But where are the pictures…

This has been one crazy month, just like old times. Which I would have been happy just leaving in the past. But I have no one to blame but myself, adding so much to the calendar, I felt like I was running on five cylinders for a month straight. It was all good stuff, but oddly enough, bad social media influencer that I am, I took almost no pictures.

I had a pair of students in for the week just prior to my guild sale. They made lovely jackets. I took no pictures.

My guild sale the first weekend in November was a smashing success. Record sales. I was there for the Friday night opening and all day on Saturday. Selling my little heart out. Just like I used to do in the 80’s when I did craft fairs. I took no pictures. There were others assigned to that job. But nothing to share with you. Except these two images of my work packed up ready to go to the sale on that Friday morning.

In the end, I sold a lot of stuff. All of the bunnies are gone, and three of the four squirrels. Almost all of the totes went, and a large number of greeting cards. Almost all the work I showed in the last post has gone to new homes. One of the buyers of my handwoven ginger jar was so pleased with it, she posted a photo in her own blog after her husband picked up some pretty fronds.

The rest of the leftover goodies from the guild sale that didn’t sell, went on to the Shakespeare Theatre for their Pop-Up Shop during their final production for the season, A Midwinter Night’s Dream. The show opens December 6th. This is a particularly complex set of costumes and I’ve spent a lot of hours there volunteering as a stitcher. I’m heading there tomorrow as well. Of course, there are no pictures.

The Shakespeare Theatre had its annual gala/cabaret fund raiser the weekend after the sale. Lots of glitter and sequins. I wore this long vest. I took no pictures of course. It was a fabulous event. There is a knitting group associated with the Theatre, called ShakesPurls. I sat at a table with them. Lovely to be with like-minded people when surrounded by incredible theatrical talent.

And work continues on the complete destruction of my yard. My invaluable handyman, who has taken all this on as a personal project, has removed nearly 30 invasives, mostly Japanese Barberry, and couple of surprise Callery Pears, and a few Japanese Honeysuckle. There is lots more, but I managed to find maybe a handful of plants that aren’t invasive, a few hiding American Holly, and a Ninebark, which I didn’t know I had. I took no photos. Except, before all the leaves dropped, I tried to identify what’s left, using a plant finder app, and each time I focused in on a plant I got something like this… Sigh…

I, of course, live in the northeast, that little smudge next to Pennsylvania, little dense NJ. Lots of corporate landscaping. All lawn and invasives.

I had another student, one of my dearest long time students who studied with me at Sievers, came for the week. We worked on a gorgeous Harris Tweed plaid she bought in Scotland. We made a fantastic coat. I took no pictures.

Thanksgiving was Thursday. My daughter and I drove to my son’s apartment in the next county, where he cooked a lovely Thanksgiving salmon dinner. She grabbed a photo of him cooking. I took one picture, of my dinner plate.

However, my head has not been idle… I look at my yarn shelves, which are overflowing, no more room at the inn so to speak. I picked a random style of yarn, a 3.75/3 cotton, in eight colors, from Peter Patchis, and sat looking at it for a couple weeks. It is a bulky unmercerized 3-ply yarn, and rugs came to mind, but I’m not really a rug weaver. I’ve always wanted woven bath towels, but could this really work? I looked at Waffle Weave structures, and have been thinking and perusing ideas, looking at books in my studio, and along comes an article by Elisabeth Hill in the Nov/Dec 2023 issue of Handwoven Magazine, talking about tutu’s. Not what you are thinking of. Apparently, when you weave a very collapsible weave structure, and do a plain weave hem on either end, once washed, and the structure collapses, the ends don’t and you are left with a ruffling tutu. I had never thought about it, and duh… That would have been an issue on a large bath towel. The article goes on to explain that by breaking the hems into two layers and doing double weave, that would resolve the density of the warp ends juxtaposed to a collapsed structure.

So I sat with software, and a calculator, and the article, which had examples that didn’t quite work for what I wanted. As a matter of fact, one of her drafts shows a “double weave” that isn’t exactly plain weave top and bottom. But I got the idea. I wanted the waffle cells deep, because of the size of the yarn, so I drafted, and redrafted, and came up with something, on 8 shafts, straight draw. The treadling is a five-end point threading.

I took a deep breath, and wound 10 yards, because that’s how much yarn I had, which would give me four 75″ x 45″ bath towels. Which I knew would shrink probably 25%. This was all a giant guess…

I got the whole thing on the loom last weekend.

It was pretty important that I sampled, cut it off and washed it, though I’m not sure if it didn’t work what I would do with the 10 yards on the loom. I chose a sett of 12 epi, and it seemed to weave pretty square. I did a double weave hem.

I cut the whole thing off after about 6″, and tossed it into the washer and dryer along with the sheets from my last guest. Hot water wash and a hot dryer.

Damn I’m good…

I even tried to dry myself off after the last shower with the small sample. It got wet pretty quickly, but the sample wasn’t enough to wrap myself in, so I really don’t know how well they will perform, and they certainly won’t match my bathroom, but my whole point was to turn yarn on the shelf into something interesting that pushed my skills.

I’m all tied on again, and weaving the first towel. I thought the color changes and treadling sequence which are all carefully orchestrated would be really difficult. It is very easy, though I did have to dig out my widest temple to maintain width on the loom, since this structure collapses even under tension.

Oh, and right after the guild sale, I made a down filled pillow from a large square of handwoven fabric I found in my stash, which I wove back in 2005 I think? My first hand painted warp project. Leftover from this jacket. It is mine, and I have it on my bed when I want to sit up and read all about invasive plants.

And so dear readers, I am furiously rehearsing for my last recorder concert of the season, you can find the info here, December 3rd in Montclair NJ. And tech week starts next weekend for the Shakespeare Theatre, so my roll as a stitcher will be finished. And my yard work is done. I hope life settles into a lovely winter routine, winter is when I usually get out the dye pots, so I’ll do a bit of that, which sketching out what I want to plant where in the gardens.

Hoping for a lovely holiday time for all of you my friends, no matter what you celebrate, fill it with things that make you happy and bring you joy, and surround yourselves with those who hold you in the light.

Stay tuned…

What do I want to be when I grow up?

This is going to be a long one… Sorry… With lots of pictures… Not sorry…

I went to a concert today, called a cabin concert, popular with singer songwriters, in someone’s house, way out in the woods, where people gather, to listen to invited artists play. It is intimate, and entertaining, and I usually enjoy myself when I go. One of the artists featured today is a good friend. She is a wonderful song writer, her songs are based on things that happen to her in every day life.

I sat next to a woman, who is also friends with this artist, though we didn’t know each other. When in musical settings such as this, there are standard questions, “Are you a musician yourself?”, and other kinds of openers. I shake my head, and mutter something about playing recorder with an early music group, but I was there to support my friend, and enjoy the afternoon. The conversation kept going, and this is always where it gets awkward, because what I really do for a living is very complicated, there are no easy ways to describe succinctly. I mention I’m in the arts, or I’m an artist, and right away, there is the assumption that I’m a painter. Which I’m not. Eventually I mention I work in fiber, and that sets off a whole other series of questions, ending with I’m a weaver. Well what do you weave? Clothing. The conversation with this fellow concert goer then dropped into amusing territory, huge assumptions on her part, and I end up just smiling as this person has no clue what I do and what I’m interested in, and I’m really not in the mood to explain. Since this person has experience with reenactments, of all sorts of wars, she felt certain that I’d make a killing taking my handwoven clothing to reenactments, especially the one in Fredericksburg, MD, where there are knowledgeable people who want handwoven anything, and are willing to pay for it. Sigh…

I’ve come across many people in my career who think that they know what’s best for me and my work. Who wouldn’t want to make a killing in the right market? I was glad the music started up again, because the thought of setting up a booth with my handwoven clothing, which I did all through the 1980’s, made me slightly nauseous. This is definitely not the direction I am headed.

So where am I headed…

I’m in a unique position where I’ve done a lot with my life, and I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’m proud of the students I’ve empowered to create from their hands, and I’m really looking forward to fiber as a hobby. Imagine that…

I live in Suburban Northern NJ, about 20 miles west of Manhattan. I have a small half acre of land, which my husband and I meticulously landscaped in the late 1980’s after we added a sizable addition to the house, and needed to create decking and tiered plantings, and so we hired a professional landscaper to draw out plans. We did the work ourselves, but what plants to plant where, was all designed by this professional. I need to mention that in the late 1980’s, landscaping took on a completely different direction, because all the new exotic imported plants from Japan and Asia were becoming available and they created lovely color and texture all year round. We planted profuse amounts of Japanese Barberry, Kousa Dogwood, Burning Bush, Continus or Smoke Bush, and a number of other things that now are considered invasive, not native, and in the case of Barberry, destroying the understory in all of the forest parts around where I live and really, the planet. The push is on to remove everything that is not native.

I recently attended a number of lectures, and listened to a few podcasts, all on invasive species. Some of the lectures were on foraging these materials for textile use, making baskets, weaving, eco printing, natural dyeing, and even papermaking. Some of the lectures were on planting native pollinators to attract caterpillars which attract more bird species because we all know the planet is in trouble, and all I can do is fix my own backyard. I went to a lecture last Sunday at Greenwood Gardens, an estate garden open to the public in Northern NJ, featuring author Doug Tallamy, University of Delaware Professor of Botany and other things.

Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy

It was probably the best lecture I’ve ever heard and I came home miserably depressed because my beautiful yard is destroying the planet. Well I’m being overly dramatic, I can’t fix the rest of the world, but I can try to fix my own.

So this is just one corner of my front yard. Note that every other bush is a Japanese Barberry. I have a gardener, and I’ve finally convinced him that each bush eventually has to go, but in it I can research native plants, and possible plants that can work for natural dyeing, basketry, weaving, eco printing, etc. So I have the smallest of hope here that I might make a difference with my little corner of the planet and add to my textile fun.

I’m pretty expert at making handwoven clothing, but I’m enough of a novice at everything else to know I don’t know anything. Except what we touched on in college in the 70’s. So I’m taking things very slowly. My gardener removed two of probably a dozen Barberries this week, and I’m getting opinions as to what to replace them with. Meanwhile, he has a black walnut tree in his front yard and brought me a huge bucket of black walnut hulls. I made a dye with them. Both skeins are dyed with black walnut hulls, the darker one on the right has an iron modifier, rust water from a bucket of rusty iron found throughout my house added briefly to the end of the dyebath.

And I did scamper across the street, to a huge patch of overgrown weeds between two properties, and didn’t think anyone would mind if I stole all the pokeberries from the two bushes there. And yes, I do know that anything purple with anthocyanins is not light fast and will fade with washing over time. Still, it was fun, and for now, I got a really pretty magenta on this skein of silk and wool.

And another area, which has always fascinated me was plant tinctures, because before big pharma, we had herbal medicine. I usually obtain Sweet Annie (Artemisia Annua) tincture from my herbalist friend (coincidently the singer songwriter I heard at this afternoon’s cabin concert, who wrote a song when her Artemisia didn’t come up that year) but this year, she gave me a couple of plants and apologized because it will take over my yard. But I made my first tincture from Artemisia in 80 proof vodka and it is sitting on my counter curing. I look forward to my home remedy for curing colds, flu, and I’ve even heard it is great for Covid. (I did use it when I had Covid this time last year, and my symptoms were so mild I didn’t realize I had it, which could be coincidental)

I took a class last weekend in Eco Printing through my guild, using the dirty pot method. I’ve taken workshops before in Eco Printing, and am a fan of an iron blanket, but this was the workshop, and the results were OK, I wished for more clarity in the middle. The scarf blank is a silk/wool from Dharma Trading.

We also, while the bundles were boiling in the dirty pot (a pot of water, preferably aluminum, with iron chunks, and a copper pipe, and some onion skins, and whatever else she dumped in there), played around with flower pounding. I’ve never done this before, so this was fun and entertaining. I had an old cutting board and a hammer and we were given cotton towels, pre-mordanted with Aluminum Triformate, and I got a bit carried away.

Of course when I went to wash it a couple days later, after I heat set it with an iron, all the purples (from anthocyanins of course) washed out. Still, I have a fun dishtowel, and I can still see the ghost outline of the amaranth.

And we experimented with a heat press, pressing leaves and flowers onto treated watercolor paper. I don’t own a heat press, and have no intention of buying one, but it was fun to experiment. I have seen more interesting prints from Jane Dunnewold, but I love first time trying anything… You never know.

I went back to Greenwood Gardens on Wednesday, for a day of artistic sketching, painting, and photography. Bring any medium you like to work in, and park yourself and your easel and get to work. I picked the hardest building on the property, the two story summer tea house, with stone wrap around steps down both sides, and all sorts of sculptures, and proceeded to sketch.

I work in pencil, mostly because I’m rusty getting proportions right, and I erase a lot, and then I ink the important things. Then I use water color pencil, and later add water with a fine brush. Here is the result and it was a gorgeous fall day and I met so many interesting artists, oil painters, watercolorists, and a woman, probably in her 50’s who has been journaling every day since she was 10. I envy her commitment to a daily practice, though I’ve been writing this blog since 2008. With more than 900 posts, I’ve done OK for myself. I don’t care who reads it, because it is a personal journal that happens to be full of pictures and is available on the internet.

Anyway, the discussion of native plants and pollinators was part of every conversation with people involved in gardening. Turns out woman with the journals has a neighbor into natural dyeing and they just did some indigo. Small world…

Meanwhile, I have until the 24th to finalize all the stuff I’ve made for the Jockey Hollow Show and Sale, November 3-5. That’s when I submit my spreadsheet and get my bar coded tags back.

More bunnies…

More bear ornaments…

Zippered kit bags…

Zippered regular bags…

A Ginger Jar…

Tote bags…

And I’ve found an easy way to insert a separating zipper in the top without feeling like I’m wrestling an alligator…

And of course I have my constant companion laying in the middle of whatever I’m working on…

So what do I want to be when I grow up? A good steward of the land? A weaver that uses what’s available and is constantly learning new fields in botany, chemistry, and medicine, all with what’s available in my own backyard? It isn’t important for me to define my goals at all, because I’ve always been about the journey, and this is no different. I’m using up stuff from my old life, and repurposing it and creating something to help support my guild. What doesn’t sell will go to a pop-up shop in the theatre lobby of the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ’s final production this December. Giving back is important to me. I try to walk into town every other day, pick up the groceries for the day, and carry them home. The other morning, in a foggy dew, the spiders were busy creating webs for Halloween, captured by the morning sun. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’m going to be ripping all those plants out…

Stay tuned…

Countdown…

It’s been years since I got ready for a show. I did craft fairs for ten years, that was a long time ago, and I’ve blogged ad nauseum about how I never wanted to sell my work again, and how I’m trying to overcome my need to hold on to everything I make, and how I might need it as a teaching tool, and well I could waste the whole blog on all my woes about my years of selling and how burned out I got.

So fast forward… I have too much stuff I’ve made, and no where to put it. The airlines are restricting my luggage so badly, that I have to basically travel with nothing when I teach, and all these wonderful teaching pieces are now in photos and in PowerPoint presentations. I don’t wear most of what I make, or I wear it once for a fashion show, and exhibit it a few times, and that’s it. The pieces sit in cleaner bags in my closet, taking up valuable space. (I actually don’t have the lifestyle to wear and use all of what I make…)

So, with a critical eye, I’ve started to gather pieces that I think I might actually want to part with if someone really wanted to buy them. I’m not convinced that will ever happen, someone wanting to buy something I made isn’t something I’ve come to grips with, largely because a) I’m not in production anymore, I’m not buying in bulk and raw materials are expensive, b)I’m not interesting in making things in an inexpensive way, if I want to spend two days carefully edging the binding on a tote bag with couched yarn, well I’m gonna do that. Too bad if the tote is $300. c) I’m personally too cheap to buy anything that isn’t on sale for 50% off the lowest sale price or I have a 30% coupon at Kohl’s. I wouldn’t buy my work (because it is too expensive) so it is odd to me that anyone else might…

But I digress. This isn’t about selling my work, it is about making the commitment to tag and bring my work to the guild sale. In order to do that, I have to properly photograph everything I’ve done recently that hasn’t already been properly photographed. Blog shots don’t count. Because if I actually did manage to find someone who wanted one of my pieces badly enough to pay good money for it, I’d never see it again, and if I don’t have a proper photo of it, I can’t even use it for a teaching tool. In my “Photographing Your Work” Monograph, I believe the first slide in the presentation says,

•RULE # 2: NEVER SEND OUT WORK THAT HASN’T BEEN

DOCUMENTED IN SOME WAY.

I’ve gotten into trouble before not following my own advice… 🙂

Today is photographing day, which means I try to take my tiny weaving studio and turn it into a tiny photography studio, and since I’m doing small things, I need the table top set up, which means there is shit stuff all over the place. 🙂 It is really hard for me to work in this chaos, which is why I am blogging at the moment and not photographing like I should be, because I needed to just look at a computer screen for 45 minutes and not my studio.

I’ve turned my cutting table into a photo area, and I climb up and over and under and around to get the shot I need, crawling around lights, cords, shit stuff on the floor. I can’t get out of my own way. But I’m slowly working through the pile. And the images are coming out well. I have a list of 33 items, and I took all of yesterday to figure out how to work the computerized forms that the guild set up, which will generate inventory/price tags for each item on the inventory sheet. It’s a mail merge thing done between Excel and Word, and I’ve never done anything like that before, so there was a lot of tweaking and hair ripping.

Once I’ve gotten a good photo of the piece, I carefully tag it with my own labels, and the inventory tag, and then bag it into one of those very large, no, jumbo, Ziploc see- thru bags with handles, that every fiber enthusiast on the planet has purchased by the industrial case!

At the moment I am working on inventory item #7, and there are 33 items on the sheet. Many of the items, especially the garments, are already photographed so I’m hoping they go a lot quicker. I only have tonight and tomorrow…

Meanwhile…

I have received a few comments about the Structo Loom I’m working with, there are apparently others who are looking to repair old Structo’s or add heddles, and I did another Internet search yesterday and found that Texsolv heddles do indeed come in 6 1/8″ length’s and they should fit on the heddle bars which would be a perfect solution to the non available heddles that plague Structo owners. I called Halcyon Yarn, and spoke with Susan yesterday morning, and had her

measure the heddles in the warehouse, and it looks like they might work. So I ordered 400. They were shipped today and I should be able to play with them next week. However, the remaining

parts I have from the two Structo looms I started with are not enough to make a second loom. Specifically I’m missing the rods that hold the beater assembly together. They are small rods, with threads at the ends to hold a wing nut or a bolt at each end.

With 400 heddles coming, I want to be able to get the loom to actually work next week, and my husband is flying to Israel on Saturday to do some consulting work for Palestine Telephone. So I asked him about the threaded rods. Which prompted the following discussion when he wandered into my studio…

Kevin: “What’s this for?” (As he is fingering the small Allen wrench in a baggie on my loom bench)

Me: “Actually it is for the tension adjuster for my small AVL end-feed shuttle (you don’t have to know what this is to appreciate this story…), but I’m so mad I could spit.”

Kevin: “Why?” (He is a man of little words…)

Me: “I tried using my 20 year old shuttle with 10/2 tencel which is too fine for the tension the way it is set, and I found the original allen wrench that came with the shuttle, (be impressed, it has been in storage for 20 years and I put my finger on it in 45 seconds) and alas, the shuttle is actually defective. The whole thread carrying mechanism wasn’t installed right, because the set screw for the allen wrench is off just enough that the allen wrench doesn’t engage when you stick it in the little hole. I can’t return a shuttle that is 20 years old and this is the first I’ve noticed the problem…”

He takes the shuttle and looks in the light and verifies what I’m talking about. I felt sort of smug that he couldn’t fix it either. Then he turns the shuttle over to the back side and sticks the allen wrench in the rear hole, which I failed to notice was there, having owned the shuttle for 20 years, and he adjusts the tension.

So now I know where my daughter gets her amazing ability to just waltz by my studio, assess the situation in 30 seconds and throw out the solution on her way down the hall. I hate when my whole family is smarter than me.

Back to the Structo. So, now my husband looks at the rod I need for the Structo repair, and says, oh, you can get a rod that is threaded the entire length and then you can just cut it to the length you need. And he disappears.

He reappears with the threaded rods I need. ?!?!?!?

Me: “Where the hell heck did you find them?”

Kevin: “I saved the threaded rods from the attic stairs when we pulled them out to replace them. Thought they might come in handy…”

OK, now I’m rolling my eyes and taking back all the crummy things I’ve said/written/complained about my husband and his champion pack rat status. We replaced those stairs a couple of years ago. And he knew exactly where in our junk hole of a garage the rods were stored. A size 6 rod, 32 threads to the inch, 12″ long will fit through the drilled holes on the beater assembly. He continued to tinker around, and within about 10 minutes he had the beater back together. All I have to do now is add the heddles when they come in next week, and make an apron for the back hex beam. And I’ll have another working 4 shaft sample loom.

I love my husband… (But I still can’t stand all the piles of shit stuff all over the house…)

Tying Loose Ends…

I am in the middle of entirely too many projects, and that just makes me want to smile. My ADD self just loves to flit from one thing to another, and it makes me want to jump out of bed early in the morning to get cracking…

So here is a run down…

First, I needed to finish the remaining handwork on the vest I made a couple of weeks ago from an alpaca throw I wove, circa 1980? I love how the triangular buttonholes came out, and I know I’ll enjoy wearing this vest. Plus I needed the sample for the workshop this weekend.

I finished the upholstery on the chair last night, I just have to bang in all the tacks and trim the fabric. I am so loving the way this rocker looks. Meanwhile, I ended up sampling the braid I started weaving on the inkle loom, trying different weight wefts, to see if I could get a bit sturdier braid.

The original weft for the braid was a 5/2 perle cotton, and the braid was a little bit too flexible for use in upholstery. I tried using three strands of rayon, and then I tried dark brown handspun, and finally I tried two strands of 3/2 perle cotton. I played around with how they looked on the chair, after I wove off the whole two yard warp.

Oddly enough, I ended up liking the original braid best, but decided to actually weave the next two yards with a single strand of 3/2 perle cotton and I’m thinking that this braid will be perfect. And it is weaving up really quickly. I like the spacing of the little diamonds better in the latest version which is on the loom on the left. The “seeds” are a bit plumper…

So here is one of the original samples of the braid on the actual chair, I am really happy, and I can’t believe it is the same chair I upholstered 30+ years ago. This has been really fun, and I can hear my mother in law cheering me on…

Meanwhile, remember the Structo I was rewarping last week? I got about half of it threaded and then got side tracked by the trip to Atlantic City, and then the rocker and then, well, I needed to finish threading that puppy, and find out if my hard work would produce a cloth weight that would work for the postcards I weave.

I’ve now finished threading the loom, and I started to weave on it, using a very slim stick shuttle, I’m surprised at what a good shed there is for such a little loom. My damask boat shuttle is tied up on the other table loom. The fabric is really fine and tight, and I’m happy with the linen so far. I had started a couple of postcards on the remaining warp on my 25″ table loom, on a gray 10/2 cotton, as a demo when I went to Albany the beginning of October. So you can see what the strips look like in progress. I’m hoping I can weave lots of little postcards, and with 15 yards of warp, I can really experiment with this medium…

Here is a shot of the actual linen cloth, it is pretty fine, the linen is about the weight of a 20/2, and sleyed two per dent, I have 30 ends per inch, not counting the tie down threads.

While I was threading, I couldn’t help myself, my brain wanders to the stash which is right in front of my eyeballs…

And draped over one of my looms is a fabric I wove that is gorgeous, from a warp I dyed in a class with Irene Munroe back in 2008 at the Tampa Bay Convergence. I sett it too dense for a scarf, and there is so little fabric that I’m not sure I want to make it work for a garment, but it would make a great tote bag! (Click on Tote Bag and scroll to the bottom of that blog to see the latest tote I made…)

I always have to have something colorful to look at on my cutting table and I’m always adding and subtracting to a pile before I actually jump into it head first.

So the vest is finished, and the loom warped, and another project is lighting up my cutting table, and now I have to finish weaving two more scarves on the loom (Photo below) so I can have them for the guild sale. And I just have to weave about 8 yards of trim for the rocker.

And speaking of tote bags, I did promise a photo of my daughter’s tote bag she made from candy wrappers and duct tape. She gets these brainstorms as school, probably when she gets bored in calculus or physics (I should have that kind of brain…) and texts me to ask if I have this or that material for her next brilliant idea!

Even her pens are covered in duct tape! Note the white rose sticking out of the tote!