Tag: In-seam buttonholes

Mea Culpa…

Please Forgive me dear readers, no wonder I’ve been getting letters to make sure I’m still alive… I remember well Saturday night Catholic Church confessional when I was a kid, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been six weeks since my last blog post…”

At the beginning of the month I caught this horoscope in my newspaper. Once in awhile I’m brought up short.

I need that reminder frequently.

I’d love to say that life in retirement is blissful and easy and boring. Yeah, no. I only retired from teaching on the road. I didn’t stop my calendar from filling up. I wanted to avoid this photo below, a photo I shot before I loaded my car to teach 8 classes at the NY Sheep and Wool Festival 9 years ago. It popped up on Facebook as a reminder…

I need these constant reminders that as chaotic as my life is now, it was much much worse…

I did take on a number of private students this fall. I’m pouring a lot of money into producing the YouTube videos, and paying my daughter a salary to make them happen, and I could use the income. (No, I don’t make anything off of YouTube, I’d need a couple million subscribers.) And I wanted to see what it was like to be in my space, using my equipment and supplies to do what I love.

And I’m enjoying the experience of having students in house. Cooking for different types of diets is a bit daunting, but I’m managing that, good skills to develop. But the calendar is rather full, one group leaves, another one comes in. That should slow up in another few weeks, but I also, in my quest to learn all the things, signed up for things I didn’t really have time to fit into the schedule. They were remote right, so they should be able to just fit right in… Between the student on Saturday, and teaching in Michigan on Monday and Ontario on Tuesday… I’m finding the need to print my schedule out hourly. That’s a first.

Still, no regrets… My guild was sponsoring a workshop with Jennifer Moore, whom I adore, the expert on double weave structures. For those that aren’t weavers, double weave means you are weaving two (or more) layers of fabric simultaneously, one over the other. There are advantages to this, but our focus was on weaving blocks, where the layers could change place, side by side. And the warp was her famous Rainbow warp, I used 4 ends of 8/2 Tencel as I moved through the color wheel.

Though I did have experience with double weave, this was a fun and challenging workshop, and I finally was able to get a warp on the new to me 25″ Macomber that I rescued and rehabbed. It wove like a champ…

And while I listened to a guild presentation last week, a different guild than the one that sponsored the double weave workshop, I sat and made cordage from leeks (the green parts), which I had sliced very thin lengthwise and let dry, giving a little spritz to soften them up when I was ready to use them. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to make cordage for basketry.

And in my spare time, I’ve been mulling over a draft I got from a friend, it has been making its rounds. This one is for something called Drunken Squares. It is a wicked cool fabric, and the draft was sent to me in the form of a profile draft. If you aren’t a weaver, skip this paragraph, it won’t mean anything to you. If you are a beginning weaver, this is a profile draft, meaning it isn’t something you can weave. You have to substitute each block in the threading and treadling with an actual structure. Each block is a unit. What you put into that unit depends on what structure you want. And since this is a six block structure, I thought I could do it with my 12 shaft loom. I tried, for a month. I got it to 10 shafts, and then when I spent another week or two I realized I could actually do it on 8. Most of my friends have done the draft effortlessly with 16 shafts. I don’t have that many. I plugged the profile draft into my weaving software (Fiberworks) and went to the block substitution tool. I worked for hours. I ended up with a tied weave, on 8 shafts, but it needed 14 treadles. I have 10. So I worked for hours more… In my spare time.

I got something I thought would work, 8 shafts, 10 treadles using more than one at a time. And no, I’m not ready to share the draft. I worked too hard on it.

I wound the warp, and went to my small 25″ 8 shaft Tools of the Trade floor loom, and looked at the treadles, and decided that this poor little loom, which I’ve had since probably 1982, could use a really good treadle scrubbing. I used a magic eraser, they are amazing for removing years of gunk, and gave the treadles a good polishing with my go to loom feed, Howard’s Feed and Wax. Even though my poor little loom still has its nose a bit out of joint since the acquisition of the Macomber, my treadles are very happy.

I beamed my warp. This is 10/2 perle cotton, in colors I had on the shelf. I had to drop one stripe to fit on my 25″ loom, but that’s OK.

And I got everything working and started to weave. I did it. There is such a personal triumph when you focus on something really challenging, determination keeps me going. I refused to admit defeat. And it worked. I did it. The drunken squares are really drunken rectangles, but I didn’t care.

While I was working on the loom next to it for the doubleweave class, I glanced over and thought, duh, just change the size of the blocks… ’cause that’s what we were doing in the doubleweave class. There are days I’m freakin’ brilliant, and there are days when I think, where did I leave my brain?

So I did another block of the repeat, and now I have real drunken squares. I remember years ago working on a two shuttle structure and having the shuttles constantly falling in my lap. And I designed a fix… This is a small loom with a small weaving area. So I took the second back beam (there is a second warp beam which automatically comes with a second back beam) and I slipped the cover on it I had made years ago, inserted a 5″ wide plastic ruler, and slipped the whole thing on the front to make a shuttle rest. I’m amazed I found all the parts considering the studio move.

And we are back to filming videos again for my YouTube channel The Weaver Sews, after a 6 week hiatus. Each video takes about 20-25 hours a week between my daughter and me, to produce. In my spare time… hahahahahah!

I finished filming the videos for my summer shirt. Just in time for fall, which has been delightfully summer weather… Handpainted skeins circular wound into an ombré effect warp. I sell this draft on my website… Also, the pattern is my 1000 swing dress cut into a shirt length, with the neck and in-seam button-down placket (no buttonholes to make!) from my 700 or 1700 Tunic. Those patterns are available in my eShop. Videos will soon be released on how to do the collar and armhole facings, last week’s video drop featured the in-seam buttonhole placket.

I planned this fabric from a few handdyed skeins while my husband was dying, worst week of my life. Took everything in my brain to focus on anything but what was happening to our lives. I’ve held onto this fabric for five years waiting for it to tell me what it wanted to be. I can’t tell you how proud I am of this shirt. I did add shoulder epaulettes, since I couldn’t get the shoulders to match. It is one of my favorite cheats. The contrasting fabric is a heavy weight linen. Here is a photo of the original skeins I used to create this fabric. I called the fabric Chaos. Fitting…

And so my retirement life isn’t any less chaotic. And as I vacuumed and dusted my weaving studio this afternoon, I thought about how much, as chaotic as it is, I love my life. There is always something calling to me, wanting to be designed, engineered, played with, created, or even cleaned, cooked or washed. And now as I cook I think, gee, can I use this for making a basket? Will it make cordage? And the animals always demand time. I’m never never never bored. There is a lot of life to cram into my remaining days and I want every minute I can get. Because we never know. I want to learn all the things, do all the things, and be all the things, in my spare time…

Stay tuned…

Keeping Busy…

I handle stress by keeping busy.  Having a project, a mission, a purpose, a challenge, keeps me from diving into paralysis, which sadly is happening to more and more of my friends as this quarantine keeps us from doing the things we love.  I’m so very lucky to have things that can challenge me.  I have a couple of wonderful studios, lots of supplies, more than I can use in a lifetime, and some wicked cool ideas.  And time.  If nothing else, I have time.  

I decided to take a page from my mom, because I’m not sure when my housekeeper is coming back, and since I’m not traveling, I really can do this myself.  I thought, with nine rooms, I could do one a day, maybe 15-20 minutes, depending on how dirty, and cover the whole house well in the same two weeks between when my housekeeper would normally come.  I decided on the den this morning.  It is a room I rarely use, I’m not sure why, but there are other areas of the house with more purpose for me.  This was the TV room, and it was where my late husband spent most of his non working time, in his Lazyboy in front of the TV.  I rarely went in the room. I never watch TV. Lazyboy lounge chairs don’t invite cuddling up on the couch.  Well, my husband died in that chair, the kids took it out of the house within two hours of his death.  I replaced it with a gorgeous leather Chesterfield couch, replaced all of the furnishings in there, and I really do love the room, but somehow, it still isn’t mine.  There are other rooms that call to me more.  Anyway, it was time to clean it.  I enjoyed tidying up, using the Swiffer to get cobwebs and dust, polishing the wood surfaces.  I used the Swiffer to dust the fan blades in the ceiling fan, and realized that the glass dome was pretty full of dust and bugs.  I reached in with the Swiffer and proceeded to melt the fibers onto the bulbs.  Really…

I turned off the light fixture, climbed up on the coffee table and tried to scrape off the melted Swiffer fibers.  My girlfriend called, her dad died, and she is struggling with the whole idea of a virtual funeral, Shiva, and family connections that aren’t really family connections since you can’t hug anybody.  We talked for awhile.  When we were finished, I tried to turn the light back on.  It wasn’t working.  Really?  

Long story short, and half an hour later, so much for my first day of, “I’ll spend 15-20 minutes cleaning one room…”; I ended up dismantling the glass globe, replacing the burned out bulb and screwing in the ones that loosened up when I tried to scrape them clean.  I washed the globe properly and reassembled the light fixture.  There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the maintenance one can end up doing in a multi room multi floor 100 year old house.  Sigh…

Meanwhile, Brianna and I and my editor Ann Marie are furiously working on launching patterns.  I launched the 500 vest yesterday, very proud of myself, and then woke up at 2am with a panic attack.  I’m such an American.  And I mean that in not a good way.  I’m selling downloadable patterns to those who can’t take my workshops, many of whom live in parts of the world that use a different measuring system than we American’s use.  The entire rest of the world uses the metric system, and we here in the US insist on using an Imperial measuring system.  How could I be so self absorbed to not even think that my materials all need to have metric equivalents?  So I spent the morning rewriting the free directions for the bias top, to include Metric measurements, and uploaded that today.  I’ll try to tackle the rewrites on the newly launched vest directions tomorrow.  I promise I won’t abandon my worthy readers from parts other than the US.  You count too.  Pun intended.

The 500 vest is one of my oldest patterns.  I’m not going in any particular order.  Just what seems most reasonable to “tackle next”.  The swing dress directions are at the editor, and the tunic is basically ready to go, but the editor is much slower than we are. She is pretty amazing. The 500 vest is the one, for those who have studied with me, with the square armhole and armhole/neckbands.  

 

Side bar…  We all have them.  Warps on the loom from a workshop that finally get woven off years later because we need the loom.  Mostly they are samples and not really usable as a finished thing.  In a round robin type workshop with Karen Donde on Bubble Cloth/differential shrinkage, my table loom had four yards of a tencel and wool/silk warp.  It was ridiculously slow to weave.  It took a few years until I needed the loom for something else.  It was a cool piece of 8″ wide yardage, and not being a scarf person, I pulled out my 500 vest and used the sample for the bands.  This is also a great place to use Inkle bands or Card/Tablet woven bands.  

 

So the vest pattern is now up on the site, available for purchase here, and the directions as always, are free downloads, but now they will be on my regular website under Extras.  I’ll add metric measurements ASAP.  

Meanwhile…

I had an odd day between projects, and I pulled a couple things out of my closet.  A couple of years ago,  I had made a sort of zippered vest from the Crimp Cloth fabric from a Dianne Totten workshop, and honestly, never liked the way it fit or looked. 

But the fabric was pretty cool.  I pulled it out of the closet and decided to start hacking it up and eventually came up with a vest I actually like.  I took about 8 inches out of each side.  I love reworking stuff that isn’t working anymore or never really worked to begin with.  Makes you really think, and God knows, I do need to do that on occasion…

My 27 year old daughter is always on me to give my silhouettes a more youthful feel.  That isn’t my demographic, but I listen.  I’ve had enough younger students request a hood on at least one of my garments that I drafted my tunic to include this option.  I made this striped wool, commercial fabric into a prototype, and I gotta say, this is one of my go to pieces in my wardrobe.  I’m starting to get the point of a hood.  Anyway, my daughter said I needed to add a Kangaroo pouch.  I had enough scrap left, that I could at least try.

So I tested the pouch, after measuring 47 of her hoodie sweatshirts, and drafted and constructed the pocket.  The next step was to add it to the directions.  So I illustrated the construction details, and all that is waiting on my editor, who is still working on the dress.  I’m being patient.

I then got the idea to do a swing coat, not only with a hood, but to try it with the in-seam button front option from that same tunic.  That meant that the center front had to be cut on the straight of grain, but the rest could be cut like a swing coat.  I drafted it, figured out the construction sequence, and pulled a purple wool I’ve been sitting on for so many years I couldn’t tell you when or where I obtained it.  And I found a very cool rayon challis for the lining in the stash.

The purple hooded swing coat is a prototype for this yardage.  I wove this at the end of last year, in a huge hurry because I had to clear the loom in order to move it to the new studio.  All the wool and mohair in it is handdyed.  The weft is a commercial black wool.

I want to lengthen the purple coat, about 4″, and make the in-seam button placket 2″ wide instead of the 1 1/4″ from the tunic pattern.  The hood is pretty cool.  And it has pockets.  Really!  So I’ve corrected the pattern, and laid out the pattern onto the wool/mohair yardage.  I’ll cut it out tomorrow in between the tedious metric recalculation of  my vest directions.  

My daughter has had a bit of a setback.  Her computer system is pretty old, like college days old.  It just didn’t have the computing power or memory to handle a program like Adobe Illustrator and all the layers it takes to vectorize my scanned patterns.  She ordered new components from a computer store in our area, picked them up curbside last night, and spent the evening trying to build herself a faster system.  She is mostly there but stuck on something to do with Windows 10, of course, and we are trying to get in touch with my tech support, who has been great directing her from afar, but we may need a physical intervention…  She was in the middle of the tunic drafts, so hopefully she will be back up and running soon.

Tomorrow, I’ll tackle cleaning the dining room and see what trouble I can get into there…

Stay tuned…