful morning, as I dusted off my wheel, my old Ashford Traditional which I bought after my freshman year of college and still gets the job done, and we sat together spinning, and decided to do this weekly. It felt amazing. I think this is handpainted merino but I’m not completely sure…

And so dear readers, know that I am really fine. There will be moments of course, and all I can do is hope that all 1500 return safe and can get on with their civilian lives. I have people who are watching out for me, and I hope that my late husband is watching out for my son. Thank you for all who reached out privately, I know I’m not alone, there are 1500 other families who are in the same boat. I have turned off notifications on all of the news feeds I subscribe to, I can read the local paper each morning and that’s it. I cannot follow the news 24/7.

Back to writing artist statements and dressing forms. Stay tuned…

Plans gone awry…

First, I have to say Happy Birthday to my now 17 year old daughter who has her driver’s license and can’t wait to find places to drive. She decided she has to drive to the High School tomorrow because her rather large woodworking project is ready to be brought home. Timing… Good job Brianna!

I sat down at the computer this morning, after getting her off with the driving instructor who would take her for her test, and my plan was to catch up on some contracts and proposals that needed some attention, and start preparation for tagging and photographing items for the guild sale this weekend. Silly me, what was I thinking…

It all started when I happened to look ahead on my Google Calendar, all the way to tomorrow. I noticed that I was suppose to deliver my piece for the Visual Art Center Blank Canvas auction, and I completely panicked. The piece isn’t even made yet. Then I looked at the original sheet with the dates, and the piece isn’t due until November 20th. Big relief! 🙂

Then I found an ad for an exhibit in Texas, an international juried art competition, but the application had to be sent out today. 🙁 So I started looking through the artwork I have committed to specific exhibits to see what pieces would be available for submission. I came upon the outstanding entry form for the New Jersey Focus for the Art Center of Northern New Jersey exhibit, and looked at the dates and nearly had a heart attack when I read that all accepted work was due today. 🙁 I never heard from them, so my assumption was they didn’t get my application? I called them. In fact my work had been accepted, and it was due today, and by the way, I never picked up my piece last week from the International Juried Show… Hmmm….. Well, I did apparently screw up there. I failed to mark on my trusty calendar that I had to actually pick the work up when the show was over, you may recall, that was the piece where I won the Merit award. (In my defense, I rarely exhibit in a show that doesn’t involve shipping a piece and prepaying the return shipping, so it isn’t something I pay attention to, the piece just shows up on my doorstep. ) OK, so I just had to gather the work that had to be brought to the Art Center for the next show, and pick up my poor orphaned piece I had left behind. I don’t usually make mistakes like that.

I went to my files to see what pieces had in fact been accepted. 🙂 And I nearly had another heart attack when I realized that one of the pieces had been woven, but it had never been mounted on a frame. 🙁 I didn’t even have the frame. It was a big piece, 28 x 24″ and I just stood frozen in my studio for a good couple of minutes. Then I sprung into action. First I searched my stick barrel in the studio, every weaver has one. Lease Sticks, Temples, wood slats for warping, dowels, yardsticks, all things long and wood-like reside in the barrel in the corner. And there, like a gift from heaven, were two 28″ stretcher bars, and two 24″ ones. 🙂 This is my lucky day!

I put them together, and built a padded cover, and then covered that with silk. I mounted the artwork, a piece I wove a few months ago, a larger version of the original Big Sister, and carefully pinned it stretched on the frame. Then I hand sewed it to the silk, all the way around. The whole process took about 4 hours, and I was finally able to head out to the art center around 2:30. This was not what I was planning to do today. And I found out the artist’s reception is Sunday when the show opens, right in the middle of the guild sale, and no where near the guild sale. I hate calendar collisions.

I managed to get back from Bergen County around 4pm, which left me about 40 minutes to process images, burn a CD, fill out the paperwork, make out the check, place everything in an envelope and get it to the post office before it closed today for the exhibit at University of Texas at Tyler, which is what started this whole escapade today. I did make it to the post office with five minutes to spare.

So nothing I had planned to do today got done, except putting in the proposals for Siever’s for next year. But that’s life in the fast lane, we all went out tonight for all you can eat Sushi for my daughter’s birthday. I am going to finish up this blog tonight and curl up in bed and read. I’m in the middle of two good reads, one on my iPod, and the other on my night stand. One is an Elizabeth Berg novel, about a woman who contracted polio in the 1950’s and was pregnant, and managed to give birth to her daughter while in an iron lung. She went on to raise her daughter by herself, in spite of being completely paralyzed. Like I said, it is a good read. The other book is by Brett Lott, called Jewel, about a family from Mississippi whose last child has what we now call Down’s syndrome, but back then, the term was Mongolian idiot. Both books are from the same time period, and both take place in Mississippi, and I am always appalled reading about how we treated each other and how racism and prejudice were everyday occurrences. We have come so far and yet, not far enough…

I finally got hold of some of the images my husband shot at the musical Once on this Island, performed last weekend at County College of Morris. The show takes place in the French Antilles, in the 1950’s. The story is a folk tale, of an orphan after a horrific storm, who was kept alive by the gods, and how she grew up among the peasants and the indigenous peoples of the island, but falls in love with one of the French Grande Hommes, after she rescues him from a car crash.

I wanted to share the photos, because I helped with the costumes, providing some of the actual garments from my vast stash of amazing clothing. The god of water, Agwé, wore my peacock vest, actually all four of the gods wore capes of some sort, so my peacock vest was perfect to give the illusion of sparkling waves as he turned and moved around the stage. In one scene, he covers the orphan Ti Moune, who has been taken by the god of death, (on Agwé’s right in the first two photos), with a wave of water.

I copied a dress with some handpainted silk fabric from Thailand for Erzulie the goddess of love. The costumer added a cape, and the actress looked like a pink froth of love! She moved and swirled, and it was all quite effective. On her right was the goddess of the earth, Asaka, and I put one of my sari skirts on her, and reworked the cape from a costume from another venue.

And of course, there was my son, who played the grandfather of all the french inhabitants of the island, Armand, who came in the time of Napoleon, and in spite of having a lovely wife, to his right, he slept with all the peasants. My son loved the role… I designed the look for Armand, and I provided the white lace dress for his “wife”, and the peasant to his left, has on one of my silk broomstick skirts.

After the show, we carried out a carload of garments and fabric, and I’m still cleaning everything. I was glad to have had the opportunity to help with the costumes, I actually enjoy it, and the challenge of making up something from nothing, and it only has to look good from the audience, and not up close, and it only has to make it through a weekend of shows! The complete opposite of how I actually work!

I’m going to try again tomorrow to work off some of my to do list. Wish me luck…

All my children and roller coaster rides…

What a week!

First, my children are of the ages when roller coaster rides seem like canoe trips on a lake… My son, who wore camouflage his entire third grade year, has finally signed on the dotted line and joined the military. He leaves for basic training for the Army National Guard on January 4th. I’ve been asked by a number of friends, how do I feel about this? Honestly, no one knows where life is going to take them, he parties hard for a 19 year old, and his motivation for anything involving work is pretty low. I adore being around him and his friends, who seem to be living in my basement on a full time basis now, eating me out of house and home. He is entertaining, kind, interesting, and I know I’ll really miss him when he grows up and goes out on his own, but I don’t see that happening without the structure of something like the military. So, I’m OK with this decision, and pretty proud, he did this all on his own, gathered all the paperwork, medical records, and he is pretty excited about the future, for the first time in his life.

Meanwhile, he has a roll in the musical Once on this Island, at the community college where he attends, and happily volunteered me to help the frazzled costumer, who has to come up with island/Carribbean costumes for 40 cast members. My stash proved to be quite useful, where do I find these things?, and my first assignment was to copy a Hawaiian wrap dress out of a vintage handscreened handwoven silk from Thailand. That was a fun 3 hour diversion.

I attended the rehearsal again last night, and now have a suitcase full of alterations to do today on top of finishing up my article for SS&D. Shades of 27 dresses…

Then there is my daughter. My lovely adorable interesting and very capable pink haired daughter. She is still in HS, and in between her honors physics and calculus classes, she has a class in Woodworking, Cabinet and Machine woods to be exact. She loves the class, the only female, and fortunately it is her first period class and makes her mornings actually bearable. This is the age of complete connectedness to your children, for better or for worse, and though it isn’t really permitted, the kids text blindly under the desk on a regular basis, so I know what goes on at school way more than I should! Usually I get texts like, “Mom, the Yankee Candle order forms and money are due today. I forgot, can you bring them over to the HS right away?” But yesterday morning I got a text that just said, “Finished”. Attached was a picture of her latest project in cabinet woods, a gorgeous oak shelving unit. I know she will want to put it in her room, but I think I’ll fight her on this one. It is beautiful! I want it for me…

Later on in the day, I got a text that said, “I’m inspired… do you have any of that clear plastic fabric?” This is always problematic, because when my daughter gets an idea, she runs with it, and doesn’t stop until it’s done. Which means taking over my studio for an indeterminate amount of time. She ended up making a tote bag, (inspired by my tote bag adventures) out of duct tape, saved candy wrappers (who saves their candy wrappers?) and clear plastic vinyl sheeting (which I did have in my studio). She needed a small tote for her Japanese books for the Japanese class she is taking at the community college. I’ll send along a photo when I can.

So this was more than a roller coaster week, aside from my children. Back at the end of September, I applied to three exhibitions, where I thought my work might be appropriate. They were all running during the same time frame, so it was quite a juggling act to see which of my artpieces I would send for which exhibition applications. Once the applications are sent, it is a nail biting waiting game. You’d think by now I’d be use to this. I don’t think you ever get use to the waiting game, and ultimately the rejections that come with them. Two of the notifications were suppose to be released on October 15th. October 15th came and went, and nothing. One of the applications was done online through Juried Art Services, so the notification would be online as well. Either a green checkmark, or a red X. Very personal. I checked the website about every half hour for about 5 days straight. Suddenly, there it was, two big red X’s. And the accompanying note, if you actually clicked on the X’s read, “Thank you for your submission. We regret to inform you that your work was not chosen for this year’s exhibition.” 🙁

OK, so there were still two more applications out there, and I kept checking my snail mail, with eager anticipation, until the next notification popped up in my email box. I hadn’t actually expected to hear from this exhibit quite this soon. “Thank you for your submission. It was a very difficult decision- making process as we received many applications. We are sorry to inform you that your work was not selected this year.” 🙁

OK, so there was still one more. I was only out about $100 in entrance fees, and I had just won an award at an exhibit a couple weeks ago, so the roller coaster feeling of being high and then crashing down to the ground and rethinking your entire body of work, is all in a days work.

Then came the final notification, suddenly, in my inbox, a week overdue.

“Congratulations! Thank you for your submission to the George Segal Gallery for Art Connections 6. This year over 175 artists submitted work for review with a total of over 750images to be juried. The quality of the work was outstanding, which made the selection process very challenging. The juror chose 182 works from 118 artists. You are one of those artists!” 🙂

This exhibit is actually at the new gallery that is part of Montclair State University, where I got my art degree in 1977. So I sort of feel a little thrill at finally being able to come back and say to no one in particular, see what I did with your degree? Like I said, this week has been a roller coaster ride.

I did manage to make up that tote bag I started last week, I didn’t actually start it, more like laid a pile of the table of stuff that sort of related, and waited to see where it would take me. I got the handwoven fabric laid out pretty quickly, but the companion complementary fabric just wasn’t working. I rooted around in my stash a bit more, and found some raw silk I had used for sampling some fabric paints and stencils. So I dug out my fabric paints and stencils and painted the rest. I chose to do a more complex binding, which involved yarn and bias strips, and it took way longer than I could ever sell the tote bag for, I really find it hard to do inexpensive and simple, but I had a blast, and love the results. I used one of my silk sari’s from India for the lining, and it made for a pleasant day being one with my sewing machine while the world rained chaos around me. 🙂

I’m Home!

Actually, I’ve been home for a couple of days, but I got in really late Tuesday night, and I hit the ground running Wednesday morning, with very little sleep. Could it have been the caffeine I consumed to keep me awake for the four hour drive Tuesday night? Duh…

Anyway, I spent Wednesday morning with my 16 year old daughter at the local county college, where she was taking advantage of a HS challenge program and signing up for a class in Japanese. Her five text books cost $125. She was very excited to think of herself as a college student. Of course she still has two more years of HS… But it is a great opportunity and she will get college credit for the course.

I spent the rest of Wednesday unpacking, doing the laundry, actually working in the yard for an hour, which felt wonderful. I haven’t spent any time, either working on or enjoying my lovely gardens this summer, and playing in the dirt after such a grueling six weeks of conferences was healing. My husband, bless him, has done an amazing job keeping up the gardens which I assure you is NOT a one person job. There is a ton of weeding that needs to be done, to be sure, but he has kept the worst of the weeds at bay, and installed a ton of downlights around the ponds, which glow like fairy pools in the late evening. I’m looking forward to the fall, which is usually glorious in NJ.

Last night, my husband and I bought tickets, right before I left, for Noises Off, at the NJ Shakespeare Theatre which is housed in a gorgeous building at Drew University in Madison, NJ. We bought the tickets based on the Newspaper review, which was stellar, and we laughed through the entire performance. I adore British farces, lots of door slamming, flawless timing, as only a Shakespeare Company can do, and we enjoyed the show so much, we bought additional tickets for Twelfth Night, and The Grapes of Wrath, which close out the 2009 season. In addition, we just received the season tickets for the Papermill Playhouse. So much live theatre to see!

So today, I looked at my poor neglected house, and decided that I needed to spend the day, really cleaning it, which meant all sorts of detours, including cleaning out the snake cage. Don’t ask. I worked straight through the day, and only managed to clean one floor. That’s what happens when you leave for a few weeks, the house gets dirty without you. I’ll continue it tomorrow, but tomorrow, being the end of the month, is paperwork day. I have a huge stack, all the accounts and bills have to be addressed, and that will be my priority tomorrow.

Since Project Runway starts in half an hour, I thought I’d post the photos of the jackets from my class at the Felter’s Fling. They were amazing. I had five students, and they were working like crazy right up to the end, there are still a lot of pins in the jackets, along with tailor’s tacks, and errant threads. But everyone was really thrilled, they learned so much, and I heard from more than one student that, “they enjoyed this so much they might even start sewing!”