Frances Irwin Handweavers – Page 3

Bliss

The house is quiet. It is morning. My husband has gone off to work, my daughter is off to her second day of Junior year of HS, and my 19 year old son is asleep in the basement, no surprise there. There is nothing major on the calendar calling me to actually leave the studio. For today, life seems almost normal. Big exhale…

I have one more big push of a workshop to teach, I leave on the 20th to teach at Sievers Fiber School on Washington Island in Wisconsin. I have to start printing handouts, and getting interfacing and pattern paper cut, and shipped ahead, but not today. I have a lecture to give to the American Sewing Guild local chapter on Saturday, but not today. Today, I’m going to try a repeat of my routine yesterday, which was simple, healing, and mind clearing. I did some housework in the morning, 20 minutes of yoga, took care of business stuff, paperwork, emails, got in my blog, and then spent the day in the studio creating something.

Sidebar: In November, the 14th and 15th to be exact, my guild, The Jockey Hollow Weavers, has its annual show and sale. Timed to take advantage of the upcoming holiday season, it has been a hugely popular event, and the members of the guild spend all year producing items to sell, handwoven, knitted, crocheted, felted, whatever their specialty, it can be found at the sale. And there are demos, and things to eat, it is a great weekend. I have never put a single thing in the sale.

Bigger Sidebar: I sold my work in craft fairs for 10 years. When I quit doing craft fairs, in 1989, I swore I’d never sell my work again. That was 20 years ago. I’ve raised two kids since then (my son was born in 1990, six weeks after my last craft fair), and lots has changed in my life. But I have held steadfast to my rule. That all changed last month when I was contacted by a woman who saw one of my pieces in the Small Expressions Exhibit in Grinnell Iowa, and wanted to buy the piece titled Survivor. Since the gallery was not authorized to act as a selling agent for the work, she contacted me directly. She bought my small postcard size work, the show ended this weekend, the work should be making its way home to me shortly, and I will forward the piece on to her as soon as I get it back. This experience has made me realize that 1) I am hoarding my work and running out of room to store it and 2) others might want to share a bit of me and own something I do.

Since I mostly make complex garments from my handwoven cloth, and they are made to fit me, it makes it really hard, and very expensive to sell my garments which are largely one of a kind. I’ve had pressure from teaching venues to develop smaller project like workshops and seminars, and I can see where all this is leading.

So here is a no pressure/no cost to me opportunity to put some of my work out there for sale, the absolute worst that can happen is I sell nothing. But I will have forced myself to experiment with techniques, on a smaller scale, and potentially make seminars out of them, which is what I do best. Think of the samples I’d have. At the moment, I could root around in the archives and come up with a few things to put into the show, but I have some time in the studio, during the next six weeks, minus the trip to Wisconsin, to actually come up with some concrete ideas and small salable pieces.

Of course this means applying a deadline and pressure to myself. I know the previous paragraph started with “So here is a no pressure opportunity…”, but pressure and deadlines are what I do best. If there isn’t any pressure, then it goes to the bottom of the very substantial to-do list. Since I work for myself, there is no boss plopping something on my desk telling me he or she needs it “yesterday”. I do that very nicely to myself thank you very much. I’m always asked how I get things done. I set impossible deadlines and expectations, and kill myself trying to meet them. The best part for me is when I actually accomplish what I’ve set out to do, and I get the most enormous sense of pride, in having met my impossible goals, that I’m spurred on for the next big impossible task I set for myself.

In January of 2008, I decided to enter all eight of the Convergence 2008 Tampa Bay exhibits. There were categories I don’t usually play in, like basketry and functional textiles for the home, but I entered them anyway. And I got work accepted to 6 of the eight shows. But it wasn’t about the acceptance, it was about applying. And this guild show and sale for me is not about actually selling work, though that would be nice, it is about having a couple dozen items to put into the show.

So, I’ve embarked on yet another impossible deadline, to create as close as I can, to one item to sell per day during any day I don’t have a major calendar event. Yesterday was one of those kind of days. So I put in my headphones, listened to the first few chapters of The Devil Wears Prada on my new iTouch, and I wove one scarf. It helped that the loom was already set up, there are two more scarves to go on this warp. But it is a start. I love the warp here, it is inspired by a class I took with Barbara Herbster at the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild last May. The class was in Supplemental Warp, and after I finished the two scarves from the class, I rewarped the loom with whatever I had in the studio, and just had fun.

Today is another non calendar event day, though I do have to warp a small portable loom for an ongoing project for my other guild, Frances Irwin Handweavers. We are suppose to set up the loom and bring it with us to the meetings to try a series of rug techniques at each meeting during the fall. That should only take an hour or two, it is a small 4 shaft table loom, and the rest of the day, I get to create. Stay tuned…

Deconstructed Screen Printing

I will admit, I am exhausted. It is hard to believe, this time last night I was somewhere over Kansas…

I promised you photos of my studio, after my bout of jealousy with Joy’s studio floorspace. There really isn’t any in mine. But it is what I have to work with, and it serves me well, and it stores a lot, and if I keep it picked up, I can actually function in it. And I’ve often said, though this is really just a justification for my 350 square ft oversized bedroom, “It isn’t the quality or quantity of space, it is what you make in it that counts”.

My studio is actually an old 10 x 10 bedroom where we knocked the outside wall out and extended over the downstairs den. There are beautiful floor to ceiling windows at the far end, but I keep the shades drawn for fear of fading of all my yarns and textiles. The loom in the foreground is my big 8 shaft 45″ Tools of the Trade Loom.

I have a great cutting table, that my husband built for me, and there are old kitchen cabinets

above the sewing machines and the computer desk. I do have a lot of storage for such a little room. The hardest part is keeping the cutting table cleared. 🙂

You’ll notice I have stuff stuck all over the face of the cabinet doors. I put up cards, notations, quotes, sketches, things that inspire me, small cartoons, and photos of classes or people I love. It is a happy wall to look up at as I work. Robyn had the same sort of thing in the form of a bulletin board next to her desk, and on it was a great quote, one I have to add to my own wall…

Powerful Woman’s Motto:

Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders and says,… “Uh, Oh, she’s awake!”

Well, damn, I like that. It left me with a big smile, and isn’t that what inspirational things are suppose to do?

After getting to bed last night after 1pm EST, I woke up at 7am, to throw on some grunge clothes and pack up the car, and drive an hour west, almost to the New Jersey border. My guild, Frances Irwin Handweavers, was having it’s end of the year one day workshop, free to members, and I was thrilled I made it back in time to finally get to take one of Kerr Grabowski’s seminars. First, I’ve known Kerr for 20 years, I met her when she first came to Peters Valley as their fiber resident. She is amazingly talented, creative, and a wonderful teacher, and she lives in the Surface Design World. It is odd that I’ve never been able to take a workshop with her, as a matter of fact, back in 2001, we both taught together at Montclair State University in their fiber department when the department found themselves without instructors for a couple of semesters. I handled the structural fiber classes and she taught surface design.

So it was with great anticipation and excitement that I finally got to spend the day with Kerr, learning deconstructed screen printing. She has a wonderful DVD of her class, available for about $40. and you can preview it on her website. Of course I bought the DVD…

(That’s Kerr in the red apron)

She showed us some very playful and spontaneous things, and I can’t wait to build a screen surface for my cutting table, and get a couple screens. I have everything else. A cabinet full of dyes, all the materials for dyeing, even the fabric, which I picked up on Friday in Seattle. My head is spinning with possibilities.

Here are a couple of my attempts at the medium, the silk chiffon scarves are still curing in a black garbage bag in my car in the heat.

I’ll take a photo when they are rinsed and dry.

One final note as my excellent adventure winds down, I picked up a birthday card in one of the galleries in Bremerton, WA during our Art Walk Friday night. It was actually a belated birthday card to me. It featured the artwork of a local artist Amy Burnett, who was actually there to sign the cards. In addition to the artwork, the year 1955 was written. She has a series of cards for all different years, as a celebration to women. Inside is a list of all the special things that happened that involved women in the year you were born.

I didn’t realize that Rosa Parks, refused to move to the rear of the bus in December of 1955, the same year I was born, and I didn’t realize that Rosa Parks was a seamstress. I didn’t know that Doris Humphrey founded Julliard’s Dance Theatre in 1955. I didn’t know Louise Boyd at 67 years old was the first woman to fly over and around the North Pole in 1955. I knew Annette Funicello was one of the original 24 Mouseketeers in the Mickey Mouse Club, but I didn’t know it debuted in 1955. It was one of my favorite shows. And most importantly, I didn’t know that Lenore Tawney, weaver and sculptor, exhibited nonfunctional weaving in shapes departing from the traditional two dimensional fabric form, thus introducing a new range of artistic expression, fiber art, in 1955. I feel like I am surrounded by women who made a difference.

“Uh, oh, she’s awake!…”

I don’t usually do commercial announcements, but I know two of the brave souls who have worked tirelessly on the project below. I did a brief bit of alpha testing, and the site has real potential. Of course I’m still hoping you’ll stop by my blog after getting your fill of online technology! 🙂

Today at noon, Weavolution the much anticipated new online gathering place for handweavers launched, and I have a brief press release here:

JOIN THE WEAVOLUTION

Weavolution.com, an online social network designed to meet the unique needs of handweavers, launches its beta test on June 8, 2009. Designed to bring handweavers together from around the world, Weavolution.com is a one-stop resource for every type of handweaver.

From hobby to production, from peg to dobby, Weavolution provides a place for weavers to meet, discuss and participate in moderated user groups and forums.

Members may post projects, looms, yarns, books, and accessories to share with others and solicit feedback from other members.

But you don’t have to be a member or even a weaver to explore the site and learn about weaving free of charge.

Weavolution aims to become an inclusive, global community that encourages weavers by enabling them to discover and follow trends in weaving; find local, national and international resources; and find businesses catering to their needs. Weavolution members can search the site’s databases to view items, group postings and research information catalogued by others.

Weavolution’s goal is to provide a website for handweavers that is useful, fun and helpful, and to be a resource for shops, products and ideas from around the corner and around the world.

The project began in 2008 when three weavers from across the United States, Claudia Segal, Tien Chiu, and Alison Giachetti, met online and formed Weavolution. Working together with a host of dedicated volunteers, the team forged Weavolution.com into a website with the potential to become a community.

Come, take a look. Weavolution.com is available for anyone to explore. You don’t have to sign up to see our site. But if you do, we hope you’ll decide to JOIN THE WEAVOLUTION

Placemat Exchanged!

Grab your coffee, this is going to be a long one!

Wow, what a meeting! Bri and I attended last night’s last Jockey Hollow Weavers’ meeting for the year. We start up again in the fall. We had a lot to accomplish. There was the stash sale, unload what you no longer want. There are a number of retiring members of the group, who are de-acquisitioning and moving to smaller digs in a far away location. Since we have a number of new weavers with paltry stashes, this is always a good thing. Equipment, yarns, books, and back issues of weaving magazines, all find good homes.

Next there was the Pot-Luck. Weavers are always terrific cooks. The food was excellent. The only group who edges out the handweavers for first place in the pot-luck catagory are the lace makers. I’m not sure why this is, but suffice it to say, no one went home hungry!

Of course there was the entertaining show and tell, we had the supplemental warp workshop scarves to show off, and we have a couple of outside of the box creative fiber members who never cease to impress me with their energy and creativity. One member crocheted a spiral rug from plastic grocery bags, and started making curtains by randomly stitching colorful halves of zippers in a haphazard way on a bedsheet. I love show and tell!

But the highlight was of course, the placemat exchange. It is always a bit disappointing when not everyone finishes on time, and we had one in the group of 16 who dropped out at the last minute, and one of the guild members graciously stepped in to try and weave her set over the summer. But no matter, I’m amazed at how many of the participants were new weavers, including my daughter, who wove a set of overshot placemats, this being only their 3rd or 4th project ever. I’m so excited to see the passion these new weavers throw out into the group, infusing it with youth and creativity, and enthusiasm. It is sad to see older members retiring and moving away, but happily there is some new fresh talent to keep the guild going.

So here are the results. Bri was able to get seven of her eight purple placemats, and they are beautiful. They still need to be washed and hemmed, but she is so excited. The eighth one is as I understand, on the loom as I write.

I only came home with four, but two more will be exchanged at Monday’s meeting of the Frances Irwin Guild, members of that guild graciously jumped in to give us two groups of 16. One member dropped out at the last minute, and her mats, picked up by another member, and the mats from the other member who wasn’t finished in time, will be delivered in September. What a beautiful collection of overshot patterns!

We had a special guest at the meeting, Alison Giachetti, who is a partner in the new Weavolution, a web gathering place for handweavers, which is scheduled to launch next week. I did some brief alpha testing, and posted some project notes on the site for my Frosted Florals dress, and talked to Alison briefly about moderating a handwoven clothing forum on Weavolution, but that won’t happen immediately. There is a lot of buzz about this, so stay tuned…

Coffee Break! Lots to cover today before I leave for Seattle….

I spent the day yesterday tying up loose ends. I got two pieces of work accepted to the Fiber Celebrated 2009 exhibition, at the Center of Southwest Studies Gallery at Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO. The show opens July 27th and runs through September 20, 2009. So yesterday was the paperwork day, artist statements, technical information, all that had to be back fairly quickly. I struggled with the artist statement. The limit was 70 words. Can you imagine? I can’t say anything in 70 words. 🙂 My average blog posts are over 1000 words. I’m already at 647 words in this blog alone! And I had a lot to say about these two seemingly unrelated pieces of artwork. So, I’ll just use my blog to tell the story that I couldn’t say in 70 words.

The first piece is one of my small artworks, woven in an inlay style, with strips of silk cut from a digital print on treated fabric. I’ve blogged about this technique in past posts, just search ‘Big Sister’, and you should find the technical stuff. I want to talk more about the inspiration.

Many of us have had the privilege of staying with someone, holding their hand, keeping the vigil as we wait for their soul to depart from their old frail, used up body. In 2006, I had the privilege of the long vigil watching and waiting for my mother in law to pass. I adored this woman. She was one of my fiber mentors, and I wrote a piece about our relationship, which you can read, titled Circle of Life. I was so moved by the grace and beauty of a dying woman, the angle of her head on the pillow, eyes half open, yet not seeing. I sketched her profile on a small notebook I keep in my purse. Later I scanned in the sketch, and printed it on silk, cutting the silk apart and reweaving it back together, a metaphor for her life, connecting each row of her profile, until she was whole again. I titled the piece, Watching Death Come.

The second piece, which seems unrelated, (I entered both the nonfunctional 2D and the Wearables catagories), is actually an extension of Watching Death Come. After the death of a loved one, there is the awesome and overwhelming job of disposing of a lifetime of collected treasures, household goods, the cleaning up of one’s life. My mother in law lived to be 99 years old. It was a long life and she had a stash!

I did my best to merge her fiber stuff with mine, but she was primarily a spinner, and lacemaker, so I have more lace pillows than I know what to do with, as I rarely make lace anymore (can you imagine no time?). And everytime I opened another box with a Romney Fleece inside (her sheep breed of choice as a spinner), I groaned. I do spin, and have two wheels, which I also mentioned in a previous blog, but I’ll never get through all these fleeces and don’t really have the desire to…

Enter felting. Boy is this a great way to use up wool. OK, I know Romney isn’t the sheep breed of choice among the felters, but it was free, and it was my mother in law’s. So, I began to carefully card the washed fleeces into individual gallon ziploc bags, layering the thin carded strips of wool. I wish I had taken photos of this process, it was such a scream felting on my kitchen counter, but alas, I hadn’t started blogging yet, so that didn’t occur to me. I added hot soapy water to each bag and started the felting process, first rubbing, and then rolling, occasionally heating up the wool in the microwave to aide the felting process. Since everything was sealed in a ziploc bag, there was no mess. 🙂

I eventually ended up with something like 18 8″ x 10″ rectangles, in white, of lovely felted Romney. I took my glass 9 X 12 baker, and put each rectangle in one at a time, sprinkling some powdered Cushing Dyes, random colors, I just grabbed a packet and started sprinkling (yes I was using a filtration mask, outside when I did this), added some salt to the felt which was still wet and soapy from the ziploc bag, and covered it in plastic wrap, venting a corner.

I microwaved it in 2 minute increments, and honestly, I can’t remember how long I did this, I just sort of did it by feel, maybe a total of three 2 minute sets, turning the baker each time, until I thought it sufficiently cooked. Once I had this riot of colorful felt rectangles dyed, I cut them apart into random shapes and called Bri into the room, who is a master puzzle maker, future geneticist, who sees patterns where no one else does. I had all the garment sections cut from a fusible knit interfacing, laying out across the table, and let Bri start assembling the pieces in whatever way she liked.

After trimming and fusing the pieces to the backing, I carefully stitched the butted together edges of the cut felt, with a decorative feather stitch on my machine, and where the natural edge of the felt occurred, I used my Janome Expressions needle felting machine to needle felt the overlap.

Then I assembled the jacket, adding a creative buttonhole, and some buttons. I call the piece Stepping Stones. Each component in our life, each experience, builds on the next and paves the way for the next part of our lives. We are all a series of chapters, and no one chapter should be the one that completely defines us. My mother in law was a lot of things to me and the people who loved her. She is missed every day, but her stash lives on!

Finally, I shipped out another one of my pieces to Peters Valley Craft Center, for their summer faculty show. I am scheduled to teach a Fiber Boot Camp, basic fiber techniques, great for those wanting to get into fiber as a medium, learn some of the techniques we all know and love, spinning, felting, kumihimo braiding, tapestry, and inkle loom weaving. This is a great class for art teachers who want to bring fiber to the classroom. I’ve taught it a number of times now, last year I had a full class. I’m not sure if the class is running at this point, the economy has taken its toll on a number of art centers, but the class is suppose to run over the 4th of July weekend, and when it does, I really enjoy being out at the Valley. They offer a number of fiber workshops, in all disciplines, as well as wood, blacksmithing, metals, clay, photography and related topics. I’ve supported the Valley for years, and am always happy to send them a faculty piece for the exhibit.

So the piece I sent is a collage titled Surviving Words. This is a very personal piece, I collaged together images printed on silk, with themes of breast cancer, I am a survivor, and that chapter in my life, though behind me, and by no means the one that completely defines who I am, is still an important one and only now, are the themes from that chapter showing up in my work. I glued all the collage components down with gel medium, and once dried, I went back in and stitched all those horrid medical words that defined my life for a year. It is a celebratory piece, colorful, yet feminine, and I hope it is well received in the exhibit.

Whew, thanks for reading this if you made it to the end. I think this is my longest post. I’m off to pack, and hope to blog along the way during my quick mini vacation to Seattle. Happy weaving, sewing, or whatever it is that gets you up in the morning!

More Loom Adventures

Well, my boxes have arrived safely in California, and I shipped my Big Sister piece to Kansas City. I always feel when my work is out traveling, that it is sort of like sending your children out into the world, they get to go places and see things without you. I have two pieces in Mississippi, one on the way to Missouri, and some inkle looms and lots of samples sitting in someone’s house in Southern California. Little bits of my self scattered like dandelion seeds…

Speaking of Inkle Looms…

inkle_warp I kept one of my baby Inklettes (by Ashford) behind, (which you can get from any dealer who sells Ashford Looms), because the warp on it was used up, and I needed to re-warp for the conference. I decided to kill two birds with one stone, (actually that is a terrible analogy, why would I want to kill any birds?) and put on the warp to make key fobs for my guild.

Sidebar: It is very common for a guild to get together and make small tokens of their talent, advertising the guild, for the “goody” bags you receive at the conferences. My guild chose this year, to send off to the MAFA conference (which I won’t be attending because I’ll be at the conference in Durango) small pieces woven on an inkle loom and made into keyrings. I volunteered to make 7, which is how many including fringe, you can make on one fully loaded baby Inklette. I adore this loom. It’s profile is so small it can fit in the bottom of that same conference tote, or even on the little fold down table on the plane. (I haven’t actually tried this, since I am too overloaded with computer and projector and all my clothes for a week, when I travel to teach, but my weaving buddy Sally, who travels all the time for work, usually has a bag full of little bands whenever she returns from a trip). I had given a workshop to my guild, Frances Irwin Handweavers, in inkle loom weaving, and everyone had such a blast, they are all now prolific ‘Inklers’, and always have a new pattern or some interesting pick-up design to share at every show and tell.

inkle_loom So here I am all warped up. I had some diversions today, like my Thursday Philosophy Club lunch, there were six of us in attendance, and lots of catching up to do. I also ran around buying more stuff for props, and of course a trip to my favorite shipper to package my piece for Kansas City.

Tonight I had a real treat. In preparation for the HS Musical, which is the first weekend in March, while I’m in California of course, the Boonton High School drama club held an open mike talent night. OMG! Who knew a bunch of high school kids could have so much talent, so much poise on the stage, and so much presence? I’m trying to remember back when I was in HS, the most talented kids in the school couldn’t compare to what I saw tonight on the stage. Even the teachers performed, there were dance numbers, a martial arts presetation, rap, rock, soul, Broadway tunes, and because the school is so culturally diverse, there were some beautiful songs in other languages, duets, and even a classically trained pianist. I was blown away. For a small town HS, this was one class A production.

If you want to learn about inkle weaving, it is a simple loom to learn to use, without much fuss. I sell a monograph on Inkle Weaving, but if you want a little free tutorial, go to Weavezine, the fall 2008 issue, and read the article my daughter wrote on weaving shoelaces on the inkle loom.

Success!

Well, I did it, I got my sister’s website up and running. I still have a lot of work to do on the project profiles page, there are many subpages to be built under there, but after much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, I actually managed to create the site, have it all work, and make the “client” happy. I will say that my sister, the architect designed the actual site. She knew exactly what she wanted, text and imagery was what she sketched out on what else, “graph paper”. My job was to get it all to work. There is no better feeling than to have pushed harder than you thought you could do, and reached higher than you thought you could go, doing something you thought was way beyond you, and to have succeeded. I still have a lot of work to do, like I said, but my poor sister, who still has to put up with dial-up service in northern rural Maryland, at least has a website for her business. Now of course, mine is really embarrassing… That is what prompted all this, I sorely need a redesign on mine, and so does my other weaving guild (the Frances Irwin Handweavers), so those are next once I fine tune and finish up with my sister’s. Actually, the Jockey Hollow Weaver’s Website could use a makeover as well, but my daughter maintains that one, and once I figure all this out, she will be pretty amenable to redoing that one, I’m sure.

If you are interested in checking it out, my sister’s firm is Ebeling Noe Associates. She is a great architect, and if you know me, she has my same sense of organization and work ethic.

I met tonight with the rest of the programming team for the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild, to map out programs for 2009-2010. We had some great feedback from the members, and we are sketching out the year, using some panel discussions, some presentations from our own talented members, and we are looking to book a couple of out of town speakers with workshops. So now I get to surf the web, looking at all the suggestions, and see what other teachers offer on their websites. So this is a win win situation for me. Stay tuned…