Tag: Custom Runner

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…

Other…

Seems like everything I do, from doctor’s appointments to purchases online to attending theater events, gets followed up with a survey. “Tell us how we did!” I hate them. I understand their necessity, and it would be great if the people reading them actually took the comments to heart, but mostly all this extra paperwork just makes my sitting in front of the computer even more overbearing, when I really just long to be in the studio.

When I do fill out a survey though, most of my opinions don’t fit the questions. If there is a box marked “other”, I usually click it, because in my life, most things require an explanation. I’d be terrible on a jury. I can’t answer yes or no. Even in a class, students ask me questions and my answer is always “It Depends…” Life isn’t black and white. Fortunately. It is in breathing living color, and there are lots of shades and tints within!

So with that said, I have a bunch of different “other” looms that didn’t get mentioned in my last 3 blogs, bringing the total of named looms to 64 I think. There are about 20 frame looms in the attic, for teaching purposes, and about a dozen hand made Schacht Inkle Loom knock offs, also used for teaching. And I think 7 still in the box Inklette Looms from my years of teaching, and I didn’t count any of them. I counted the ones I use, that I named, and so, because I wanted to document where I am at this point in my life, I’m going to finish out the list with the “other” looms.

Every weaver has probably seen or has a Peacock loom. I even found an ad for one, when I was assembling a lecture for a guild a number of years ago for their 50th anniversary. I researched what was popular in the day when they got started, and it was quite a representation of where we have been as a handweaving community.

So I have a little 2-shaft Peacock loom, named “Peacock” which is pretty unoriginal, but there you go. I use it when I have a young person visiting and they want to “try weaving”. I have refurbished it with new heddles, which I made with a jig, and new roller cords, with heavy duty shoe laces, and it is a solid little workhorse when in the hands of a new weaver wannabee…

A number of years ago, my daughter called me while I was on the road teaching, about a Glimakra Band Loom for sale from one of our guild mates. I told her she wouldn’t like sitting sideways, but she persisted and I gave her the money to purchase it. I was right. She hated sitting sideways, and immediately redesigned the way the treadles worked so she could sit in front. That would be my daughter! This loom is named “Seven“, not the number but the Star Trek character. On it is a gorgeous warp, which she put on, plain weave, but hand dyed yarns that are wound in an ombré effect.

We own a card or tablet weaving loom, purchased from John Mullarkey years ago at a guild workshop. I’ve done card weaving many times, still prefer inkle weaving, and John and I have on more than one occasion done a “Battle of the Bands” performance at a couple of conferences. Tablet woven vs. Inkle Woven… That said, we have this loom, that my daughter warped a number of years ago, named “Rom“. I know the pattern is in one of my many booklets from John and I should be able to figure it out. My daughter isn’t big on accompanying paperwork. So I’d like to finish it off, in one of my outdoor weaving stints.

I also blogged recently about my Gilmore Wave loom, which I dug out and warped after a trip to a lace day sponsored by the local lace group, where I came home with a little baggie of about $200 worth of lacemaking threads, some hand dyed. I immediately set to work warping my Wave loom, called “Quark” and am really happy with the result. Warping was a challenge, but weaving is a breeze.

The rest are a large assortment of inkle looms, there are four Schact Inkle looms, seven Inklettes from Ashford, and a Beka, named “Beka“, which doesn’t have a warp at the moment, but I recently finished off a long warp for an Anni Albers’ Necklace project with my guild around the holidays.

I loved the Inklettes for their portability. I could fly somewhere to teach, and pack a half dozen of them in my large roller bag and be able to have a technique in progress to demonstrate with. I’d love to clear them, since I don’t do that anymore, but all of the techniques are part of my Advanced Inkle Weaving class (which I can do remotely), and there is a monograph available that details all of the techniques and how to do them. You can purchase the download in my eStore here.

“Bryce” has a beginning sampler with plain weave and Baltic Pick-up. I keep it as a “Learn to Weave” loom for inkle weaving.

“Adira” has a sampler featuring a complementary warp, light and dark, specifically for pebble weave. Warp yarns are Tencel.

“Stamets” is set up for Paired Pebbles, and I just keep repeating this small motif, for demo purposes, but it would be nice to have a finished band, maybe across the top of a small zippered bag! The threads are 12 wt. cotton..

“Tilly” has a sampler on it, for teaching purposes, supplemental warp and baltic pick-up.

“Nelson” is set up for a supplemental weft project, trim for a jacket, like the Chanel style.

One of my favorite patterns, from Ann Dixon’s book of Inkle Weave patterns, is something called Runic. It is free form weaving, you make it up as you go along, and I set this loom named “Owo” years ago, with hand dyed silk yarns from Treenway Silks. I need to finish it.

And “Detmer” is threaded for 3 shaft Turned Krokbragd, done on an inkle loom, which is a very cool thing. This is also Tencel.

That leaves the four Schacht Inkle Looms. “Rios” is a sampler, also for teaching purposes, threaded in a complementary warp, light and dark.

“Raffi” is another of my Learn to Weave looms, set up for simple Baltic Pick-up, or just plain weave.

“Jurati” is also set up as a beginning loom, with plain weave and Baltic Pick-up options.

And finally, yes there really is an end, is “Elnor“. I set this up in 2021, when I downloaded Annie MacHale’s newest book for Three-Color Pickup for Inkle Weavers. It took me a while to master the pattern, and of course I don’t remember what I did, so I’ll have to go back and figure it all out all over again, but that’s the point of all these looms, so I’ll keep figuring it out and one day have all these structures in my head ready to explain intelligently as needed.

My guild mate, who comes on Tuesdays to just play with all of my Structos, suggested a huge accordion file to store the paperwork for each of the named looms. The one she brought me wasn’t big enough with 30 something files, so I bought a second one and taped them together. Now to get paperwork for some of these looms from my daughter!

So you might wonder how I have shuttles for all of these looms, especially the Structos, which I talked about in the last post. I have a huge number of shuttles, stick and boat, but needed way more, and guild mates jumped to the task. Some I cut myself, from quart yogurt containers. I’ve also used take out food containers. The flat rectangular kind.

My guild friend who comes on Tuesdays went home and cut me a bunch from her cat litter tubs.

My other guild friend went a little crazy with her GlowForge and cut me a whole bunch of gorgeous stick shuttles and programmed in a sweet signature on some of them. In exchange I paid her guild dues. Small price to pay!

I mentioned in the last post, that I had already cleared one of the floor looms. That was a 4-shaft commission for another guild mate, for a friend of hers dining table. It needed to be 84″ long, and she wanted me to weave it in whatever structure I loved the most. The colors had to match the friend’s decor. My favorite structure is the one where I combine all sorts of different structures lengthwise in the same cloth. I have previously mentioned I documented this concept heavily in the Heddlecraft issue #38 I wrote on the subject. But I usually work with 8 shafts. I only had a 4-shaft loom available. So I reread my article, and revisited one of the 4-shaft drafts I included, from Oelsner’s Handbook of Weaves, and expanded it to include a straight draw twill, basket weave, and a broken twill. Using color and weave effects, I am so freakin’ proud of this cloth and its complexity, on only four shafts. So here is the runner on my own table, I can’t wait for photos from the client’s friend’s table.

And here is a close-up of the fabric. The draft and details are available in my eShop as a $2.99 download here.

I’m heading out next week for a very long overdue vacation. I haven’t been on a plane since March of 2020 when I barely made it home from the west coast before the world shut down from Covid. My daughter and I will be on a plane for 15 hours to Japan, where we will meet up with a tour sponsored by Tom Knisely and his daughter Sara Bixler, from Red Stone Glen. We will make a circular tour of the northern part of Japan, stopping at many textile centers for lots of hands-on experience and inspiration. Oddly enough, I’m trying to figure out what to pack, not clothing or toiletries or electronics, but what yarn I should bring. Because no good textile artist goes anywhere without a project. Socks to start, I ordered some lovely yarn from Webs, hope it comes in time.

If you do order from my shop, digital products will be available immediately since I’m not involved. Don’t forget to check your spam for the email with the link. If you order products that I have to ship, please be patient while I’m busy in Japan. I’ll resume shipping after the 18th.

So dear readers, until I return, I’ve given you things to inspire you, and keep you busy while I’m gone. My son will stay here off and on and check that all is well with the garden and the ponds. And my handyman will come around as well. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling any anxiety about leaving and going so far away for so long. I’ve been home for too long, so this is an important trip for me to regain my traveling feet. (And no, I’m not planning to resume teaching on the road!)

Stay tuned, there will be lots to tell when I get back…