Fiberworks PCW – Daryl's Blog

Rested…

All week I felt as though I were moving through Jello. I slept as much as I could, and just accomplished what absolutely needed to get accomplished. And I mourned that, although I’m having a wonderful year teaching, I haven’t done anything creative in the studio, except write, for a long time… My adventures on the road though interesting, from a blogger’s point of view, get redundant after awhile, there isn’t anything new to say, and I long for a meaty project, and for that matter, to just put warps on my looms, any of them would be great, because they are looking like that girl from Bluefly.com who goes to the party naked because she has nothing to wear. (If you watch Project Runway, you’ll know the ad.)

My handweaving guild, Jockey Hollow Weavers, has an exchange every September. The goal/project for the year is set, we have all year to come up with whatever is expected of us, and we present it in June. Well of course that means I don’t look at it until April, and then maybe start on it in May. The meeting comes early in the month, first Wednesday, so I really only have about another month to pull this off. You might remember last year this time, my daughter and I were working frantically on eight overshot placemats each, the loom wasn’t cooperating, and we were pretty much down to the wire on that one. My daughter is participating this year as well, but I have my own project to worry about, so I’m not nagging her, yet…

This year, the guild chose a creativity project, each participant put cones of yarn in a brown bag, and then chose from the bags on the table; the assignment was to weave something from the contents of the bag, and then return it to the person whose bag it was in June. This isn’t unlike the Challenge project I did for the Tampa Bay Convergence in 2008. Here is yarn, make something. Sort of a Project Runway parameter. Except I had nine months, not one day. My bag of yarn was from my guild-mate Sherrie Miller. She put a very large cone of pink kid mohair, with a cone of beige Homespun unmercerized cotton, and a small cone of some unlabeled rust cotton, and about 100 yards of a fat, soft, hairy variegated knitting yarn.

I’m not one to plan projects. I like to weave yardage. How much yardage? How much yarn do I have? I spent a day with my McMorran Yarn Balance, and a scale, and did lots of calculations. The knitting yarn, I just measured by hand. I wasn’t sure how else to be completely accurate and I didn’t want to waste an inch playing around with the balance. Then I played with yarn wraps, getting a feel for how the yarns looked together. I loved the knitting yarn, but with only 100 yards, and I was determined to use every inch, how could I get that to work with 30 ounces of fine kid mohair weighing in at 2750 yards per pound. And the cottons seemed coarse next to the mohair. So I was thinking of trying to minimize their impact. I started leafing through my vast collection of weaving books for structure inspiration. I have acquired some new ones, and I pulled Ann Dixon’s Handweaver’s Pattern Directory from Interweave Press. I found a lovely Swedish lace pattern, and started to see lace boxes with plain weave horizontal and vertical stripes of the cotton with a center of the knitting yarn. I worked out how many warp and weft stripes I could get for varying widths of fabric, until I came up with something I liked. It was relatively easy to work out using weaving software. I use Fiberworks PCW. I have for years. I plugged in one of the lace blocks into my software, and to my surprise, the software showed it wasn’t actually weaving. There were warp floats that were the size of the entire block. Hmmmm…… I checked it about six times, thinking my brain must be really fried, and then it dawned on me, could there be an error in the book? I went to the Interweave Press website, to check for errata, we can do that now you know, and sure enough, to my horror, there were pages of errata. But not the page I was using, page 191. Could it be I discovered yet another mistake in the book? I quick emailed my guild-mate Sally, there isn’t a structure she doesn’t know or can’t figure out, and I figured if she had the book, she could look at it and confirm that I wasn’t nuts. Sure enough, she wrote back within five minutes, had the book, and declared I was correct, there was an error. I quickly corrected it, and felt vindicated… small silly victory, but hey, it made me feel competent for about five minutes. I love the internet…

Since I only had eight shafts, I chose to use only one of the blocks of the Swedish Lace, and then set out to figure out how to make the knitting yarn act as a supplemental warp AND weft, which took most of the remaining shafts. It took me quite awhile to figure how to get it to float and intersect like a cross in the middle of the stripe. I love challenges like this. The world disappears and I am so focused… When I clicked on the correct shaft, suddenly the draft wove perfectly and I was cheering from my desk. The rest of the family did the proverbial eye roll, you know how we get, but I was really happy with myself, and now all I needed to do was actually weave it, sample first once the warp is threaded and wound, and then adjust the sett if needed.

So I pulled out my warping mill, and wound three separate sections of the warp. There will be less distortion on the yarns for 30″ across, and I’m not sure how fragile the kid mohair is. I found some breakage, maybe from old rodent or insect damage near the bottom of the cone, so I didn’t want to cause any unnecessary stress on the yarns. Since I had so little of the knitting yarn, I didn’t want to lose any to loom waste, I added a 20″ header of junk yarn, to each of the knitting yarns in the warp. Since this is eight shafts, the waste is more because of the depth of the castle.

So I’m all wound and ready to start threading. I’m feeling a bit more rested, and I’ve given my mind a creative stretch, and I’ll soon have a warp on the new loom.

Oh, and what am I going to make with this fabric? I don’t have a clue, I’ll wait until I actually make the fabric, and since Sherrie is a fantastic sewer (she was one of my favorite weavers who worked with me on the forecast column for Handwoven Magazine) I might just give it to her as yardage. 🙂

Stay tuned…

Not a great start to the year…

OK, true confessions… I’m a baby when it comes to getting sick. I’m miserable, cranky, and very whiny. Fortunately my husband is on the other side of the world, and my son is safely in Boot Camp. That means poor Brianna has to listen to my misery…

This hit me like a ton of bricks, and I never saw it coming. As a matter of fact, I kept blaming my not feeling quite right on all kinds of stupid things like the jalapeno pepper I put in the cole slaw yesterday, and overdoing it at a new yoga class last night. Truth is, I’m sick. There is no denying it. How long I’m sick for, and what actually I have, remains to be seen, but I am achy, feverish, and have a deep rattling cough. Bummer…

I’m guessing that my body did what it had to do, got through the holidays, got through the New Year, got my husband off to Israel, and my son off to Boot Camp. I cleaned out his room, and his car (it would take a blog post by itself to describe those adventures, but I’ll be kind and just say, everything is now clean, beds are properly made, and nothing is currently growing or unidentifiable in the downstairs refrigerator.) 🙂

And now I’m sick… 🙁

I did manage to finish sleying the reed with the new marble inspired warps, and I did manage to update my sister’s website, but it was painful. Everything on me aches. I had to cancel attending the guild meeting tonight, which was tough because I was one of the panel speakers. Brianna is driving, as I write, to Mendham to take over for me as program chair, for the Jockey Hollow Guild meeting tonight. She is a trooper (and I think she welcomed the excuse to get out of the house since I was so cranky…).

I have to say I’m really really lucky. I can lay low. Other than dropping off my work tomorrow in Montclair at the George Segal Gallery for the Art Connections 6 exhibit, I have nothing on my calendar requiring me to be out of the house, and I can hopefully sleep it off. I have a slew of deadlines, but it is more important I get over this thing quickly, so I’ll cave and be a good girl… And I just started an 800 page book, the final installment of the Outlander series, Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon though I hear it really may not be the final installment. This is book 7 I think… It was a handweaver in Connecticut who turned me on to this series, many many years ago when I stayed with her. So I’m off to curl up in bed and read, and hopefully sleep…

Here are the photos from my loom adventures today. I slowly but surely worked my way across the reed, pulling the appropriate amount of threads from the cross on the appropriate warp bundle. I loved the colors, and it was peaceful to just sit and thread, but I sure wish I didn’t ache all over…

Here is a tip, I found this out the hard way of course. If you are using hand dyed warps, always save a couple of extra threads, or wind a couple of extra threads to include when you are dyeing, in case one breaks while you are weaving. You’ll always have a way to correct the break with the right color.

The next step is of course, threading each of those warp ends, one by one through the heddles in the shafts. Here is another tip, one I also learned the hard way. Check how many heddles are on each shaft BEFORE you start threading. My loom is the type where you can’t add heddles once you start. You also can’t remove them. And I’m going almost the full width of my loom. So having a bunch extra squeezed on the sides, or heaven forbid not enough, can make the most easy going handweaver resort to hair pulling…

So I used my handy dandy computer drafting program (I use Fiberworks PCW) and it gives me the heddle count for each shaft. Now I just have to pull each of the eight shafts out of the castle, and lay them on my cutting table, and add the correct amount of heddles. I keep my heddles stored on knitting needles, so they just slip on the heddle rods effortlessly, checking first to make sure they face in the correct direction. 🙂

This process takes time. And I really don’t enjoy this step. But it is an important one, on most of my shafts I had to add at least 100 heddles…

Now they are all back safely in the castle, fully loaded with the correct number of heddles, and I can start threading tomorrow. If I can get out of bed…

Post Mortem or playing ketchup…

Actually it is Catch-up, but I liked the word ketchup better. We are almost finished with the holidays, the social obligations, the Christmas cookies, the good cheer, the Christmas cookies, oh, and did I mention the Christmas cookies? (I recieved something like six trays…)

We spent a glorious three days over the Christmas holiday with my sister and her husband in rural northern Maryland. It poured rain for most of the time we were there which prevented us from doing anything wonderful outside. I brought nothing with me to keep me occupied. That would be no weaving, no sewing, nothing that involved yarn, no computer, no technology, no email, no blogging, just gifts, and my family and a big bottle of wine. 🙂

The weekend was glorious because I did something I almost never do. Absolutely nothing. I just enjoyed the quiet and peace of a good visit with my sister, wine and friendship, planning meals together from all the leftovers, fixing a puzzle with my daughter, and playing the occasional word or card game. I finished a couple of books, and I came home feeling rested, calm, and peaceful. Sort of what the holidays had intended but rarely produce.

So now, I am back in fast forward drive, trying to play ketchup or catch-up this week, dealing with all the things I didn’t deal with while I was playing in NYC, unwrapping gifts, and visiting with my family. Things like clean the house. Bummer… Things like laundry. Double bummer… Things like paying the bills. We won’t even go there… None of these activities make for an interesting blog post, but they all have to get done, and once finished, they have this habit of needing to be done again almost immediately. 🙁

So I spent the better part of the last two days, cleaning my very dirty house, doing countless loads of laundry, organizing the paperwork so I can pay all the bills when the pay check comes in tomorrow, and four hours today writing proposals for a conference in 2011. That would be a year and a half away. So far away I can’t even think. The conference may even conflict with my daughter’s High School Graduation, but I won’t know the dates for that until late next year. So I send out the proposals and hope for the best.

What I really want to do is play with my new painted warps. They are beautiful. I can’t wait to get them on the loom. I might play around tonight with my drafting software (I use Fiberworks PCW) and see what I can make with these babies. I long to get something substantial on the loom. Some of the colors dyed brighter and deeper than I had planned, but no matter, I think this fabric will weave up gorgeous, and colorful.

In addition, I got a few skeins from the leftover dyes. More than likely I won’t use these skeins in the 10 yard fabric, but they are there for when I get inspired and need just the right thing. And I had a stack of rayon scarves sitting under the cutting table, and I used two of them to mop up the rest of the dye, a dark brown and a dark plum.

One of the books I finished on my weekend getaway, was Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle. It is the story of her family’s yearlong attempt to be locavores, that would be consuming only foods grown by them or by local farmers or producers. The book is fascinating, and Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite writers. I actually listened to the audio book, and she reads the book herself. The point of the book I think, is not to convert everyone who reads it to go back to the land and grow all your own food, raise and slaughter your own poultry, make your own cheeses, and can and preserve all the fresh produce you can for the long cold winter months ahead. She and her family did all that, but I never got the feeling that she was judging those who don’t. The book is designed to make you think. That’s all. Think about where our food comes from and make personal choices that work for us. This is almost January. We are in the middle of an icy wind storm in NJ. There won’t be fresh local produce available here for months. I travel too much to be able to grow, tend, harvest and preserve my own foods for my family, but I loved the passion she showed, for understanding and documenting the process from the beginning of working the ground while it is still partially frozen to glorious meals with the simplest and freshest ingredients.

I feel like that, working a basic necessity of life, from the very beginning, from the raw sheep fleece, spinning the yarn, (Ok I do cheat and buy yarn on a cone…) dying it in bright colors that make my heart sing. Working the yarn into a cloth, carefully threading the loom, weaving the fabric row by row, and taking the finished fabric and turning it into a spectacular garment to celebrate and decorate my body. It doesn’t get any better than that. I completely get what it means to understand a process, and to painstakingly work, step by step to achieve a goal, clothing to wear. Yes, we’ve all heard the passerby wonder why we do this, why can’t we just to go the store and buy dishtowels, or lace, or a knitted hat, or a woven jacket. Wouldn’t it be cheaper? Sure. But there is no explanation to those who ask that kind of question, they aren’t wired to appreciate that it is the process of getting dirty, of feeling fingers in the mud, of crawling under the loom to tie up the treadles, of painstakingly threading each thread through the reed and heddles of the loom, of endless weeding, of sending the shuttle flying through the shed that makes our hearts sing and our souls satisfied. It allows me to take the time, to pay the bills, to vacuum the house, to scrub the toilets, to fold endless streams of laundry, because I know once I finish those tasks, I get to play with my yarn and create something from nothing.

Here’s to another year of creativity and passion, lift your glass in celebration of the process! Cheers!