Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild

And the Seasons, they go round and round…

With apologies to Joni Mitchell…

I’m sitting here looking out my beautiful window, overlooking my gardens, musing on how fast the seasons are changing, and how oddly beautiful everything looks as it is dying back. It will all go to sleep thankfully for a few months, while I regroup and survive music performance season.

It has been a challenge I will admit, to keep everything alive this summer into September, the intense heat and drought has forced me to plan my day around what desperately needs water. I’ve given up on weeding, it will resume again next spring when new growth presents new challenges. Right now it is seed spreading time, dancing around the yard, putting seeds like milkweed, baptisia, Joe Pye, and iris versicolor, everywhere there is a blank spot. My landscape designer says, “Put down hundreds of seeds, if a few take, they are free plants…” So the autumn dance continues.

As I left my house over the weekend for yet another rehearsal, I slammed on the brakes, because there, a lone iris in my garden by the street, was blooming. You gotta love that even plants can thumb their noses at Mother Nature…

Right now, it is raining. Blissfully. Though the predictions have been ominous, coastal flooding and high winds, the nor’easter, descending upon us, is largely for me, a couple days of gentle, much needed rain, breezy winds, which create a gentle swirl of leaves as they fall off the trees. I will rake them into the beds, “Leave the leaves…”

My days are full, and the calendar for December filling up to the point where I’m getting a bit nervous. I, of course, never overbook….. Hahahaha! Anyone who plays music with an ensemble of any type, knows that December is not necessarily the end of year full of holiday celebrations of all religions, full of family gatherings, etc. It is the season of concerts, gigs, nursing home sing-a-longs, small recitals, and whatever else the 5 early music ensembles I play with, plus my cello lessons (yes we do holiday gigs too) comes up with. Three more gigs were added yesterday. Tomorrow, my day starts with volunteering at the Shakespeare Theatre starting at 9am, guild sponsored spinning group at 2pm, craft group which meets in the library in my town from 6-8pm, and my recorded yoga class at 8pm, carry over from tonight, since I’ll miss it because I’m at a rehearsal from 7pm.

I keep reminding myself that I really do love all these opportunities to be with people of all ages, all kinds of talent, all kinds of backgrounds, and that community is what keeps up moving forward. We need this in our current challenging times of civil unrest. If I can play Christmas songs on the cello or recorder for a group of people society has forgotten, in a nursing home or memory care facility, then I have given back in my own small way.

One of the other ways I give back, is to look at my still overflowing stash of scrap handwoven fabrics, samples and samplers, experiments, and even loom waste, and see what I can make from it. Our guild, the Jockey Hollow Weavers, has a show and sale every year the beginning of November, and I make whatever I can to sell there, a percentage of sales goes to the guild for programming and operating expenses, equipment and library acquisitions, to ensure future generations have access to what has defined me for the last 40 years.

I have to have my complete inventory submitted by October 28th, but the work doesn’t have to be completed until the morning of set up, which is November 7th. So I’m cutting up everything I can, making trays and kits, which I will then furiously sew and construct once the inventory sheets are submitted for bar coded tags.

There are teddy bears…

And zip bags…

And trays of ornaments…

And a few ginger jars…

I’ll make some tote bags, and greeting cards, and add a few scarves which are already finished and in the closet.

What doesn’t sell at the sale, I’ll take to the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ for their lobby pop-up shop in the Kirby Theatre at Drew University. They get to keep all the monies from anything they sell.

I’m pretty proud of the journey I undertook the last couple of weeks reworking a gown I had in the back of my closet for 20 years, to use as a costume for when I play with my early music groups. I needed something “Renna-bethean” as we call it, Rennaisance/Elizabethean, which also serves when I need something Viking and Medieval… tall order. In my last couple of blog posts, I talked about cutting up this gown, creating a lacing down the front, however, when I tried it on, I realized immediately that the slender silk arms of the gown were too restrictive to play cello, which requires sweeping right arm movements. I also needed something that though it looked like a skirt, would split apart to create room for the cello between my legs.

To note… I’m just beginning to play cello, somewhat reluctantly, with a couple of the groups. I’m still only a year in, and though I have made remarkable progress, I’m still a beginner and make mistakes, off pitch, crossed strings with the bow, etc. But more opportunities are coming, I just have to keep practicing. The rest of the groups I play a solid bass recorder, and am so happy keeping the low voice going in a group of talented sopranos and altos. I don’t need to be front and center. I did that too much in my handweaving career. Give me the back row any day.

So, to remind me and my beloved readers, I cut the original dress up the middle, and added lacings.

I created culottes, from a 1990’s pattern, using one of the decorator fabrics I got from a deceased weaver’s stash sale a couple months ago. I needed some kind of camisole to go with it, so I grabbed some Rit dye at the ShopRite, and dyed an ivory lace camisole that was sitting in my drawer, probably for 30 years.

I had to hem the dress, since when I initially wore it, I had 3″ heels. Not doing that anymore. I carefully removed the sleeves, and took the strip from the hem, laying it crosswise grain over a sleeve pattern I found in a back issue of Burda Style, and piecing it together to create a short sleeve. I used the silk from the original sleeves to create the same overlay as the bodice.

It was still too restrictive, and so I put in gussets, like we do all the time at the Shakespeare Theatre costume shop. Then I went spelunking in my stash and found a lace fabric, which was again, ivory, to potentially use for the medieval sleeve. I couldn’t identify what the fiber content was from a burn test, there was synthetic, but also ash, so it was some kind of combination. I brewed all the coffee in my freezer.

The color was a glorious orange shade that went perfect with the dress.

So the result was something I was really really proud of. My skills with the sewing machine are dramatically shifting, getting more creative at repurposing, altering and restyling what already exists. I have the Shakespeare Theatre costume shop to thank for that. I have a lot of fun there…

And Saturday, I jumped in a car with other musicians, and we made our way down to Princeton, in heavy traffic, to a festival of early music sponsored by the Guild of Early Music, where we, NJ Early Music, were the last group to perform. I played cello for a couple of pieces, which really needed a cello, and our regular cellist couldn’t come. I made mistakes, but with music performance, unlike textiles, where you can rip something out and redo it, I have to just keep going. There is no correcting a wrong note in performance. No one will die, and it all turns out fine in the end, with a sigh of relief when we all end where we are supposed to! We all went out to a pub in Princeton afterward, and it was so great to get to really know some of the other players in a social setting.

Note… Cello players can’t wear jewelry, have their hair down (it gets tangled in the strings) and need short fingernails on their left hand (challenging for a textile artist). But I persevere…

I actually had a free day yesterday, nothing on the calendar. So I got up, did my morning routine, and went out into the vegetable garden, and harvested all the basil, which was showing signs of cold weather, and larges bunches of parsley. I picked the tomatoes that were starting to turn a blush color, and replaced the ones on my window sill, now very ripe, which I made into a pot of sauce.

I also put a tray of sliced cherry tomatoes, with a drizzle of olive oil, into the oven at 200 degrees, to dry all day. After a few hours, I take them out, cool them, and add them to the large zip-loc in the freezer to use all winter long.

While all that was happening, I started picking all the basil and parsley leaves. With olive oil, garlic, walnuts and parmesan, I made 12 zip-loc bags of pesto, and along with three bags of sauce (I had the 4th one for dinner), my freezer is filling up! I should probably grow potatoes…

I don’t remember if I mentioned that I go dancing on Friday nights with one of my music friends. We go to a local Arthur Murray, where I adore the staff, learn a lot about teaching skills that involve body movement, learn to follow (definitely not one of my strengths, which is why playing in a music ensemble is so good for me, even though again, it isn’t my strength) and get good exercise. My strappy sandals I wore fell apart, and I talked to one of the instructors who pulled up her pant leg and showed me what she wore… Ballroom dancing practice shoes. Who knew there was such a thing… Amazon… They are super flexible, (they can fold in half) with suede on the bottom, and the next day, these were on my feet. I got the sliver ones!

So my world is changing with the seasons, and mostly I’m so happy with all of my new-found communities of interesting and varied people. (The packed schedule is a bit tiring, but I keep going…) Politics are rarely ever discussed, and if they are, there are real discussions, with informed people who are open to other points of view. It is a healthy world, and I have hope that it can prevail.

Enjoy the falling leaves, as nature takes a long nap. We fiber people, and now music people need the time to dive in uninterrupted with our next season of activities.

Stay tuned…

Quiet and focused…

My mom always calls and asks when she doesn’t get a copy of my blog in the mail, if she missed something. My 92 year old mom, who taught me to love fibers, sewing and garment construction, has no internet access, no cell phone, nothing electronic. By choice. If you want to talk to her, you call. So I dutifully make a paper copy each time I blog, and send it to her in the mail. The old fashioned way. She always calls when she gets it and tells me how much she loved reading it, over and over, and how lovely the pictures are, and we always have a good chat about it.

I of course haven’t blogged in a couple weeks, so she was wondering.

Truth is, I’m hyper focused. I always have good intentions that in the spring, I’ll start making stuff for my guild sale, and actually I did somewhat this year, with the 18 yards of mohair, netting me seven mohair blankets, a run of hand dyed scarves, and some mats woven with water iris leaves from my garden. But still, just a few weeks before the sale, I found myself once again, locked in the sewing studio, churning out whatever I could with whatever leftovers I found. And I am always stunned at how many, or how much scrap I have tucked away. That’s one of the benefits of weaving yardage. Once you make the garment, you have lots of smaller hunks of fabric to just play with. I have a whole guild lecture I do on what to do with leftovers, and of course there is my digital monograph of the same name…

I did craft fairs, for 10 years. By 1990, I was done and swore I’d never sell my work again. But the guild show and sale, is somehow different. It is actually fun for me to make a bunch of zippered bags…

…tote bags…

…greeting cards…

…and something new I tried this year, really fun to make, from a Simplicity pattern, #2450, I made a half dozen of these mug buckets, adapting the pattern to handwoven fabric, because actually, this is a fund raiser for the guild.

Ultimately what doesn’t sell of the 132 items I tagged, (don’t be too impressed, 40 of them are greeting cards) will either be donated to causes I support, for their fund raisers, or as gifts, not that I go many places that require hostess gifts… but I do have friends…

The guild sale is a great place to move-on stuff that can be loved in other people’s homes. I just have fun making it all.

So everything is tagged, we are using bar code tags now, and I’ve written and printed a custom hang tag with the story behind each piece, and what garment the leftover came from. That was a lot of work, but fun for me to go back through the archives. And I even learned in a class during Spinning and Weaving Week with the HGA, how to print my own sew-in labels, because no two are alike. And I know by law I have to have the percentage of fiber content, and country of origin of the fiber, but that information isn’t possible to know. I use too many different unknown yarns, and this is from leftovers and that’s as best I can offer. I didn’t have any poplin inkjet treated fabric, but I had a number of packages of 10mm silk habotai, which honestly is better for wearables, since it won’t be pokey and itchy. The Daryl Lancaster labels are from a stack I had left from the 1980’s. They still work. Did I mention I am a pro at sewing in labels? From my days working in a high end exclusive department store during college, we took out manufacturers labels and sewed in our own. In between customers, I was the best at sewing in labels. And I still do it volunteering in the costume shop at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ.

If you live anywhere near the north Jersey region, the Jockey Hollow Annual Show & Sale will be at Brookside Community Center in Mendham on November 5th and 6th, 2022. Please check www.jockeyhollowweavers.org for more information.

I did it!

This has been a long haul, I’ve been mostly on the road non-stop since August. There is one more brief venue I need to fly to in December, but my marathon is done. I still have buckets of stuff on my plate, including the guild show and sale this weekend, and though I probably won’t have any work to show, I’m the treasurer, and will need to spend the three days locked in the kitchen of the facility processing lots and lots of sales. And then the follow up.

But for now, as I drove up the Eastern Shore of Virginia into Maryland and then Delaware, over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, finally heading up the length of the NJ Turnpike, the leaves were at their peak, and the traffic minimal on a Saturday morning, and I listened to NPR Now on Sirius XM and all was well with the world. I arrived home much earlier than I thought I would, in time to get my doggies from the Kennel, stop at a Trader Joe’s for my favorite yogurt, and completely unpack and put everything away, getting ready for my heavy calendar on Sunday. I had a recorder performance in the morning followed by a rehearsal, and then theater tickets at my beloved Shakespeare Theater of NJ. My daughter and I saw Charlie’s Aunt, and if you are in the area and want a raucous time, laughing until your sides hurt, this is a welcome diversion on all things political. The perfect British farce.

That said, I’ll say it now, OBX wins. For those not in the know, OBX is an abbreviation for the Outer Banks region of North Carolina, coastal, Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk and the Wright Bros memorial and museum. This is my third year teaching at this lovely five day retreat. It is organized by Linda Ihle of Island Fiberworks, and she did a bang up job with this one, held at a beachfront resort called Sea Ranch.

We stayed in condos, I got a beach view and every morning I woke up to this…

And went to bed looking out my balcony to this…

The view is lovely, but mostly I was in the classroom, from 7:30 when I went down to breakfast to well after 10pm each night. So I didn’t spend my time sitting on my balcony listening to the surf drinking wine. Actually I spent no time at all. Sad.

The reason OBX wins is the participants, or rather their fabrics. I have never seen such a combination of handwoven fabrics, the Blazing Shuttle influence is definitely here, but not everyone used hand dyed or hand painted warps. I believe everyone but one student used handwoven fabrics. And the one who didn’t has taken this class with me before, a couple of times, and used gorgeous handwoven fabric, but this time, she was interested in fitting a pile of test garments from patterns she brought, or ready to wear she wanted to copy, to presumably use eventually on handwoven fabrics later.

The gauntlet was thrown down and the first night I arrived after a long drive from north of Baltimore, I was greeted with a lovely spread of food and of course wine! It flowed regularly and often (after happy hour of course!)

Participants spent the first couple of days with challenging layouts. This is one of the toughest parts of working with fabrics that combine hand painted warps, finding common areas for matching across the fronts and backs of a garment. I spent a number of hours the first night of the workshop with one student alone trying to find the best layout.

Because there were wonderful photographers in the group who hardly missed a shot, I didn’t take as many photos as I usually do, and so many of these came from Leigh and Natalie and some of the other students, I swiped them off of Facebook. Mea Culpa dear ladies, I hope it was OK. There were some really fun pictures of me in action, I rarely ever get into the shot!

Margaret was the participant who brought her own patterns, and she cut out a number of them, including this lovely paneled dress, after I showed her how to copy a beloved piece of ready to wear. She thought up the pocket treatment herself. She used a Guatemalan babywrap for the fabric. Then she made a purple linen bathrobe that will eventually have a belt. She modified my swing coat pattern, creating more of a duster.

Elizabeth, Dornan, and Cyndi all made Daryl Jackets with the Shawl Collar and Gaila made the same, except without sleeves.

The rest of the class dove right into my new collared vest pattern that zips up the front. Natalie led the pack with fabric she wove using Blazing Shuttle Warps and a modification of my Chaos draft, available here. She was hilarious with her camera taking all sorts of documentary selfies. She made me smile.

Linda, Peggy and Leigh also wove gorgeous versions of my vest, all with fabrics they wove.

Mary combined my jacket pattern with the collared vest pattern and made this gorgeous jacket.

And Victoria, who has also taken my class a couple of times before, experimented with working on some of her vast collection of smaller cuts of fabrics, thinking of pillows and bags, and then at the end of the class, brought out the walking vest she made two years ago, to finish it up. It is one of my favorites of all the fabrics, as a matter of fact, I got some of her scraps and am having another pair of clogs made from them. I wish I had gotten better photos, it looked really lovely on her.

Kathrin Weber came in a few hours before the end of the class, to begin the transition to her class which followed mine starting this morning actually. As I was packing she was laying out all of her dyed warps for her students to purchase. I got a great shot of us, she is wearing the collared vest I made, using fabric I wove from a class I took with her last year. Or was that the year before… Time flies when you are having fun surrounded by glorious color.

I’ll be back next year, last week in October, all of you who are booked for 2019 in other classes in the country, this one will be a hard act to follow!

If you are in the area, the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild annual show and sale will be held at Grace Lutheran Church in Mendham NJ, Saturday and Sunday, the 10 and 11, 2018. I’ll be in the back all weekend doing the numbers!

Stay tuned!

Loose Ends

Just a quick post (if that’s ever possible from me) to tidy up some unfinished business.

First off, I got a wonderful surprise yesterday afternoon when Jerri Shankler, one of my guild mates from the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild, stopped by to deliver the yardage she wove for me from the yarn she got from me for the Potpourri Exchange. I love the fabric, and the random warp across the width. She added a few of her own yarns, like the burgundy stripe, and though the crackle structure wasn’t obvious most of the time, the fabric had a texture and dimension that made it just a bit more interesting than if it had been plain weave. Jerri and I both agreed that this whole Potpourri Exchange we participated in was a great skill stretching experience, and of course Brianna was there, squealing with delight, as only a 17 year old can do, and asking if we could do this whole experience again! I told her I’d be happy to give her yarns and tell her to come up with something any time she wants!

So now I have another four yards of handwoven yardage to look at and mull over and figure out what to make from it, the hand is weighty and I’m seeing a jacket here…

Meanwhile, my haul from the Saturday dye day in Central Jersey continues to dry. The scarves are fun, and the skeins turned out bright and colorful and again, I’ll be thinking about fun stuff to do with them. And one of the 10 yard warps still hadn’t completely dried, so I photographed the two that have, and can I say I love the palette? Everyone has their own color preferences, but this one is unusual for me, it was riskier with so much orange, and the effect of the pale melon against the lavender is really lovely, at least I think so, and after all, this is all about me, and if I’m happy, then that’s all that counts! And once it is woven, it will look entirely different, so stay tuned. Lots of weaving and sewing to come once my schedule from hell ends around mid-October.

I’m heading out shortly for a weekend getaway (yes I know it is still only Wednesday). My baby sister turns 50, and my middle sister and I are heading to the Catskills with her, where she has a cabin in the mountains, for a little R&R and quality sister time. The actual party is Saturday, and I’ll have to return Friday afternoon for a concert in Newark, my husband got us tickets for the James Taylor/Carol King event, and then head back up on Saturday, but all the festivities should be over by Sunday when my husband gets back on a plane for another two weeks in Saudi Arabia. I’m hoping the home gods are a bit more cooperative this time around. I’ll be working frantically trying to finalize everything for Convergence and teach a four day fiber boot camp at the Newark Museum. Though the timing is bad, I really do enjoy teaching this class, every three hours students learn a new fiber technique, spinning, dyeing, felting, weaving, braiding, great if you want to enter into the world of fiber and need a crash course! I’ve stocked up on green and blue Kool-Aid for dyeing (those colors are really hard to get) and I’ve got lots of fleece and a fresh supply of needle felting needles. If you live in the north Jersey area and are free the week starting July 5th, come play with us at the Museum.

And one final note, I’ve updated my Inkle Loom Weaving monograph to include some of the additional advanced techniques I recently taught in South Jersey. Now included are supplemental warps and a unit on 1:1 Name Draft. The monograph is now $20. If you already own a copy of the monograph, don’t despair, I’m offering an Advanced Supplement to add the missing information. This monograph costs $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping (I know the shipping is excessive, but the computer figures it out that way. The real cost of the monograph is actually $5. so I figure what you are really paying is $5. for the monograph, and $1.50 for the shipping). Anyway, if you are interested in purchasing the advanced supplement, remember I’ll be in hiding in the Catskills until Sunday, so orders won’t go out before Monday.

Happy Summer! It’s officially here!

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…