Pansies – Daryl's Blog

Highs and Lows…

I grew up in southern NJ, not far from a town called Clementon. They had an amusement park there, and a few times a year, my dad would take the three of us to the Clementon amusement park for the day. ( I checked, it is actually still in existence). I would patiently wait, because I couldn’t go on any rides that spun me around, some structural inner ear issue, I’d immediately start hurling. Motion sickness haunted me as a child. Now there are drugs for that, but mostly I just sat and watched my sisters spinning around in tea cups, the Tilt-a-whirl, and all the other magical rides that make up an amusement park. The merry-go-round was iffy. If I sat on a non-moving horse, and stared straight ahead, I might make it off the ride with my lunch intact. The only real rides that were safe were the Ferris wheel, which only went in one direction, but NO ONE could swing the seat, and of course, my beloved old wooden roller coaster. I loved the roller coaster. That slow climb to the top, barely making it over the crest, and then straight down, breathlessly screaming all the way!

That’s sort of like my last couple weeks.

The day after my last post, the reconstruction guys came and my beautiful music room with the view was complete. I was so very happy, and grateful that something really wonderful came out of a miserable situation. I still have to stain the wood around the new window…

The next day, yeah, not so much. My dryer broke, and when the service man came, he said, Yep, can’t get the parts, you’ll need a new dryer.”

This is something I’ve been dreading for years. I’m a textile artist. The Washer and Dryer are an important part of my design team. I need total control over the function of both. I don’t want appliances smarter than I am, I need to control the water level, I need to be able to open the lid periodically to check on how the fabrics are doing. Wet finishing handwoven fabric is critical.

I’ve heard horror stories from other weavers who have had to replace their washers. In addition to wanting a simple top loading washer, and even though it was the dryer that broke, the washer, actually the pair, were put in when we built the addition, in an alcove off the second floor bedroom, in 1989. So yeah, both were hanging on by a thread. I knew this day was coming, but really, did it have to be the day after the reconstruction was finished? (Ok, fair point, it could have been during the reconstruction…) Sigh…

Further complicating things, according to the repair guy, was that the alcove that housed the pair, was very shallow by today’s standards. He wasn’t hopeful I’d find a dryer that would fit the space. At this point, I’m bordering on having a heart attack…

I went to my local appliance chain, and looked at options. There were washer/dryer sets, like Speed Queen, that would do what I wanted, and not do what I didn’t want, but they didn’t fit the space. They sent a surveyor out the following week to check the space and see if there were any options.

Turns out, my original units were GE Profile. And who knew that GE still made roughly the same pair, same features, and roughly the same size. I ordered, and yesterday, an incredible pair of service technicians hauled my old set away, down two flights of stairs, and had the new set installed, in about 25 minutes. I cannot tell you what a huge relief this is, something I dreaded for years. I’ve done a couple loads and so far so good.

Last weekend, I drove a couple hours up to Newtown CT, where I had agreed to judge The Handweavers Guild of CT biennial fiber show. Denise Kovnat, the other judge and I arrived Saturday evening, and our lovely hostess Jennifer, whom I had never met before, greeted us, showed us around, got us settled, let us preview some of the work, and then we just sat and chatted. Can I tell you what a joy it was to be back with my tribe? Denise, whom I knew of, and had some online interactions with, but didn’t really know well in person, was just a delight, full of stories, adventures, humor and grace. My hostess was the same. We were like old college friends who hadn’t seen each other in 40 years. I needed this weekend away. (And Denise told me that there is a site that ranks blogs, and I’m number 7 in the country for handweaving blogs according to Feedly.com. Who knew!)

Judging is always tough, a huge responsibility, and I needed to give critical feedback on more than 60 pieces. I had a couple of scribes assigned to me, they were hard workers, very accurate, and helped me move the process along. I saw photos today of the exhibit, which was just a beautiful installation, and in one corner, there was a grouping of a couple of my pieces and some of Denise’s work.

I didn’t provide a link to the Handweavers of CT Guild, because apparently their site has some malware my software apps picked up. I’ve let them know. If you can get to the show, it will be up for a month, it is a lovely array of what handweavers do, this is why we do it.

Meanwhile, yesterday was my late husband’s birthday, he would have been 74. There are so many times I wish I could just sit and talk with him, get his opinion of this crazy world we are living in, he was so grounded and informed and thoughtful. In honor of his birthday, every year, I go out and buy pansies, and plant them. First planting of the spring. Such happy little faces on such colorful plants.

And this afternoon, I went into the vegetable garden, and planted a couple flats of spring greens, the lettuces, spinach, arugula, etc. along with collards, kale and chard. And of course peas and parsley. The universe is sending rain tonight, or maybe it is my late husband, since it is still too early to turn on the hoses outside.

And of course, because my life is about putting out fires at this point, we have a raccoon that has moved in, completely trashed the wood shop, and we are doing battle with it trying to catch it and remove it from the property. My vet tech daughter has some experience with this, so she is in charge. We put chicken wire on the underside of the eaves of the shed to prevent reentry, but there is a huge task ahead trying to clean up what looks like a drunken frat party in my woodshop. Every box of nails and screws has been shredded, contents dumped on the floor. Could have been worse, it could have been my yarn.

Each morning I sit by my window, eat my breakfast, and look at the yard, and see the little bit of green that increases every day. I’ve always wanted to do a daily sketchbook journal of sorts, I envy those who, have a committed practice. And though I can draw, I have a degree in fine arts, I don’t find it appealing. I don’t for me see the purpose. Even though I keep buying art supplies, sketchbooks, and take classes.

I participated in something last fall called the Sketchbook Revival. I even paid so I could continue to access the content. There was one session that really struck me as something I could do regularly. Melinda Nakagawa, the session leader uses a fountain pen, which was right up my alley, since I spent 8 years in parochial school writing with a fountain pen, and have actually very fond memories, and she would sketch a plant, a bird, add simple water colors, and write all over the page, thoughts, definitions, plant names, whatever was important that day.

So I sit every morning, with my breakfast, and my sketchbook, and my cat, and my tea, and I sketch something in the yard, something just poking its head up, and I research the common name, the Latin name, the traits, thoughts, and I’m starting to fill my sketchbook…

Oh, and yes, I’m still a weaver! I managed to clear another loom, and I’m keeping this one, a little Rep mat for my dining table.

When I used to travel, I’d always pray that my trips were uneventful. Now I just hope I can get through the days uneventfully. I would like to get off the roller coaster and just walk for a while. It has been going just a little too fast for my taste.

Stay tuned…

Happy Spring…

This past week was full of highs and lows, I sort of felt like a pinball. Monday was the first day of spring, and here in the northeast, we have been hitting temps of about 60 when it is sunny, with steady spring rain in between. I walk into town, and everything has the smallest of buds, ready to just burst apart in some kind of chorus of life. I can’t wait for some color. Even my daffodils are just straining to bloom, tall stalks of yellow confined in their green outer skin.

On Tuesday, I had the wonderful opportunity to moderate an episode of the weekly Handweaver’s Guild of America Textiles and Tea. I prepared hard for this, did my research, collaborated with questions, and was thrilled that it all seemed to go extremely well. The person I interviewed, a knotter from Colorado, Al Canner, was really interesting, extremely talented, and made the most gorgeous work from the lowly macramé knot, the double half hitch, a throwback from the 70’s and the jute plant hangers with the ceramic owl eyes. I still can’t wrap my head around the work he does now, with one foot in the past. My first job out of college was teaching in a mall craft shop in Paramus, NJ, macramé, specifically owl plant hangers. Check out his work, there is nothing like it that I’ve seen in the fiber world. And the interview is on the HGA Facebook page, and will eventually make its way to their YouTube channel.

On Wednesday, my late husband’s birthday, I found out that two people who I really really respected and who had tremendous influence in my life, passed away. One was a weaver in the Pacific northwest, who died suddenly in a house fire from what I understand, and I’m still saddened and stunned that such a spark of life could be so snuffed out in a heartbeat. She was probably the most enthusiastic student I ever had in a class, just a joy to teach, and she will be truly missed. Rest easy Dori.

The other loss was a close friend, here in North Jersey. Ed and I shared a lot of good times creating music together, working on huge projects for Montclair Early Music, and a lot of sushi lunches from my favorite sushi place. I will miss his gentle spirit and musical talent. Too many losses.

So on Wednesday, with news of both deaths, and yet wanting to celebrate my late husband on his day, my daughter and I headed out to the garden center for our annual early spring trek, for pansies and lettuces and I was really really disappointed to find out that no one had any in stock. Which shocked me. Everyone had pansies this time last year, and the year before that. It hasn’t been that cold. I’ve since learned of a couple of places, but the point was, to do something to commemorate my late husband’s birthday. On his birthday. So instead, my daughter and I dressed all the beds after an intense clean out, fertilized, topped off the soil, and planted whatever seeds were in the back of the refrigerator that could go in the ground now. Of course, the hoses aren’t turned on yet, so watering will have to be done by dragging buckets from the house. Not something I look forward to. As if my husband smiled on us, it rained the next day, and then yesterday, and it is supposed to rain tomorrow. It’s like he said, “I’ve got this…”

Which allowed me some lovely studio time. One of my guild mates who lives nearby, came over to work on one of the Structos. I have so many set up with interesting structures. She picked the one with 8 Shaft Honeycomb variants on it, from Malin Selander’s Weave a Weave, specifically the Isolde version. (They are named after operas,) She worked on it for a couple of hours, and I finished it off a few days later. That’s a flat surface, but the deflection in the honeycomb around the gold threads creates the illusion of a wavy fabric.

And of course, my last blog post left everyone hanging with the threading of 8/2 Tencel in an Echo parallel threading on my 12-shaft Voyager Table Loom. It is gorgeous. (The draft is from Denise Kovnat, from her collection of WIF files for Echo Weave available on her website. This is a variation) I feel like there are so many cool things to weave in my studio; I’m a bit addicted to setting up looms, but at some point, I really need to weave what’s on them!

While showing my guild mate all the options with my Structos, I realized that one of them, though threaded for a Theo Moorman technique, hadn’t actually been woven on. I had cut off the piece that was on it, re-tied onto the front, and just left it. So I found a cool photo of the pansies from this time last year, what should have been in my flower pots by now, printed it on silk Crepe de Chine, and started cutting it into strips to weave in an inlay technique. The ground is linen, and the tie-down threads are serger thread. Barely visible. The technique is documented in my monograph called Weave a Memory. It is available digitally.

Those needlework threads I talked about last time, that I purchased from the Lace Day event? They have been calling me. I sat down after calculating the repeat in the handpainted threads, and figured out how many ends, five yards long, I could get with what I purchased in a specific color grouping. Something like 153 ends. So I sat with my weaving software and did a few versions until I liked what I had.

I wound the warp carefully, starting and tying together each end in a loop by the cross, since I would be using a loom I haven’t actually used before, my Gilmore Wave Mini. We named him Quark, (from Deep Space 9, I think). I’m a front to back warper, but the design of this loom requires warping back to front. Normally I would have wound each color separately, and incorporated the chains in the reed, following my draft. In this loom, as in inkle looms, there is no reed, so I had to wind the entire sequence of 153 threads, and try hard to get the handpainted colors to match up. I couldn’t exhale until I had wound the entire warp, because I was so afraid of running short. My calculations held, and I ended up having enough, but that would have been pretty depressing to have had to go to Plan B…

The directions for setting up this loom are strange. The Lease Sticks, two fat knitting needles that slip into the cross, and mount on the back of the loom, work fine for winding, but they have you add metal supports to the warp beam to channel the warp into something like a sectional warp. It doesn’t work. I needed precision winding, to keep the colors from shifting. After winding on 5 yards, I ended up pulling the entire thing back off and winding my own way, which has never failed me; a couple of fat zip ties on the back support, and stiff interfacing for packing material.

Threading from the lease sticks which are suspended a good five inches from the eyes of the Texsolv heddles, which are very densely packed together because this will be a warp face band, proved ridiculous. I ended up pulling the lease sticks and replacing them with a cross tie, like I always use, and just holding the cross in my hand and threading the heddles like I do when I thread the reed. Worked like a charm.

There is always a learning curve with every new piece of equipment I use. Weaving is weaving, but each loom has a personality, quirks, and oddities that make it unique. It is a team effort. So now I’m happily weaving away on this incredible loom, now that it is set up. It does weave like a dream. I’ve never seen such a small loom have the ability to tighten a warp so tight you can bounce on it. And the colors are lining up perfectly.

Life throws you curve balls, and people come into your life and leave. I am a better person for having known Dori and Ed, and I wish them peace on their new journey. And for those of us left behind, I wish for the will to keep on planting, and designing, and playing music, and welcoming the budding trees and bulbs in a joyous celebration of life.

Stay tuned…

Pansies and Piping

Well it isn’t much. But I managed to brighten the dreary days of March, eager with anticipation of spring, measuring the bulbs as they poke their heads out of the damp earth. In anticipation of tomorrow’s rain, I did manage to get the deck boxes and a couple pots planted with pansies, a wonderful gift from my friend and neighbor, in celebration of my husband’s birthday over the weekend. Thank you Deb! Everything is so bare and cold, but pansies add a little bright color in mid March, the first color of the spring.

Of course you realize that a week ago, the deck looked like this:

I’m seriously crossing my fingers we are done with the spring snowstorms.

I worked hard on the website today, managing to figure out one of the things that was eluding me. I knew it was just a stupid click, somewhere, yet I sweated how to do this simple thing for days, and then all of a sudden, Wham! The proverbial 2 x 4 hit me over the head and you could hear the “DUH!” all the way to Trenton! Now that I figured out that little detail, I can start on the gallery pages, and get them moving along. I want to reprocess all the images I used on the original site, make them more uniform, and a little bigger in their thumbnail size. So lots of photo processing, finding the originals in the archives, oh goody, a treasure hunt of sorts…

I worked for a bit tonight on the jacket, getting the left side of the jacket sewn in. It fits like a glove. I’m so glad I added the additional two inches in length. I’m really loving the lime green piping, and when I looked at it on me in the mirror, I loved the way the belt brings in the jacket in the back. But I decided, after mulling over some of the comments from the original posting, that a hint of the color someplace else would be a great idea. I have some DMC floss in the exact color as the felt piping, so I took off the back belt, and couched the floss on, get this, I realized I didn’t have the right color thread, couching only works if you have the same color thread, so I rooted around in a drawer, and voilá, there in the back was a very old wooden spool of poly thread, in the exact color. Go figure…

So I couched (which means a very narrow zig-zag stitch over a cord or yarn, in this case I used floss, aided by a little foot that has a groove to feed the cord or yarn). I plan to use this couched floss to topstitch the collar and the top of the sleeve cuffs.

I love the wavy movement of the felt piping, it looks like the aurora borealis in the northern sky, and that’s the effect I was looking for, the jacket is called after all, Arctic Sky.