Daryl Lancaster Website

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?

Special Delivery

I have a really great weaving buddy friend, who has been known on occasion to go through massive clean-outs of areas of her house, and she will throw everything in a box she doesn’t want and ship it to me. I always love “care” packages from my friend. She knows whatever is in the box will get some attention from me, and that I have enough contacts to see that everything finds a good home.

So today my daughter was trying to come in the front door after school, and couldn’t get in because of a huge box, full of magazines, weaving journals, and fiber books. OMG!

What a treasure box this is, there are magazines dating back to the 40’s. The highlights include a December 1942 Woman’s Day with a lovely article on weaving in it, back issues of Fiber Arts, SS&D, Handweaver and Craftsman and Craft Horizons. There is a newsletter series from the 50’s-60’s called the Shuttle, I think published by Maysville. There are two volumns of Handweaving News from the 1930’s from Nellie Sargent Johnson, Detroit. And my favorite, a bound volume of 1945-46 issues of Osma Gallinger’s Shuttle Service complete with actual woven samples. All of this was apparently in the storage unit. This is my lucky day! There was also a copy of Ann Sutton’s Structure of Weaving, you’d think I’d already have that one in my library, oddly enough I didn’t. And I have a huge textile/periodical library!

After I got through that very welcomed distraction, I got down to business, I finished another couple pages on the new website, actually, looking over what’s left, it seems I only have four more pages to create. The Extras Page will be ongoing, I’ll move over PDF articles and things from my old site, but I hope to add to it, maybe extracting out the parts of the blog that pertain to specific garments and creating an all- in- one article to make it easy to follow the string. Stuff like that. I was trying to do a check on the site tonight, make sure everything I uploaded was working, but the site seems to be down. I’ll check later.

I managed to get the sleeves into the jacket, and I am soooooo happy with it. It looks fabulous on, so trim and angular, the lime green felt piping just pops right out of the jacket. The jacket was a dream to sew, there was enough wool content to remind me why I love tailoring wool, and why my mom would haul us down to 4th street in Philadelphia when we were growing up, to get the best wools for her suits and coats. Now I’m down to the lining, which should go together quickly, and then hours of handwork.

Tomorrow I have to spend the day making pantaloons for my son’s costume for Cinderella. I mentioned this in the last blog, but I have a better idea now of what they want, and I rooted through my stash and found enough stuff to pull this off without having to spend any money. I found a length of a jacquard white on white decorator fabric, which was too white and clean looking for the age and condition of the dublet they gave me. So I poured the remaining morning coffee and tea into a pot on the stove and “aged” the jacquard fabric to the correct color. I took measurements of my son’s trim muscular body, and I’ll see if I can whip out a pair of pantaloons! Stay tuned…

The Proverbial Grindstone

So another two days spent with my butt stuck in the chair, my hand paralyzed in the shape of a mouse, and more of the letters worn off my poor wireless keyboard. But, I did get two important pages done in the new site. The 1-1 1/2 hour lectures page, and the 2 – 2 1/2 hour lectures page are entered. What a job. The worst part was finding the original images I used for the prospectuses, there are just so many times you can save .jpg’s, and they lose a considerable amount of information. So I always like to start with the original file. But where among the thousands of images I have stored in about 5 different back up locations, could each of the images be hiding?

It’s like that in my studio, “I know it’s here somewhere…” “I remembered seeing it in 1994″… “Whatever happened to that…” Then of course I become a woman possessed. I won’t rest until I find the yarn, fabric, tool, image, whatever is lurking just out of site…

Besides spending the day searching through my vast archives for original files of some of my images, I also hunted around the studio for my supply of upholstery braiding. I know it’s here somewhere. I have to do an emergency costume for my son who plays the coachman in a performance of Cinderella. Yes, the same son with the car in the previous blog. I have to make a pair of pants to match a very old Lieutenant’s Doublet from Van Horn and Sons Theatrical Costumers. The jacket is in tatters, I’ll do my best to repair, but they need me to construct a pair of pants that will look like they go with it. So far, I haven’t found the braid. Next check is the attic, and oh boy, there are amazing things stored up there…

Speaking of my son, he announced yesterday that he is planning to join the National Guard. Well, I’ve been a bundle of mixed feelings all day, part of me knows that this would really be great for him, and part of me is scared to death. So, I’ll just focus on the costume for today.

I am planning an excursion into NYC over my daughter’s spring break, there are a couple of fiber shows I want to catch, one at the Cooper Hewitt called Fashioning Felt, and the other, called Seduction at the Museum at FIT. While checking out times and which days they are closed, I checked the MET to see if there was anything new of interest, and I found that they have an artwork of the day, which can be posted to your Google reader, or whatever you use for keeping track of such things. So, today’s image came up The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, ca. 1799-1800
William Blake (British, London 1757 – 1827 London)
British
Watercolor, pen and black ink over graphite; 14-1/8 x 13-1/16 in. (36 x 33.2 cm)
Rogers Fund, 1914 (14.81.2)

Somehow in all my years of Catholic School, and my years teaching Sunday School in the Reformed Church in town, I never came across this parable. What’s with the 10 virgins? So I did a quick search on Wikipedia, and got the scoop, it is a really odd analogy for being prepared for the second coming, but I loved the watercolor. And the whole idea of 5 wise and 5 foolish virgins waiting for a bridegroom who is having on-time issues, has got the creative juices really churning. So now I have something else to look forward to, a new work of art every day, just go to the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and subscribe to the artwork of the day feed. This was number 3,000 something, out of 130,000 plus artworks. I should live so long…

I went to the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild meeting tonight, and the speaker was Barbara Elkins, the woman who started WEBS. If you are a handweaver reading this blog, you know about WEBS, “America’s Yarn Store”, a 30,000 sq. ft. facility in Northhampton, MA. When I do buy yarn, I probably buy from them, and it was really great to listen to Barbara talk about how she and a fellow weaver started by renting out looms in order to get more money to buy yarn. That was 35 years ago, and in their garage. It was a great story, and I love the store, I’ve been there, Pioneer Weavers meets in the store, and I taught a jacket class for them a couple of years ago. Barbara was wearing the jacket she made in the class, tonight at the meeting. They are having their 35th anniversary sale, the email just came in my box. Beware, their sales can be quite toxic to credit cards! Seriously, they have a great website for ordering and terrific customer support, and I usually get whatever I order within two days. (That would be east coast).

So as I’m driving home from the meeting, in the cold dreary steady rain, visibility zero, I suddenly had a panic attack. The placemat exchange is due at the June meeting, this was the April meeting. That means my daughter and I have exactly 8 weeks to weave 14 more placemats. You do the math… So, out with the whip, and lets get cracking…

New Website!

Well I’m not completely finished, but I got what I’ve done uploaded and ready for testing. I’m completely brain fried, I think I’m getting too old for these kinds of intense hours!

Anyway, if anyone wants to try out what I’ve done on the new site, feel free to go to www.daryllancaster.com

Please note that only half the pages are completed, if you click on a link and the page isn’t done, it will just say, “Under Construction”. FYI, the About Me section should be done, those pages were easy since I just had to basically cut and paste from my resume. The schedule and worshops aren’t done. And the gallery is only halfway there. It took me the whole day to rebuild the Garment Gallery 2000-2005. I haven’t decided if I will ultimately put my earlier work, I go all the way back to about 1975, but I think it is too much information and not relevant to my current body of work. 2006-2010 isn’t up yet. But I did do the HGA Challenge page, because I finally figured out what button to click to get the text to wrap around the picture instead of on top or below. A big DUH! (To further the duh moment, the technique for doing this very simple thing (the align left key), is the same one I use to use back in the Microsoft FrontPage days. It never occured to me that this maniacal program would use something so simple…

Feel free to comment about any part of the site, I’m still building it, so I’ll take any feedback under consideration. The pages with a large amount of text or images have a built in scroll bar, see if it is intuitive to figure it out. Should the gallery images go from oldest to newest on the bottom, or the other way around? Same with things like my published work. I know you can’t click on the home page images, I hadn’t intended that. It is just a JPG in photoshop. Does it make you nuts that you can’t click on them? I was hoping visitors would just go right into the site.

The biggest question is, does the Spry menu bar work in Safari browser, I heard there were some compatibility issues. If it doesn’t, what happens? My husband has Safari browser on one of his computers, so after his ski trip (yes, another one, they left tonight for Vermont), I’ll get him to check. If anything wacky comes up on your screen, let me know what browser you are using.

Anyway, I’m tired. No progress on the jacket, I wanted to get this site up and working before I go any further on it. There is one other issue I’d love some feedback on, and that is the contact page. There are two schools of thought here. Publishing my personal information, my address and such is thought by many to be a no-no, after all, I will eventually have my schedule posted and that’s an invite to unwanted visitors while I’m away. On the other hand, there is the school of thought that often a guild or other important person needs to send me something by snail mail, or they need to plan airfares by the closest airport, so by not putting it, which I haven’t ever on the old site, I know very annoyed program chair people will spend an hour cruising through my site and finally email me in disgust, because they can’t find my address. Any opinions here?