Sievers – 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…

Must be the full moon…

What a bizarre day, I never left my desk, stuff just kept coming in faster than I could take care of it. I had high hopes of working on more of the hot mats/mug mats, but alas, the universe, or the full moon, or whatever forces were causing a cosmic redirect, I was stuck in front of a glowing screen all day. Now I’m not saying this wasn’t a positive thing. I got the best news today. If you followed my blog back in the end of September, I worked hard for a couple of weeks, reworking all of my lectures/workshops to make them more appropriate for the sewing community instead of the handweaving community. I had been asked to submit proposals for the American Sewing Guild Conference in Atlanta next August. It is a market I’d dearly love to be more connected with, after all, I am a sewer (sorry, I’ll never get use to the new PC word ‘sewist’) and I weave to have something to sew.

Anyway, I spend lots of time writing proposals, entering exhibitions, and doing the waiting game once I package everything together and send it off. Sometimes I even forget I entered or submitted, which is probably not a bad way to handle the stress of waiting. Today in my inbox, I got a “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to teach…” letter from the American Sewing Guild, and they want me to teach 4 classes at their 2010 conference in Atlanta. Can I tell you how excited I am?

On top of that, I just finished most of the final details for the April 2011 Ontario Canada provincial conference. I will be teaching there, and giving one of the keynote addresses. That’s been in the works since last summer. I spent a good deal of time today, coincidentally, on the phone with a woman from Ontario, who found me searching the internet, and wanted to know more about my monographs on sewing, I had trouble realizing that she just found me on the internet, completely independently from the Ontario conference and Convergence in Albuquerque, where I’m also teaching next July, the booklet just became available for that. Anyway, the woman was lovely to chat with, and towards the end of the conversation, she had me convinced that I need to look down the road a bit to one of my next goals, and bring it up further on the to do list. That would be turning my monographs into DVD’s. I bought the camera equipment last year, to be able to film the Step by Step process. I’ve been looking at some of the sewing videos out there, and haven’t seen anything I really thought would work for how I would want my DVD’s to read. The woman from Ontario encouraged me to pick up David Coffin’s DVD on shirtmaking. She raved about it, and so of course, I immediately clicked on my trusty Amazon.com account and stuck it in my shopping cart, along with his book/DVD on making pants. I’ll let you know what I think. Always love an excuse to buy books on Amazon.

Speaking of books, my neighbor/friend is a media center specialist for a neighboring High School, and her school’s book club was sponsoring a fund raising event at a local Barnes and Noble. Again, not to pass up a chance to just hang around in a book store all evening, I managed to dump a couple of hundred dollars, mostly on books for my daughter, she is seriously into Manga, but I did pick up a couple of movies I’ve had on my Amazon wish list for awhile. I love the movie genre that takes a close look at a creative genius, uncovers their pain, their obsessions, their muses, and their passions. I got a copy of Pollock with Ed Harris, and Goya’s Ghosts with Natalie Portman. I also picked up Frida, with Salma Hayek. I’ll let you know what I think of them once I’ve viewed them.

I cruised through the bargain book section of Barnes and Noble, and found a couple of little treasures, Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? First, I love Maureen Dowd, she is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times. And secondly, how could you go wrong with the title? The book is a snarky look at feminism and the collision of the sexes. The reviews are all over the place, so for $5.98 for the hard cover, I’m game. I’ll let you know.

I also picked up Julia Cameron’s memoir, Floor Sample. It had a dress form on the front cover. Julia Cameron wrote the well respected creativity book called “The Artist’s Way”, which has been on my shelf forever. Again, the reviews are all over the place, but I thought it was worth picking up for $5.98 for the hardcover.

I mentioned that the latest issue of Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot came in yesterday, finally, I was probably the last to get my copy. In it is the brochure for the HGA’s conference in Albuquerque next July, called Convergence. Since I am teaching, I get to participate in early registration, but I couldn’t really do that until my magazine came in. And come in it did! All four copies. I am all over the place in this magazine. Which is why I got four copies! I have a book review starting on page 9, a photograph of my piece The Spouse, on page 20, from the Small Expressions exhibit, and my article starting on page 31, the second installment of a three part series on the Designer’s Challenge from the Tampa Bay Convergence in 2008. I ripped the Albuquerque conference brochure out of the middle of the magazine, and started to look through all the offerings. It isn’t hard for me to fill out the registration, since I am teaching in every time slot, I don’t get to pick anything, but the tours before the conference look wonderful. So wonderful that I booked two tickets for the Georgia O’Keefe Ghost Ranch tour and I’m dragging along my husband.

So, the bottom line here, is my next summer is pretty set, I’ll be on the road more than I’ll be home. With two 5 day classes in August, at Sievers and at Harrisville in NH, along with the ASG conference in Atlanta and Convergence, and a 4 day class in fiber basics called Fiber Boot Camp at the Newark Museum in NJ, it doesn’t look like it will be much of a summer! I’ve also got to write up proposals for two conferences for the summer of 2011. Can you see my eyes rolling around in my head? It is hard to follow the “One Day at a Time” way of thinking, when you are writing proposals for 2011, and 2009 isn’t even finished. Oh the life of an artist…

All of the scheduled events I’ve mentioned above can be found with contact information on my website.

Oh, and I almost forgot, the invitations for Art Connections 6 at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University are out, I will have two pieces in the show. The opening reception is January 17, 2010 from 2-5 pm if you are in the north Jersey area. The show runs from January 17 – February 13, 2010

Stay tuned…

Plans gone awry…

First, I have to say Happy Birthday to my now 17 year old daughter who has her driver’s license and can’t wait to find places to drive. She decided she has to drive to the High School tomorrow because her rather large woodworking project is ready to be brought home. Timing… Good job Brianna!

I sat down at the computer this morning, after getting her off with the driving instructor who would take her for her test, and my plan was to catch up on some contracts and proposals that needed some attention, and start preparation for tagging and photographing items for the guild sale this weekend. Silly me, what was I thinking…

It all started when I happened to look ahead on my Google Calendar, all the way to tomorrow. I noticed that I was suppose to deliver my piece for the Visual Art Center Blank Canvas auction, and I completely panicked. The piece isn’t even made yet. Then I looked at the original sheet with the dates, and the piece isn’t due until November 20th. Big relief! 🙂

Then I found an ad for an exhibit in Texas, an international juried art competition, but the application had to be sent out today. 🙁 So I started looking through the artwork I have committed to specific exhibits to see what pieces would be available for submission. I came upon the outstanding entry form for the New Jersey Focus for the Art Center of Northern New Jersey exhibit, and looked at the dates and nearly had a heart attack when I read that all accepted work was due today. 🙁 I never heard from them, so my assumption was they didn’t get my application? I called them. In fact my work had been accepted, and it was due today, and by the way, I never picked up my piece last week from the International Juried Show… Hmmm….. Well, I did apparently screw up there. I failed to mark on my trusty calendar that I had to actually pick the work up when the show was over, you may recall, that was the piece where I won the Merit award. (In my defense, I rarely exhibit in a show that doesn’t involve shipping a piece and prepaying the return shipping, so it isn’t something I pay attention to, the piece just shows up on my doorstep. ) OK, so I just had to gather the work that had to be brought to the Art Center for the next show, and pick up my poor orphaned piece I had left behind. I don’t usually make mistakes like that.

I went to my files to see what pieces had in fact been accepted. 🙂 And I nearly had another heart attack when I realized that one of the pieces had been woven, but it had never been mounted on a frame. 🙁 I didn’t even have the frame. It was a big piece, 28 x 24″ and I just stood frozen in my studio for a good couple of minutes. Then I sprung into action. First I searched my stick barrel in the studio, every weaver has one. Lease Sticks, Temples, wood slats for warping, dowels, yardsticks, all things long and wood-like reside in the barrel in the corner. And there, like a gift from heaven, were two 28″ stretcher bars, and two 24″ ones. 🙂 This is my lucky day!

I put them together, and built a padded cover, and then covered that with silk. I mounted the artwork, a piece I wove a few months ago, a larger version of the original Big Sister, and carefully pinned it stretched on the frame. Then I hand sewed it to the silk, all the way around. The whole process took about 4 hours, and I was finally able to head out to the art center around 2:30. This was not what I was planning to do today. And I found out the artist’s reception is Sunday when the show opens, right in the middle of the guild sale, and no where near the guild sale. I hate calendar collisions.

I managed to get back from Bergen County around 4pm, which left me about 40 minutes to process images, burn a CD, fill out the paperwork, make out the check, place everything in an envelope and get it to the post office before it closed today for the exhibit at University of Texas at Tyler, which is what started this whole escapade today. I did make it to the post office with five minutes to spare.

So nothing I had planned to do today got done, except putting in the proposals for Siever’s for next year. But that’s life in the fast lane, we all went out tonight for all you can eat Sushi for my daughter’s birthday. I am going to finish up this blog tonight and curl up in bed and read. I’m in the middle of two good reads, one on my iPod, and the other on my night stand. One is an Elizabeth Berg novel, about a woman who contracted polio in the 1950’s and was pregnant, and managed to give birth to her daughter while in an iron lung. She went on to raise her daughter by herself, in spite of being completely paralyzed. Like I said, it is a good read. The other book is by Brett Lott, called Jewel, about a family from Mississippi whose last child has what we now call Down’s syndrome, but back then, the term was Mongolian idiot. Both books are from the same time period, and both take place in Mississippi, and I am always appalled reading about how we treated each other and how racism and prejudice were everyday occurrences. We have come so far and yet, not far enough…

I finally got hold of some of the images my husband shot at the musical Once on this Island, performed last weekend at County College of Morris. The show takes place in the French Antilles, in the 1950’s. The story is a folk tale, of an orphan after a horrific storm, who was kept alive by the gods, and how she grew up among the peasants and the indigenous peoples of the island, but falls in love with one of the French Grande Hommes, after she rescues him from a car crash.

I wanted to share the photos, because I helped with the costumes, providing some of the actual garments from my vast stash of amazing clothing. The god of water, Agwé, wore my peacock vest, actually all four of the gods wore capes of some sort, so my peacock vest was perfect to give the illusion of sparkling waves as he turned and moved around the stage. In one scene, he covers the orphan Ti Moune, who has been taken by the god of death, (on Agwé’s right in the first two photos), with a wave of water.

I copied a dress with some handpainted silk fabric from Thailand for Erzulie the goddess of love. The costumer added a cape, and the actress looked like a pink froth of love! She moved and swirled, and it was all quite effective. On her right was the goddess of the earth, Asaka, and I put one of my sari skirts on her, and reworked the cape from a costume from another venue.

And of course, there was my son, who played the grandfather of all the french inhabitants of the island, Armand, who came in the time of Napoleon, and in spite of having a lovely wife, to his right, he slept with all the peasants. My son loved the role… I designed the look for Armand, and I provided the white lace dress for his “wife”, and the peasant to his left, has on one of my silk broomstick skirts.

After the show, we carried out a carload of garments and fabric, and I’m still cleaning everything. I was glad to have had the opportunity to help with the costumes, I actually enjoy it, and the challenge of making up something from nothing, and it only has to look good from the audience, and not up close, and it only has to make it through a weekend of shows! The complete opposite of how I actually work!

I’m going to try again tomorrow to work off some of my to do list. Wish me luck…

I’m back!

Whew, what a week. First, I have to say that Sievers Fiber School, is my most favorite place to teach. For a couple of reasons. The location is sort of like heaven, especially in September. You have to travel to an obscure airport, Green Bay, which exists solely for providing transportation for Packers Games, then there is the two hour drive north through Wisconsin, into famous Door County, with all the cherry trees, and I’m talking the kind you can make wine with, and then you hop a ferry for the 25 minute trip to heaven.

In September the population of Washington Island drops to almost nothing, at least by New Jersey standards, and the weather is gorgeous. It hadn’t rained in 25 days, but the first night there, we got some welcome rain, and it stayed cool and comfortable all week.

The staff at Sievers is unbelievably hospitable, and caring, and they make you feel like family. They start with a Sunday night welcome social, and do their best to be supportive and encouraging, and grateful for not only the faculty, but the students as well. More than half my class were returning students, this was my third year there. I love the five day format, students can accomplish a lot in five days, but it always ends up rushed because one of the secrets of teaching is that no matter how much time you give students, they always need more! The new students follow my agenda, they all make a jacket from my pattern, learning the basic skills I want them to learn, and then when they return the next year, they may bring anything they want to work on.

This is such a great opportunity for me as a teacher, each student wants something different from me, and I find myself working way outside my comfort zone and really being challenged by some of the projects, some of the patterns, and some of the fabrics students bring. I think that’s my favorite part. I learn as much from them as they do from me.

The work space, which is a fabulous hexagon, a really beautiful building to work and teach in. It is roomy, bright, with plenty of work tables. Students can just spread out and fill whole corners. Many of them brought SUV’s full of stuff, projects, fabric, supplies, and the gallery/store at Sievers has lots more stuff available should you need anything at all.

There is a tradition at Sievers on the final morning, a group photo, a mini graduation, a song from Cindra, one of the staff members, who has a beautiful voice, a song about sleeping on an island, and never being quite the same. I cry every time I hear it. And a quick look around, I’m not alone!

I shared a cottage with Nancy Adams. She taught the other class at Sievers this week, a beyond beginning weaving class. She had eight students, and they were all enthusiastic and talented, and made some beautiful things. And we kept trying to convince them that they should be weaving yardage for clothing, forget rugs, and table runners… 🙂

Nancy was a great roommate, this is the second time we’ve roomed together. We would chat in the evenings, over dinner, which we cooked in the cottage, and then head back to the studios for the evening. There is no internet available, no TV, nothing else to do but what you love best! It doesn’t get any better than this…

The final night we all went to a Washington Island landmark, the Sailor’s Pub. It has become a tradition, and we filled the restaurant with happy talk of fiber, and projects, and what next, and how we are all looking forward to coming back next year. We left the restaurant just at sunset, which was a fitting end to a glorious week.

I encouraged Ann, the owner of Sievers, on the drive back to Green Bay, to think about offering to rent sewing machines to those flying in from other states. I know many more would be able to take advantage of the classes they offer if they didn’t have to worry about bringing a sewing machine on an airplane. I’m hoping they can work that out for next year on a limited basis.

I flew home uneventfully, in first class, enjoying the quiet time before returning to the melee at my house.

We have taken on a few additional teens in the basement since I was last home. I think my son is trying to get in as much partying as possible before he leaves for the military. He is still working on all the paperwork, and I get frequent texts asking me about medical procedures he had, or things like the spelling of my maiden name and where I was born.

And I’m sure you are all waiting to hear about the new dog. My husband and daughter spent a few hours repairing my fence last Sunday after dropping me off at the airport, and they brought home a lovely year and a half old male Norwegian Elkhound. His name is Bjorn, and he follows my daughter around like they were glued at the hip. She has known him since he was 2 months old, was bred at the kennel where she works, and after he became a champion, the breeders needed a home for him, too many males with five females in heat becomes quite the juggling act. Bjorn was my daughter’s favorite, and so she brought him home. I really haven’t seen much of the dog. If my daughter isn’t home, he just sleeps at the foot of her bed and waits for her to come back. He isn’t quite sure where I fit in, since he lived her a week before I returned.

I’m all unpacked, and I’m caught up on laundry, starting to clean, and look at the workload for this week. I don’t travel again for a couple weeks, and then it is off to Albany for a quick weekend.

It is good to be home.