Jockey Hollow Weavers – Page 2

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!

Dreary Day Reprieve

Finally, some sun shine. Honestly, I haven’t been home enough to even notice, since my last blog Wednesday afternooon, I have been largely out of the studio/house.

Wednesday night was the business meeting for my guild, Jockey Hollow Weavers, and the new board was “sworn in” so to speak. So now I am officially the program chairperson, and I am off to a running start.

My daughter is a member of the guild, and they always welcome her and are so supportive of whatever she comes up with. While we were going through the show and tell, she happily sat sculpting rose candles from the red wax left over from the Bonne Belle cheeses at the snack table.

Barbara Herbster was the speaker for the evening, and she talked first about how she uses a supplemental warp to create her beautiful scarves, some of the supplemental warp threads containing lycra to make the middle ruffle up.

Barbara has one of the best senses of color, and it was inspirational looking at her work. Barbara was one of my most creative weavers who wove for me during the years I worked on the forecast column for Handwoven Magazine. I could always count on her to come up with something spectacularly original, keeping with the palette, theme and inspirational photograph I’d give her.

Thursday morning I packed up the 8 shaft loom, and headed out to a workshop with Barbara at the guild, it was a two day workshop on supplemental warp. Barbara pre-wound the warps, and gave them to us to beam, some were chenille, and some were bamboo. I got one of the bamboo warps. I struggled a bit to get it onto my loom, I had a sectional beam, which normally shouldn’t have been a problem, but there was a mis-communication about size and spacing, and it beamed incorrectly. So I spent the day struggling through the first scarf, finally cutting it off at the end, and re-beaming the warp.

Barbara wound each warp based on a photograph of some kind of flowers she took during her last vacation. It was a great way to wind a warp, much like I used to do with the forecast column.

Friday night, after the workshop, I unpacked the loom, and the bags of stuff one carries to these kind of workshops, and headed over to the Paper Mill Playhouse, to see their current production of 1776. May I say that was one heck of a piece of theatre. A standing ovation, the passion of the times of the days leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the total dysfunction of the first Continental Congress, and the hilarious witty lines which could have been written about the current Congress some 200+ years later, made for a terrific evening.

This morning I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a truck. Actually, I am coming down with a cold, I feel crappy, but still managed to get to my American Sewing Guild meeting, where the speaker was one of the guild members, Tomasa, who is currently attending FIT, and she demonstrated to the group how to draft a bodice pattern on a dress form. I actually learned a few things, she was a very good teacher, and the group was really enthusiastic. I am liking this group of women more and more, and look forward to the meetings.

I came home from the meeting, and jumped into the car with my husband and we made the hour long trek south to Rutgers, for their spring plant sale. Plants from Rutgers University you might ask? Who knew? They have gorgeous gardens, spreading over acres, duh, they do have an agricultural school, and have a fabulous plant sale every spring as a fund raiser. My husband and I always look forward to spending a weekend each spring at some nursery or garden center picking through the usual perennials, and shrubs in search of that one plant that catches our fancy. Well, we hit the mother-lode here. We were like two starving children in a candy shop.

We filled the car with all sorts of unusual specimens, trying to figure out where we were going to plant all these gorgeous creatures. We have about a half acre of great gardens, ponds, perennials, all sorts of wet and dry areas, sunny and shady, and it is all pretty lush at the moment, due to all the buckets of rain that have come down in the last week or so. So lush in fact, I was sort of shocked at how everything had grown about two feet since I last checked.

We found some really unusual things, including the small fern like tree on the left of the photo above, which is actually called Dawn Redwood, yes, that kind of redwood, it is a sequoia from China, thought to be extinct until discovered by the Japanese after WWII, grows to be more than 80 feet. We couldn’t pass it up. And we think we have the perfect spot for it, but will have to fell a dying birch tomorrow, before we plant it. We have lost all of our birches in the last few years, from some birch blight, but happily that just gives us more room to plant stuff.

The photo on the left shows a Mahonia, an odd looking holly type of plant, with even odder flowers, which will be perfect in the shade by the bay window in the front. After I paid for all our specimens, my husband went to get the car, and when he didn’t return, I found him back in the nursery talking to one of the volunteers, about this jack-in-the-pulpit variety, that he couldn’t resist. So I went back to the check out table for one last plant. Apparently this one is a male, which it is when it is suffering from transplant shock, and will eventually settle down and become a female and produce seeds once it likes its new home. I looked at both my husband the volunteer like they had two heads each, but snatched up the plant, the story is too good to pass up.

So, tomorrow, after church and recorder practice, I’ll put on my gardening clothes, and start digging. I’m looking forward to a mother’s day in the gardens, I promise I’ll come back with some amazing photos of our yard. It is really gorgeous. I just hope my cold doesn’t get in my way from spending the day outdoors. No rain for the next few days, yippee!

The Proverbial Grindstone

So another two days spent with my butt stuck in the chair, my hand paralyzed in the shape of a mouse, and more of the letters worn off my poor wireless keyboard. But, I did get two important pages done in the new site. The 1-1 1/2 hour lectures page, and the 2 – 2 1/2 hour lectures page are entered. What a job. The worst part was finding the original images I used for the prospectuses, there are just so many times you can save .jpg’s, and they lose a considerable amount of information. So I always like to start with the original file. But where among the thousands of images I have stored in about 5 different back up locations, could each of the images be hiding?

It’s like that in my studio, “I know it’s here somewhere…” “I remembered seeing it in 1994″… “Whatever happened to that…” Then of course I become a woman possessed. I won’t rest until I find the yarn, fabric, tool, image, whatever is lurking just out of site…

Besides spending the day searching through my vast archives for original files of some of my images, I also hunted around the studio for my supply of upholstery braiding. I know it’s here somewhere. I have to do an emergency costume for my son who plays the coachman in a performance of Cinderella. Yes, the same son with the car in the previous blog. I have to make a pair of pants to match a very old Lieutenant’s Doublet from Van Horn and Sons Theatrical Costumers. The jacket is in tatters, I’ll do my best to repair, but they need me to construct a pair of pants that will look like they go with it. So far, I haven’t found the braid. Next check is the attic, and oh boy, there are amazing things stored up there…

Speaking of my son, he announced yesterday that he is planning to join the National Guard. Well, I’ve been a bundle of mixed feelings all day, part of me knows that this would really be great for him, and part of me is scared to death. So, I’ll just focus on the costume for today.

I am planning an excursion into NYC over my daughter’s spring break, there are a couple of fiber shows I want to catch, one at the Cooper Hewitt called Fashioning Felt, and the other, called Seduction at the Museum at FIT. While checking out times and which days they are closed, I checked the MET to see if there was anything new of interest, and I found that they have an artwork of the day, which can be posted to your Google reader, or whatever you use for keeping track of such things. So, today’s image came up The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, ca. 1799-1800
William Blake (British, London 1757 – 1827 London)
British
Watercolor, pen and black ink over graphite; 14-1/8 x 13-1/16 in. (36 x 33.2 cm)
Rogers Fund, 1914 (14.81.2)

Somehow in all my years of Catholic School, and my years teaching Sunday School in the Reformed Church in town, I never came across this parable. What’s with the 10 virgins? So I did a quick search on Wikipedia, and got the scoop, it is a really odd analogy for being prepared for the second coming, but I loved the watercolor. And the whole idea of 5 wise and 5 foolish virgins waiting for a bridegroom who is having on-time issues, has got the creative juices really churning. So now I have something else to look forward to, a new work of art every day, just go to the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and subscribe to the artwork of the day feed. This was number 3,000 something, out of 130,000 plus artworks. I should live so long…

I went to the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild meeting tonight, and the speaker was Barbara Elkins, the woman who started WEBS. If you are a handweaver reading this blog, you know about WEBS, “America’s Yarn Store”, a 30,000 sq. ft. facility in Northhampton, MA. When I do buy yarn, I probably buy from them, and it was really great to listen to Barbara talk about how she and a fellow weaver started by renting out looms in order to get more money to buy yarn. That was 35 years ago, and in their garage. It was a great story, and I love the store, I’ve been there, Pioneer Weavers meets in the store, and I taught a jacket class for them a couple of years ago. Barbara was wearing the jacket she made in the class, tonight at the meeting. They are having their 35th anniversary sale, the email just came in my box. Beware, their sales can be quite toxic to credit cards! Seriously, they have a great website for ordering and terrific customer support, and I usually get whatever I order within two days. (That would be east coast).

So as I’m driving home from the meeting, in the cold dreary steady rain, visibility zero, I suddenly had a panic attack. The placemat exchange is due at the June meeting, this was the April meeting. That means my daughter and I have exactly 8 weeks to weave 14 more placemats. You do the math… So, out with the whip, and lets get cracking…