Outer Banks Retreat – Daryl's Blog

Where do I begin…

I feel like I am still spinning around wildly on that Merry-Go-Round, and my poor painted pony is running out of breath! But I’m getting closer to the finish line, if that’s actually a thing. Truth be told, I seriously doubt it!

So I went off to Sievers. Sievers is a wonderful fiber school on Washington Island, WI, and we determined this is my 13th year there. I’m thinking 13 is a charm? I had an uneventful trip there, made all my connections, bags were waiting cruising around the baggage carousel when I got off the plane in Green Bay. The Sievers Staff sends someone to pick me up, we stop at a Walmart for my week of groceries and the all important box of wine, and off we go onto the ferry and my get away home for the week.

The weather was cold, and crisp, and some days bright and sunny, and other days, raining like the end of the world was coming. It even snowed one day.

Sunsets were beautiful, and I actually caught the moon peeking through some gorgeous cloud formations as I crossed the road to my cottage about 10:30 pm, leaving students still working, this is one committed group!

Sievers always sponsors a “Getting to know you” breakfast with all the students from both classes at one of the local breakfast places, this time the Sunset, and the beach outside the restaurant didn’t disappoint.

My class was amazing. 8 of the 12 students, really 9 of them had worked with me before, 2 at other venues, but all jumped in pretty quickly. The remaining three were excited and kept up easily with the rest of my Sievers’ Achievers. The space is glorious, well lit, lots of tables, and all important cutting tables that are always in demand.

The students took advantage of all of the patterns I now offer, many of them making multiple garments over the 7 day class.

Of course there are always my jacket people, Margaret, one of my new students, but a pretty experienced garment maker did a gorgeous collared jacket with bound buttonholes from a commercial wool. Cindy D (there were three Cindy’s in the class) made a longer jacket with a neck band for her yardage she wove from a Blazing Shuttles Handpainted Warp. She worked hard on the layout to get everything to line up.

I had a lot of tunics happening in this class. Cindy M made up a tunic in a commercial fabric she had laying around just to see how it all went together. Linda made up a lovely tunic from a commercial fabric, and Janene made two tunics, the first one, in beautiful watery blue chenille handwoven with Zephyr wool/silk she cut out last year and never got a chance to make it up, so came to class and picked up where she left off. The second one she made in a new handwoven cloth from a superwash handpainted knitting yarn. This one she made with a button placket. Helen also made a tunic out of contrasting quilt fabrics.

Helen was also one of my new students, and in addition to the tunic, she made a vest from her handwoven fabric.

Gerri made a vest from handwoven fabric, this was a commercial pattern we needed to alter a bit. I love the contrasting band, also handwoven.

In addition, Gerri started in on the pattern and then the test garment, for probably the most unusual vest I’ve ever fit on anyone, from the Sewing Workshop, the Fillmore Vest. She had some beautiful handwoven, which apparently I didn’t get a photo of, but once we tweaked the pattern, adding bust shaping, she got everything laid out and will cut and assemble at home. Can’t wait to see photos of that finished.

Terry also made a vest, this one we created a pattern from a drawing she brought in to show the kind of vest she wanted to really show off these two cuts of wool she bought on a trip to Scotland. She had a car full of gorgeous fabrics and started in on a swing dress/jumper, from one of my newest patterns. I missed getting a photo on her, but at least I got one on the table showing off what a terrific match job she did on the plaid.

Dawn for her first project also made the dress. And that gave her enough scraps to make the same vest that Helen made.

Cindy M also made the dress from an old fabric from the stash, working hard to get those red and white checks to match.

There is a pattern that has been shared around the class, many of the students have made it up multiple times. The pattern I’m sure is no longer in print, but turns out I have a copy in my own stash of patterns, and so it is on my list to make one of these knit blouses too. There is an interesting twist of the two fronts right at the bustline. Linda and Cindy S both made knit blouses from Today’s Fit Vogue 1477.

And then we have the new jacket, which is like my zippered vest with sleeves. Dawn had planned to make it up, but had lots of tensioning issues with her handwoven fabric and kept cutting it off the loom when her tension went astray. There was a bit of warp left on the loom, and she hoped that she could get the last sleeve out of it after she got home and finished weaving what was left. She couldn’t quite get the jacket finished without the sleeve, since it is lined edge to edge and then the perimeter binding and zipper are applied. A few days ago I got a text from Dawn showing me the remaining fabric is off the loom and with not a quarter inch to spare, it exactly fits the remaining sleeve!

The collared zip vest is fast becoming my most popular pattern. Janene made one last year from a gorgeous handwoven from a Noro knitting yarn. She brought it back because she wanted to alter it to create a side vent. So of course everyone wanted that. Ginnie made one from the fabric she wove with me in my designing yardage class back in July at Peters Valley. And she made a vent too.

Cindy M also made a gorgeous vest from her handwoven, again, really spending time to get the panels to match as best she could.

And Cindy S brought her jacket she made last year, back to class because we could not get the collar right. She had put bound buttonholes in my jacket collar to put onto a commercial jacket pattern she had used before, and for some reason, we just couldn’t get the collar to lay right. We ran out of time last year, so she brought it back. Turns out, there was an oops moment, when I removed the entire collar and we laid it out on the table, and discovered that the whole collar had been put on in reverse, the shawl edge against the body. Which complicated things because the bound buttonholes were now on the outside edge instead of the inside edge. With some tweaking and tiny seams, I managed to reverse everything and she got it all back together and once she puts the lining back in and finishes handsewing, and gives it a good pressing, the collar now does what it is supposed to do.

She went on to make a new jacket, this one also from handwoven, and after watching a video from an old Roberta Carr tutorial, inspired by a Threads Insider Video from Louise Cutting on Spanish Snap Buttonholes, she made one for this jacket. Turned out perfectly. I was peripherally aware of this technique, but will now make a garment with them and possibly use them for my closures lecture. They are perfect for a thinner weight handwoven.

And then there was Joy. She sat quietly in her corner of the room, making a gorgeous black duster coat, using my long shawl collared jacket pattern from a commercial wool fabric. Her line of bound buttonholes down the front turned out perfectly. I can’t wait to see it finished with the lining installed and all the handwork done.

Here is my Sievers Achievers Class of 2019! And we had great fun at our newest tradition, Monday night Island Pizza night, we get take out pizzas and bring the wine (and beer, this is after all Wisconsin!)

Speaking of Threads Insider, my latest video is up, this one on making a full bust adjustment. Threads Insider is a subscription service, about $5. a month, and that gives you access to everything Threads, including all the videos, online archive and print magazine. There is a 14 day free trial. You can binge watch a lot of videos in 14 days!

And so I started the trek home on Wednesday around lunch time, knowing full well that there was a wicked storm on the east coast and that most likely I would not make it home and have to spend the night in O’Hare. The ferry crossing to Door County Wisconsin was enough of a ride! The water was rough, surf pounding and that tiny ship got tossed around! I got to Green Bay early and was able to hop onto an earlier flight, which was boarding as I was going through the check in process, I was the last one on the plane, pretty sure my bags wouldn’t make it on with me.

We made it to O’Hare, where the Club lounge ticket agent also put me on standby for an earlier flight, the trick was finding my bags and hoping they would make it on the earlier flight as well. She knew they made it to O’Hare, and asked me to describe them. Hahahahah! Very very big and very very heavy. Both were soft sided, zippered, on two wheels. None of this spinny wheel thing, I’d break those suckers right off. Both weighed in at 70 pounds and had large straps holding them together.

I made it on the earlier flight to Newark, in spite of the hour and a half air traffic control hold for weather. Apparently they hadn’t closed Newark airport, in spite of 60 mile an hour gusting winds, but were just spreading out the planes coming in. We took off, and all was well until landing. I started looking for the barf bag in the seat pocket. Everyone was holding on tight while the plane pitched in the wind, I have to give a lot of credit those two United pilots who got that plane safely on the ground. We sat on the tarmac awhile waiting for a ground crew of marshals to escort us in and I described the plane rocking back and forth in the wind, just sitting on the tarmac like two hippies doing it in a VW Microbus. By now it is about 11pm, two hours earlier than I was originally scheduled to land, and to my complete surprise and extreme joy, my bags came zipping down the chute of the baggage carousel. United, you made me very happy.

And so, I had only a couple days for the final prep for the recorder concert I’ve been working on for the last year for Montclair Early Music. The Rembrandt concert, shows the life and artwork of Rembrandt along with music of his time. Not having rehearsed with the group for the last month because I’ve been on the road made me a little nervous. The concert was yesterday, and just about everything went wrong like my windshield wiper flying off the car in the middle of a torrential rain storm on the way to the concert, not having a long enough extension cord, finding the 19th century church building where the concert was held didn’t have a three prong outlet, but once all of that was worked out, with only minutes to spare before showtime, the program went off without a hitch. I did the narration and played bass, some of the photos surfaced this morning and I’ll post them here.

Meanwhile, the Jockey Hollow Show and Sale is coming up November 9-10. During the evenings at Sievers, I had brought a bunch of scraps from old work and created a number of small bags to sell at the guild sale. I continued that, now that I’m back and have been making a bag a day, I’m really having fun watching YouTube tutorials and seeing all the ways that people put together zippered bags.

Final prep for the Outer Banks retreat, I leave on Saturday! Last retreat of the year. I’m so tired! My daughter is going with me on this one.

Stay tuned…

When it rains it snows…

Just once I’d like to go to bed at night and think, “What a boring uneventful day. Nothing happened, no major weather issue, no major political headlines, no one in my family had any drama, nothing went wrong with the house, or the dogs or the people I love. Nothing.” Hahahahahahahahah…

So it is supposed to be -20 tonight with wind gusts of 45 mph. Everything has a coating of ice from all the rain yesterday. Hahahahahahahahah…..

For now, I have power, and internet, and I’m going to try to post this way overdue blog, because, it isn’t like anything important happened this month… I read a lovely funny meme on Facebook, 30 days hath September, April, June and November, all the rest have 31 save January which has 374… I use to love January, it was dark and cold and there was no travel, and no drama, and I got to hunker down in my studio and just make stuff. It has been that way since I started doing craft fairs in 1979. I loved January because it was so dark and uneventful. I didn’t want it to end, because that meant February and craft fairs started with the ACC show in Baltimore. This is 40 years later, and nothing has changed, I get on a plane next week for the first trip of the season, to Southern California for a five day garment construction class.

This January was an anomaly. Just like everything else in life. It goes from 40 degrees and raining to -20 overnight. The world is an anomaly. My family is an anomaly. My life is an anomaly. But I finally broke through all the things that were pulling at me preventing me from doing what I love and buckle your seatbelts, its going to be a wild ride…

I finished the first draft of my article for Heddlecraft. 16 pages. Toughest article I have ever written. Meanwhile, I had applied to a number of exhibitions last fall, and not only was I accepted, I received the print copies and found out I had won an award. At the Blue Ridge Fiber Show, when the work was returned to me, there, attached to my yardage, was a third place ribbon. This was the yardage, Chaos, the draft is available as a download from my eShop.

And of course I already knew that my other entry, the duster, won the HGA award. The draft for that is available as well.

And the latest Fiber Art Now magazine arrived within days, featuring the Annual Excellence in Fibers Catalog, an annual print exhibition. There I am on page 63.

And then a few days later, when I dropped my artwork off at the Montclair Art Museum, they handed me the catalog for the exhibit, New Directions in Fiber Art, 2019 NJ Arts Annual – Crafts. The exhibit runs through June 16, 2019, unfortunately I’ll miss the opening Friday night February 8th, because, well I’ll be teaching in Southern California. I hope it is warmer than 20 below.

I loaded the car with my 16 Structo looms and set off to teach a one day Learn To Weave class for my guild. It was a nail biter, the weather was iffy right up to the day of the class, with a major storm due in late in the afternoon. The governor had already called a State of Emergency. I’m happy to say, there ended up not being a major weather event, you might say the afternoon was uneventful, except that there were more than a dozen new weavers and some very happy people.

I said goodbye to my son, he is off to war, first to Texas and then onto a location in the middle east, which I can’t name for safety reasons. I’m very very proud of him, I wish his father could have been there. Meanwhile I put all his stuff in storage, vacating the basement apartment he has inhabited for the last 14 years.

I had my handyman come in and paint and fix up the basement space. My daughter is slowly moving in down there. She has stuff all over the house. Way too much stuff for a 26 year old. But she is the creative sort and so everything has potential use in some grand piece of artwork. I totally get this. Which is why I’m working with stuff from my stash for my current project that dates back to 1981…

Meanwhile, the last big project I wanted to do on the house was to have the wood stove removed and replaced with a similar stove except gas fired. No mess, no chimney cleaning, no wood to haul, no ashes to clean up. The installation was completed last week, and I’m just waiting for the rest of the inspections before the final hook up. I want to curl up in the living room with my dogs and my knitting, flip on the fire, and then when it is time to go to bed, flip it off.

Meanwhile, once I finished the first draft on my 16 page article I promised my fiber friend Linda, who sponsors my wonderful five day retreat in the Outer Banks the end of October, that I would make her vest for her, that she wove out of Kathrin Weber Blazing Shuttles warps, in exchange for a pair of clogs from Chameleon Clogs, using a gorgeous hand dyed Tencel scrap from one of my students, Victoria Taub. I love my clogs and Linda loves her vest. Done and done… (There might still be a spot or two left for next year’s retreat, leave a comment if you are interested…The vest is one of the options to make in my workshop)

I will say that one of the major obstacles in my life right now is the inability to function in my studio. When my daughter moved back home to take a job closer to me, she brought four looms with her (leaving one with a friend), more yarn than any 26 year old should have, and a cat. The two 8 shaft 45″ looms had no where to go but into my already too small studio, the one I just had renovated. I struggled for a few months, falling over equipment, barely able to lay out a piece of fabric and the plan to move one of them to the basement once she settles down there, is still probably a couple months away, because there is a huge warp on it that has to be woven off first. I’ll keep my original 8 shaft, the first one I bought in 1978, and work around that in the studio, but the second one is making me nuts. I got a brain storm yesterday, since we hadn’t moved the second bed down from the attic to the guest room she just vacated, and in a fit of shear craziness, with help from my willing studio assistant Cynthia, we folded that baby up and pushed it right across the hall into the guest room. Done and done…

Now I can actually move in my studio. It isn’t great, but I can function in it.

So with my new found freedom of space and major projects crossed off my to do list, I dove in head first. My looms are screaming at me to put warps on them. They have been naked for months. I have requests to exhibit work this summer and I have no new work. I bought some new fiber reactive dyes from Dharma a couple months ago and want to see what’s inside. So I started up the dyepot again. First batch is something called Mars Dust. Gotta love the name.

Second batch is drying, called Muir Glen. I misread the calculations and put 3 Tablespoons instead of 3 teaspoons. Hahahahahaha…. I’ve never gotten such a gorgeous deep gray before.

Third batch is in the pot, called Kingfisher Blue. Meanwhile, I started winding a warp. Way back, a couple of years ago, I bought some Noro Taiyo Lace on sale at a knitting shop somewhere in the Pacific northwest. I made this jacket from the cloth I wove using one of the colorways.

I still had four balls of a different color way, and I’ve been dying to weave that off into a similar kind of fabric.

So I looked at my stash, and I had about 21 ounces of Harrisville Shetland Singles from my early craft fair days, circa 1981 or 2. They don’t even spin singles anymore, well actually they do, but they ply the yarn and don’t sell it as singles. I wound a seven yard warp until I ran out.

Then I looked around for something else since I wanted the fabric wider than the 14 inches I would get from the Harrisville. I found four 2 oz tubes of Maypole Nehalem, a 3 ply worsted very close in grist to the Harrisville, and in a close enough color to blend. So not ask me how long they have been in the stash. I think I inherited them.

I got about 6″ worth of warp out of those babies, and then sat down at the computer with my trusty Davison and picked out a draft where I could use the two warps most effectively. I chose a Finnish Twill, page 37 if you have the book, and figured out exactly how to use what I wound. I love to wind first and then decide what to make later.

Meanwhile, my studio assistant sat all day perched on a stool winding 2 yard skeins of some of my vast stash of dyeable cellulose yarns. She wound a lot but didn’t make a dent. I have hundreds of pounds of natural yarn. Don’t ask…

And between us we cleared a lot of cones. Unless you are a weaver, you don’t understand the importance of a trash can that looks like this…

Because I was running around like a distracted crazy person, enjoying the space in the studio and finally getting to do something fun, and running back and forth to the dyepot and the washing machine which I use for rinsing skeins, I did the most stupid thing a weaver can do, I don’t think I’ve made this mistake in 40 years if ever, I forgot to tie off the cross of the first bout of warp. If you aren’t a weaver the magnitude of this mistake will be lost on you, trust me, it is a big deal. Fortunately it was only the first 6″ bout, and each 1/2″ was carefully marked, so the warps won’t be too out of order. But this is a sticky singles warp, of all warps to screw up… Sigh…

I am going to curl up now and watch the next episode of Project Runway All Stars. And hope that the rest of my life will be uneventful. Or maybe just tomorrow. Or maybe just get through tonight and hope the pipes don’t freeze or my trash cans don’t blow down the street…

Stay tuned…

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!