Tag: Diane Click

Bittersweet Farewells…

Don’t worry dear readers, I’m not going anywhere. But there have been some changes that have me saying goodbye to things that impacted my life in some way, in many areas of my life.

The biggest news is a bittersweet farewell to the Duchess. I’ve blogged about her many times, this is a 12-shaft 54″ wide Tools of the Trade loom, a monster of a loom, challenging to weave on with this aging body. But weave I did. My daughter brought her here to live, picking her up from Rochester, NY, in the middle of Covid, and I was able to clear the warp she put on shortly after that, along with one I transferred to this loom, from a 12-shaft table loom, (which is now safely in Michigan) using a pattern I purchased from Denise Kovnat. I referenced that in my previous blog post.

I cleared the loom of that warp in short order. It is a very gorgeous piece of Tencel fabric, and no I don’t have any idea of what I want to do with it. It will sit quietly and be, for now.

I started packing the loom, stripping it down to reduce weight. Fashion Institute of Technology, in NYC was sending a moving van to pick it up and move it into their new weaving space. The movers came last Tuesday in the icy rain, two strong guys with a big truck and a lift gate, and within two hours, it was loaded…

…and installed at FIT. It looks really happy with the other multi shaft looms, looks like mostly Macombers. I hope it helps a new generation love weaving. Or at least get a good workout weaving on it!

Of course that left a huge chunk of space in my studio, which I filled by just rearranging some of the furniture that was already there.

I had moved my teaching set up, for zoom meetings, to the back corner of the studio, away from light and traffic, and that was fun staging a new look behind me as I taught or just tuned in to Zoom.

With all the space, and rearranging, I’m seeing things I haven’t looked at for a while, and getting psyched to start getting more things on the remaining looms… I have a couple that are empty…

It is also a bittersweet farewell to winter. It’s probably not completely done, but it reached 69 degrees today. I will say, that though for the first time since my husband died, I’ve given thought to how much this house is to care for by myself. This latest snow storm, of 14 inches, on the back of another one that produced about 15 inches, almost finished me. I worked doggedly every day to try to clear a pathway to my house, and to try to dig out the cars. Snow days are fun until you are the one removing the snow. My daughter was on her annual Star Trek Cruise in the Caribbean, and my son was in NC at Ft. Bragg for leadership training with the military. So they were absolutely of no help. This is the picture from the Ring Camera on my front porch, after I managed to clear the front deck steps.

I shoveled daily…

But it was really beautiful. The snow was heavy, and covered the trees, and one morning, after the first snow storm, after the roads were clear enough to drive, I actually pulled over on my way to the Shakespeare Theatre to volunteer, and just looked at the stunning landscape of everything covered in a blanket of white. I didn’t even try to get a picture. It would have never done it justice. This was the view out the window in my music room.

So a farewell to this winter, hopefully there will not be anymore storms like this for the rest of the season. The snow is gone now, with the warmer temps, leaving behind a dreary muddy landscape (we got 3.25 inches of rain in the last 24 hours).

And a sad farewell to my beautiful vine covered gazebo, which didn’t survive this winter. I’m debating what to do, I can’t fix it myself, and I can’t find a handyman, and I’m just sad…

But I did go out today, and start to clean out the vegetable garden, and planted some arugula, lettuce and spinach seeds. Spring is coming…

Meanwhile, I had hoped to say goodbye to my natural dye class I’ve been doggedly working through for the last number of months. I managed to use up all the exhaust baths I saved from my 18 dye adventures.

I washed samples that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks before I divided them into thirds.

I divided up all the samples, these are the cellulose fabrics, into thirds, one third for an extensive dye notebook, one third for Iron Modifiers, and one third for an Indigo overdye.

I thought I’d be through the indigo unit by now, but alas… I needed 7 pounds of very ripe bananas. Really…

There are many ways to create an indigo vat, and Maiwa teaches making Banana mash and using it to feed the indigo. I’ve done other methods, but I’m good at following directions. You would have laughed hysterically at me trying to carry what I hoped was 7 pounds of bananas across the produce department in my Shoprite, in the very thin produce bags, to weigh on the scale, nowhere near the bananas, and watching the bags rip as I tried to lift them onto the scale. The other shoppers were quite aghast… The things we do for our craft…

So I wait patiently for them to over rippen…

Meanwhile, I try to weave every day. I’m doggedly working through the Quigley course Diane Click was gracious enough to send me a few years ago, when I mentioned in a blog I had put a Quigley threading onto one of my Structos. Having transferred that warp to a floor loom, I threaded it based on Diane’s extensive handout from a class she taught in Florida in 2015. I do a new sample every day. I think there are 19 samples in total. I love this structure, a four tie unit weave, though it is very slow and tedious, especially in 20/2 cotton.

And dearest gentle readers, this will sound really silly, but I’ve been in mourning every since I binge watched the latest season of Bridgerton, which for those who have never seen it, is a Regency era romp through life on the ton under Queen Charlotte, turn of a couple century’s ago, (you might remember she was married to mad King George), and it is so gorgeous, so decadent, so utterly ridiculous and so addicting, that I couldn’t stop watching until the last episode. Now I have to wait probably another year and a half for season 5. The costumes are incredible. The sets lavish and stunning. And Queen Charlotte’s head pieces, are the highlights of any scene she is in. I don’t have a TV, and I don’t watch television, but I started watching Bridgerton during Covid, on Netflix, and it has been the one decadent treat every couple years. I’m sad the season is over.

And finally, I took a one day workshop in Broom making at my weaving guild. It was so much fun. The teacher, Sue Muldoon, stayed with me and I realized how much I missed the one on one I used to have with my hostess when I’d travel. Always a new friend, with an amazing story, and I’m a better person for each of the wonderful people who hosted me over the decades I taught. Sue is a wonderful teacher, very prepared, and I made some pretty cool brooms…

And there you have it. My daily life at this point, with the coming spring is now a check list of ‘Weave every day’, ‘Finish the dye class’ (when the bananas are ripe), ‘Play in the muddy gardens every day’, and of course practice every day for all the music groups I play with at the moment, spring concerts are coming up, and the set lists for each group are growing. There are multiple rehearsals each week, and I’m improving in tiny increments each time I sit down with the cello. One day I hope to be competent…

Stay tuned…

Life Happens…

I finished up my last blog, and headed “down” the shore (a NJ expression) for an overnight, meeting up with an old college friend and her husband, who had just flown in from the West Coast. It was a lovely day that Sunday, and then hurricane Erin stirred things up, and Monday was a cold, rainy day, thrilled to get rain, but sadly not at home two hours north, and definitely not a beach day. I headed home Monday night.

Tuesday I spent the day with my sister at the NY Botanical Gardens, finally getting to see the Van Gogh’s flowers exhibit. It was pretty incredible. But more importantly, my sister is a superior gardener and well versed in native plants. We poked around, examining labels, identifying plants with my trusty app, and acted like two horticulturists, or in my case really, a horticulturist wannabee… We discovered all the different variations of Rudbekia (hirta, fulgida, and triloba, if you are interested…)

Tuesday night I started feeling sniffly, and by Wednesday morning I was sick. I was so sick, feverish, I got really suspicious. 48 hours before, I was with a whole group of people… hmmmm.

So I wanted to start this blog post with all the glorious pictures of my new costume, and my cello debut at the Montclair Early Music Medieval fest. Turns out, I couldn’t go because, I TESTED POSITIVE FOR COVID! Damn… Bad timing. So basically I cancelled my life for the next 10 days, until I tested negative once more. I was really disappointed, so many things planned for the end of the summer. Fortunately I was sick for just a couple days, and stayed in bed, and did what any weaver would do, took a loom to bed with me.

I cleared one of my Inklette Inkle Looms of a Supplemental Weft piece that has been on there for too many years.

I was on a roll, and couldn’t go anywhere, so I cleared another Inkle loom, this one set up for turned Krokbragd. Both looms were donated to Jockey Hollow Weavers for their loaner loom program. Two more looms out of my studio.

Meanwhile, the gardens, in spite of no rain, (in spite of being sick, I still went out and watered the critical things) my tomatoes are prolific.

So I made a pot of sauce…

And that warp from hell? The one that wouldn’t end? I was determined…

6 yards of 20/2 fine cotton. I initially worked through the Robyn Spady overshot sampler from a back issue of Handwoven Magazine, switching back and forth from Rose fashion to Star fashion, and then I just said, “Screw it”, and picked one of the patterns that appealed to me, and just wove. And wove. And wove…

So now I have this incredibly long sampler I will have to do something with. I think zip bags? At least a portion of it.

Which meant that I could move another warp onto that loom from my dwindling collection of Structos. I chose to move over an 8-shaft Quigley, the original pattern on the Structo I got from Tom Knisely’s book of Table Linens. It was designed by Diane Click and is a four-tied Unit Weave.

It is complicated to weave, and when I originally posted it on my blog, a couple of years ago, Diane actually wrote me, told me she taught a workshop in this structure at the 2015 Florida Tropical Weavers Guild conference (I’m pretty sure I was there teaching) and generously sent me her handout. Since I had already set the loom up, I didn’t do much with it, but now that I had the opportunity to rethread, bingo! Now I can work through her handout and really study the structure.

I was on a roll, and though I finally tested negative for Covid, I decided to move the warp on the 4-shaft Structo I had set up with Doup Leno. I wanted to prove to myself that I could weave Doup Leno on a Structo, but table looms are painfully slow, so once I moved the warp, I blew through a half yard in a sitting. This is 10/2 cotton.

Then I decided to move the warp on another 8-shaft Structo with a Honeycomb draft, from Malin Selander’s Weave a Weave. Here is the original piece I cut off the Structo before I moved it to my 8 shaft 36″ floor loom.

This probably wasn’t my best idea, I should have waited for a smaller floor loom, but I wanted to reach out to my contact at FIT in NY who is patiently waiting for me to clear Structos. I wanted to make it worth the trip for her.

This is going to be a bit technical, so if you are not a weaver, just skip to the picture and move on. Malin Selander’s book is written for a sinking shed loom. I have rising shed jack looms. In a sinking shed loom, in Honeycomb, only one shaft gets pulled down at a time, the rest stay up. Easy treadling. (Though I’m curious because I’ve never seen an 8-shaft loom with a sinking shed, at least from the era the book was written). I have rising shed jack looms, like I said, which means, to have one shaft stay down, I have to lift 7, 36″ wide rock maple shafts. This is quite the workout. And yes, I could weave it upside down, but trust me, you don’t want to do that in Honeycomb. Cause I’m kind of designing as I go… Not only that, one of the designs in her Honeycomb sampler calls for 18 treadles. I have 10. It is easy to weave on a table loom, you just pull levers and engage the shafts you want. (There are 254 combinations of shafts in an 8-shaft loom) Not so easy on a floor loom. So I jumped down a rabbit hole, determined to figure out a skeleton tie up so I could use more than one foot, and get the tie-up down to 10 or less treadles.

There is an old program on the internet called Tim’s Treadle Reducer. I went there, and either it is no longer functioning, or I blew it up. If anyone knows its status, please let me know, it was a really handy tool. So I was on my own.

I sat with the draft for an hour or so, after transferring the tie-up for a rising shed loom. And slowly I worked it out to be able to use less than 10 treadles, two or three at a time, but set up in a way that one foot could press two at once, having the treadles adjacent to one another. I was pretty damn proud of myself. (I tweaked it further, shifting the plain weave to the middle, the photo shows the middle of my calculations.)

I haven’t woven that one yet, but this is a different design in her Honeycomb sampler, it is a very cool weave structure, but I’m going to be with this one for a while, since there are something like four yards on this 16/2 cotton warp.

Yesterday was an interesting day. First, it rained. We have been under extreme drought conditions here, I’m struggling daily to keep my plants alive, and Wednesday we planted another four dozen native bushes and perennials. It started raining Thursday night, resumed on Saturday, and well into this morning. I’m thinking we got more than 2″ of rain. For that I got on my knees and gave thanks to the universe for taking care of its own.

Secondly, if you own a PC with Windows 10, you probably know that October 15th is D Day. Microsoft will no longer support Windows 10 with security updates. Which is really problematic, leaving any computer with Windows 10 vulnerable. My tech guy came over yesterday, I was not going to try this myself, to upgrade my two computer systems to Windows 11.

Yeah, so the first computer, my laptop I use for teaching online, which I can annotate with a pen, set up in my studio, the processor in it won’t support Windows 11. So $1000 later, I have a new laptop on its way. Apparently the processor in my desk top computer will also not support Windows 11, but my tech guy, who is really brilliant, found a work around, and got everything on my desktop updated. Of course I have high anxiety knowing by the end of the week, I’ll be ripping my hair out making sure all my programs work on the new laptop, finding registration codes, passwords, etc., and getting a new code for Fiberworks. Which I definitely need that critical piece of computer software.

So one computer is safe and updated. And it rained. And I’m Covid free. And my sister didn’t get it. And my garden continues to delight and astound me. Leaves are starting to turn, things are beginning to die back. And I just cleared a number of looms, all going to good homes who will use them for teaching.

And I looked at the calendar and my eyes got really big, and I realized I have six weeks to make as much stuff as I can for the guild sale, inventory sheets are due the end of October. OMG! Fortunately I have a 5-yard plus Overshot sampler to start with…

Stay tuned…