Silk City Fibers – Page 3

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile there is a tropical storm moving in tonight. Finally, a typical summer… At least we need the rain desperately…

Meanwhile, I launched another pattern for download. And I’m beginning to add Lookbooks for some of the patterns. I’ve had a number of requests from potential buyers to see what people are doing with the patterns. I know this is a thing on Ravelry, and it does help to see what people do with the pattern, and how it fits all different body types. This is one more thing on my never ending to do list, but I’ve managed to post three of them, one for the vest below, and one for the 700/1700 tunics and the 100 jacket. I don’t know if it helps, and obviously the patterns are too new for purchasers to show what they’ve done with them, but I’ve been using these patterns for years, especially the jackets, and I have a collection of mostly in progress, not completely finished versions from all of my workshops.

What’s important here is that if I used a photo of you in your garment, I cropped all body parts, so you wouldn’t be recognized. Still, if you object to my using your garment, please let me know. And if you have a photo of a garment you made in one of my classes and/or from one of my patterns, especially a finished version, please let me know at theweaver@weaversew.com

The 800 Zippered Vest is fully lined to the edge and has bias bound edges. The vest has a stand-up collar with front separating zipper. View 2 uses the lining as a seam finish on the side, shoulder and neckline/collar seams. Optional yoke on both views. This pattern does not contain directions for sewing. The directions, which contain metric equivalents are available for free from my website https://www.daryllancaster.com/Webfiles/800ZipperedVestDirections.pdf

In addition, a lookbook of garments made from the 800 Zippered Vest is available here https://weaversew.com/wordblog/800-zippered-vest-lookbook/

I’ve only got one more pattern to go in the current collection, which will give me a total of 12! The pattern for the 1800 jacket is done, it is a combination of the 800 zippered vest above and the 400 jacket with waist darts. The directions are rewritten, I’m waiting for the final edits from someone I hired to make sure what I wrote makes sense. The conversations between us are hilarious. Usually she writes that something doesn’t make any sense, and I respond that it would have it they were in class because there would have been an entire class lecture on the fine points of that technique earlier in the morning, and then she responds that people who buy the patterns won’t have been privy to that lecture, so I have to spell it all out. So I’ve added so much to each of the directions for each of the patterns. I keep them separate because whenever something is unclear, I can edit easily and post on a page of my website, without generating an entire new pattern download. The directions are always free, so if you already traced a pattern from one of my classes and need the updated directions, please find them here. As always, if something isn’t clear, please let me know, I’ll try to fix it. And there is the goal to have a YouTube channel to explain many of the techniques I feature in my patterns.

Meanwhile I’m already thinking of how to combine the patterns and what silhouette I want to work on next. A scoop neck top with sleeves…

Meanwhile, I met with a consultant about video equipment and improving the image of my online teaching via Zoom or whatever platform works for the guild hiring me. And they are hiring me. My October Calendar is really filling up with remote guild lectures and a few short workshops. I’m beginning to get cancellations from next year, and I’m really good with that because I don’t see us returning to a normal any time soon. I don’t see me hopping on a plane, dragging 170 pounds of luggage, staying with people, and teaching a 5-7 day class working intimately with students, and returning safely to NJ. Right now there is a list in NJ of 31 states that you have to quarantine from after traveling to… So I’ve edited some of my lectures to list what can be done remotely. I will start on the half day seminars shortly.

So I now have a couple of Canon SLR’s that actually were designed to also work as webcams, in addition to 4K video. I have an AC battery adapter so the camera battery doesn’t die in the middle of a zoom meeting. I have my tech guy coming this week to run an ethernet cable to the garage weaving studio so I don’t have to rely on WIFI. I have the cable company coming to upgrade my modem so I can get 1GB of internet speed. And I purchased a sound system and video lights for recording videos, all that of course contingent on my daughter, who works for me now, learning how to use them. Right now she is creating a logo.

Meanwhile, I’ve mentioned my long time association with Silk City Fibers, which is now a division of Lion Brand Yarns. Alice, who is the director of that division is an old friend and coincidently lives in my town. We are in regular contact about what’s new there and my opinion of the market, the type of yarn, the marketing, and anything else that comes to mind. Last week I was asked if I wanted to be a “weaving influencer”. I suppose I am an influencer. A few thousand friends on facebook, been teaching this stuff since the early 80’s and using their yarn since then as well. I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years, have about a thousand subscribers, and earlier posts have been viewed thousands of times. And of course I always have an opinion. I’m not always right, but my opinion always comes with a thought process that shows how I got there. I met with the powers that be at Lion Brand, via remote conferencing, and largely I said, if you want to toss me yarn, I’ll make yardage out of it, document what I do and what it does, and make clothing out of it to sell my patterns.

And so, at the end of last week, Alice dropped off a small bag of assorted cones, two of them yarns I’d not worked with before. Left to right is Nile, a cotton tape yarn, Cotton Bambu, a heavier parallel plied yarn, great for supplemental work, Linen 14, a fine linen yarn I’ve had experience with before, and Bambu 7, bamboo yarn, pretty much a SSF staple. There was about a half pound of each, which doesn’t seem like a lot to work with, especially if the goal is yardage. But that never stopped me.

I thought about the yarn, and then looked through my stash to see what I could add that was part of their current line. Not much, since my shelves are full of older discontinued styles and colors of Silk City Yarns, all wonderful, but I thought I’d try to stay current. I was able to add these. Clockwise from upper left, Saphira, Skinny Majesty Variegated, and a possible weft, Bambu 7

First I had to figure out exactly what I had. I use a McMorran Yarn Balance and a scale and I can come within a few yards of knowing what’s on the cone.

I played with yarn wraps…

…and adapted the draft from Chaos, which you can purchase from my website here…

…and came up with something that reminded me of summer rain. Think Tropical Storm Isaias.

Meanwhile, I haven’t actually wound a warp or set up a loom since the huge studio move last winter, which seems at this point like a lifetime ago. When I returned from Oregon the beginning of March, the heat had just been installed, but the entire world shut down, and I dug in and made a bunch of new garments, in the basement sewing room, still thinking I had to submit five new works for the Convergence Fashion Show as a guest artist (of course that conference was postponed until 2022). And I started on what seemed like an impossible task at the time, creating downloadable patterns from the ones I developed for classes. I was sitting on a lot of handwoven yardage I had stockpiled, and now my stash is depleted.

So I did what I do best. Create with a small pile in front of me, and see where it takes me…

First up was winding the warp. There are many ways to wind warps, but I wanted to see the colors unfold, so I chose to just do a straight wind off of the draft, as opposed to winding individual chains of each color. The winding was slow, but the sleying would be much faster. The first thing I discovered was the Nile tape lace had to be unwound from the cone like a toilet paper roll, instead of off the top, like typical coned weaving yarns. When exiting from the top, the tape seriously twisted and I knew would never lay moderately flat in the woven surface. So I put the cone on a spool rack, with the rack facing away from me at about a 30 degree angle. The cone unwound easily in that position.

Next hurdle was of course the dreaded slippery rayon, and Silk City Fibers has lots of these. I’ve used them for years. This was one called Saphira, a pretty shimmery yarn with slubs. The color I had has actually been discontinued, but a similar one is available with a black core instead of a white one. Winding a warp with a yarn like this is problematic because any break in movement, like the turn around at the top of the warping mill, causes the yarn to pool around the base, getting caught as the movement resumes. I usually use a nylon stocking around the cone as a drag, which works really really well, except in the move, they are hiding and I can’t figure out where they went. So I used the mesh covering from an Asian Pear, which when tucked around the base, stopped the pooling and the warping could continue.

I loved the way the colors built on one another.

By dinner time yesterday I had the loom’s beater sleyed. Each of these steps was sort of like reinventing the wheel. The chair I usually used for sleying was now in the basement in my sewing studio. So I had to come up with new tools and devices, figure out where my regular tools were now living, figure out where to plug in the magnifying light (in the ceiling as it turned out), and how to adjust the split HVAC system that was spilling copious amounts of frigid air right on me. I figured that out and the room was really comfortable. The new studio worked well. I’m happy and can’t wait to actually spend most of my days out there even when I’m Zooming…

I started threading after dinner.

Meanwhile, my beloved brat of a dog Ranger got his manhood clipped last Monday. He was very depressed and had to wear the “innertube of misfortune”. And of course, that meant he couldn’t wear a bellyband, so my fear all week was that he would pee on everything in my house. We were good until late last night. He saddled up to a shelving tower of handdyed yarn skeins and lifted his leg. So I got to use the new dye sink in the studio and wash all of the offended skeins as I cleaned up the mess. The dye sink worked really well. And incision or no incision, he is now wearing a belly band. The relationship between the two males dogs is slowing changing, it will be interesting to see where this goes. The week for the most part wasn’t nearly has challenging as I thought it would be. I got a lot accomplished locking myself and the dog in my office for hours at a time while he healed. He liked the constant companionship.

Meanwhile, did I mention we are getting hit with a tropical storm tonight? Note to self, pull in anything that isn’t nailed down, like umbrellas, etc. Better yet, send Brianna out to do it…

Stay tuned…

Helping out an old friend…

Many of you know that today is the third anniversary of my husband’s death. All of us deal with anniversaries, both sad ones and happy ones in different ways. My children each have their own way of dealing with the death of their father, but my way is always to stay as busy as I can, acknowledge the passing of a major event, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. A series of coincidences led me to today’s adventure, I told my daughter that my new philosophy is, “It isn’t worth doing if you can’t make an adventure out of it…”.

I’d like to crack a joke here and say that what would any self respecting fiber enthusiast do during the anniversary of a very sad event, and the answer of course would be, “Go yarn shopping.” I don’t know if that is really an appropriate joke, given the gravity of what today stood for, but in my own way, knowing this was coming, I planned to do just that. To keep busy and do something I haven’t done before, (of course I’ve bought yarn many times) but not in these circumstances.

Let me explain…

Back in the early 1980’s, when I was new to the craft fair circuit, I have this clear recollection of this couple, Maureen and David, who would come down the aisle at every craft fair in the northeast, showing all the handweavers their line of yarn. They were new to the business, though David dealt in mill end yarns, Maureen and David decided to put together a regular reproducible line of yarns, ones that no other weaver was working with or could find. Rayon, and rayon silk yarns were just starting to become accessible to the handweaving market and they were the ones who ushered in a new era of wonderful, high end yarns in gorgeous colors and innovative fibers. They called their yarn company Silk City Fibers.

Many of the weavers from that era, including myself, and my friend Candiss Cole all used their yarns. It was easy to set up a wholesale account, you just needed a tax number, which was easy to obtain, still is. During the prime of my craft fair career, I probably spent $8,000 a year on yarn, which back in the 80’s was a lot of money. Silk City Fibers got its name because it was located in Paterson NJ, which was considered for many years in the 1800’s the Silk Capital of the Northeast. Paterson NJ was 15 minutes from my house. Silk City Fibers was housed in an old warehouse, a kind of slum of a place, cold and dark and dank but they had yarns. A number of years ago, they opened the warehouse one Saturday a month, and you could find all kinds of bargains, discontinued colors and styles, at very reasonable prices. I tried to avoid going there because 1, I didn’t need anymore yarn, and 2, I always came home with yarn I didn’t need. Because who could resist. Mostly I was usually traveling when the warehouse was open, so that was always a good thing.

In the early years I would visit Silk City, sometimes to pick out yarn for a project for Handwoven magazine, or sometimes to consult with David or Maureen. Sometimes they even had me consult on colors. I remember many many years ago picking out furnishings with Maureen for a NYC showroom they were opening. That was a long time ago.

Since I’m no longer a production weaver, I don’t really need to buy yarn in quantity and sadly there are a number of, too many really, opportunities to restock the stash when a beloved weaver in the guild dies. Many of the older members had large stashes of Silk City Fibers. I remember one recent studio sale from a weaver who passed who was sitting on huge multiple pound cones of white Silk City Contessa, a rayon and silk yarn that had been discontinued a long time ago and is still my most favorite yarn I’ve ever used. I bought all of for dyeing. And when my friend Candiss had one of her weavers return yarn from many years ago when the weaver was diagnosed with a terminal illness, Candiss passed all of it on to me for a price I couldn’t refuse. All of it gorgeous Silk City Fibers.

Last year I got word that Silk City Fibers was sold. David retired and the whole enterprise was purchased by Lion Brand Yarn. Huge knitting yarn manufacturer. Available everywhere. The word was that they wanted to expand into the weaving market. I don’t know how true that is, but that dank dark basement warehouse moved, with everything in it, to Lion Brand’s gorgeous spacious facility in Carlstadt, which is only about 30 minutes from me. Silk City has only been in their new digs about 4 months.

Alice who the Silk City Fiber yarn development director, and an old friend, lives in my town. We ran into each other at Shoprite a couple of weeks ago. She caught me up to date on everything and talked about how to get the word out about Silk City Fibers to a new generation of weavers. We talked about conferences, we talked about social media. We talked about getting a flier into the conference bags at the Mid Atlantic Association Weavers Conference which is in about 10 days. I’ll be teaching there. Here is the flier they came up with…

So I decided that today, I needed an adventure, one that would take me out of the house and away from the memories of what today is, and I got in my car and drove to Carlstadt. The GPS struggled to find the facility and I ended up lost in a town full of warehouses, but I called them and they talked me back to the correct location. Wow, just wow.

The outlet store, filled from one end to the other of Lion Brand Knitting yarn is open 6 days a week, every day but Saturday. So on a Sunday afternoon, when everyone is watching football this fall, drive yourself down there all of my peeps in North Jersey. Wow, just wow. There is a lovely classroom set up along the side wall, and in there are racks and bins of labeled coned Silk City Yarns, not nearly the selection that the old warehouse held, but in my discussions with the women who worked in the outlet, there are thousands more cones still to be labeled and put out. And there are bargains.

The outlet is opened to the public and for anyone living in NJ or NY, it is a great destination for an afternoon of serious yarn shopping. Of course I ended up with two carts full of yarn I didn’t need, but still had to come home with me. Much of the yarn was between $1, $3, and $5 a cone.

Silk City Fibers is actually a wholesale enterprise. You need a resale/tax number in order to be able to order from them online. That isn’t a difficult thing to obtain. But they have no minimums. As long as you have a tax number, you can order cottons, rayons, wools, their famous Bambu line, and all sorts of fabulous stuff, one cone at a time. Alice is hoping to expand their 5/2 perle cotton colors, and no one has better rayons than Silk City Fibers. Skinny Majesty, Avanti, Linen, rayon Chenille, they are all still there, in gorgeous colors and available wholesale. For those of you who don’t have a resale number, many yarn suppliers like Cotton Clouds are still great retailers who can get anything you want from them, or order online directly from their retail site.

And so, I’m going to go down to my car and unpack six large shopping bags and fondle my goods. It got me through today. I’m grateful for coincidences that led me to today’s adventures. I will be fine…

Stay tuned…

Candiss and Daryl’s Excellent Adventure

I got the biggest treat this week, a call from my favorite fiber buddy of all time, and probably my closest longtime friend, Candiss Cole. Candiss is a handweaver from Sedona, we met around 1980, across the aisle from each other at the Gaithersburg, MD craft fair, and have been the best of friends ever since. My husband gave Candiss away, and I stood for Candiss at her wedding in 2004 to Rodger Footitt, in a tiny little hamlet in northern England called Bagshaw.

Sidebar: I made the dress I’m wearing, and the vest is another long story, I handbeaded it over the course of 9 years, finishing it up for the wedding. Two beads at a time, a labor of love. The ground fabric was a vintage jacquard upholstery fabric, in the color Candiss and I referred to as Starbuck’s Caramel Macchiatto.

Candiss continued to do craft fairs, while after about 10 years, I stopped to have a couple babies and redirect my career. Her work has evolved and she continues to reinvent herself year after year, each time I look at her collection I think, Wow! Candiss, this is the best one yet!

Anyway, Candiss called, she was en route between a fall show in Maryland, and the show in Westchester, NY this weekend. She had a couple of days to “play” and play we did! Her husband headed off to the golf course, and Candiss and I hopped in my car and headed into Manhattan. On my list of wannasee was the textile woven from Golden Orb Spider Silk now on display this month at the American Natural History Museum in NYC.

ONE MILLION WILD SPIDERS FROM MADAGASCAR SUPPLIED SILK FOR RARE TEXTILE ON DISPLAY AT AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

LUSTROUS GOLDEN CLOTH MADE FROM UNDYED SILK TOOK FOUR YEARS AND SOME 80 PEOPLE TO CREATE.

This is an amazing textile, if you can’t make it to NYC to see it, make sure you look at the link from the American Natural History Museum, there is a slide show of details that my poor little camera phone, (yep, the one the dog ate), couldn’t begin to capture. The story is amazing, and I’m glad I slipped in to catch it before it leaves NYC.

Candiss and I had a lovely lunch together, just like old times, chatting about stuff that only Candiss and I can chat about, old friends, who have spent a lifetime together, and then we went on to see the Cezanne exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ.

First I want to say that the Montclair Art Museum is a lovely old architectural beauty nestled in a residential area of a very wealthy section of Montclair, NJ. It is always a pleasure to venture over there, but alas, I am spoiled, for another 10 minute trip on the bus, I can be at the MET in NYC. So I don’t venture there nearly as often as I would if it were the only game in town.

There has been extensive advertising for the Cezanne exhibit that just opened there, more correctly, the title is Cezanne and American Modernism. More correctly the title should read American Modernism and the Cezanne influence.

There were only a handful of Cezanne paintings and a few of his watercolors and drawings mixed in with well over 80 early paintings of American greats like Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Max Weber, and Arshile Gorky. The American painters weren’t even exposed to Cezanne until after his death in 1906, when Cezanne’s work first appeared at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in 1910, largely in the form of photographs of the paintings and then at subsequent exhibitions including the 1913 armory exhibit. The Montclair exhibition was well done, but I have to say, I kept getting the nagging feeling as I wandered through the paintings, looking at numerous Cezannesque still life’s and nude bathers and impressionistic landscapes, that there is a fine line between “influenced by” and a direct knock off. We struggle with this fine line today in fashion, and I kept thinking that in the artworld, this is almost expected, you learn from imitating the masters. Each of the above mentioned painters went on to create their own vastly different styles, and the early paintings, clearly “influenced” by Cezanne, were sort of a surprise.

Anyway, if you live in the north jersey area, it is a great show, but don’t expect to see a retrospective of Cezanne.

Yesterday Candiss and I met up again, this time at a veritable institution for handweavers, Silk City Fibers.

Sidebar: I live about 15 minutes from Silk City Fibers in Paterson NJ. I’ve had an on again off again relationship with them over the last 25 years, most of my yarns came from them in the 1980’s when I did craft fairs, many from that era remember the old stand-by Contessa, rayon and silk, a staple in most handweaver’s stashes. Silk City Fibers is a wholesaler, which means only those who establish wholesale accounts and buy in large quantity can purchase from them, but there are a number of retailers across the country that carry their lines of yarn, for both knitting and weaving, most know about Bambu 7 and 12. They are Silk City yarns.

I did some color consulting for Silk City Fibers around the time my son was born, (he is almost 20), and I used their yarns heavily in the color forecast column I wrote for Handwoven Magazine for a number of years. They open the warehouse once a month, on the second Saturday of the month I believe (same day as my American Sewing Guild meeting), to handweavers, knitters, and other interested fiber enthusiasts, where they discount their discontinued colors and lines, and offer them for sale. Though I am choking with yarn, and have no need to add to the stash, I jumped at the opportunity to tag along with Candiss and her husband, see Mady, who I’ve known since 1980 ish, and is now probably in charge of everything Silk City, haven’t a clue what her title is, but there were lots of hugs and how are the kids, and how’ve you been kinds of greetings exchanged.

I found some thin rayon rickracky kind of yarn, Skinny Majesty, (I remember the plain old Majesty line, which I still have remnants of floating around on the shelf, twice the diameter of it’s skinnier counterpart), and picked up a few cones to fill in the stash. I also got a number of cones of assorted cottons and rayons that are undyed/unscoured and will really need to get out the dyes and start winding and painting warps soon! I of course haven’t a clue where I’m putting this yarn, but an opportunity is an opportunity and there is always room for one more cone, (or in this case a dozen). In addition, I found a gorgeous fine linen, that I think will work in my adventure with converting my two Structo looms, into one that can weave postcards for my artwork series.

Candiss opened the back of her truck and showed me her latest garments, and like I said earlier, I always feel like, “Candiss, this is your strongest line yet!” Check out her website to get a preview. It was great to see my old friend, and it gave me a wonderful diversion for a couple of days, I’m feeling worn out and burned out, and just want to sleep for a week. Are you surprised? Now I have to focus and get my next article out for Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot. It is dreary and rainy and cold here in NJ today, I’m scheduled for a lunch date, the Thursday Philosophy Club, but I think I’ll crank up the wood stove when I return from lunch. And I really have to scrub every inch of the house because it still smells of the smokey remnants of seriously burned bacon from my son’s cooking adventures while I was out playing yesterday evening. And the dog ate two of the pieces of our expensive chess set on the coffee table this morning, silly me, I heard him chomping but I thought he was eating a bone. Dumb… This dog and I are not friends at the moment…