Tag: Structo Looms

Bringing up the bodies…

With apologies to Hilary Mantel…

I wish I could have taken a picture of me following a County College of Morris Dodge Caravan heading west on Rt. 10, loaded with 20 dress forms, all stacked like bodies, on the way to the college gallery with the second load for the exhibition. It was pretty hilarious.

This has been one of the most intense but awesome assignments of my life, to organize a retrospective of my work, and all the moving piece parts, assign labels, write 15 artist statements for the 15 categories of work, some 90 pieces, including wall/art pieces. Enormous.

My best friend in High School said to me on Facebook, “I knew you when…” and “Is this like getting an Oscar?” Wow. What a lovely thing to say. I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never gotten an Oscar and have never done anything to deserve an Oscar, but this retrospective is pretty important to me. I think of it more like a lifetime achievement award. Slow and steady. Because one of the sponsors of the show is Morris County Teen Arts, there was a request to go back as far as I could with work to tell the complete story. So there is a macramé vest I did in 1972. I’m still proud of that piece. I was 17 years old. (And Macramé was all the rage.)

So the last couple of weeks, I’ve done nothing but dress bodies, and store bodies in my guest rooms. The forms I purchased through Amazon were really inexpensive. About $21 each. But… each form costs $25 to ship via Fedex, and the hip measurement of each form was only 33 1/2″. I do not know of a single adult human being with a 33 1/2″ hip. I don’t know who they were designed to fit. Maybe that’s why they were so cheap. So I invested in a few rolls of large bubble wrap, and armed with a tape gun, and a box of shoulder pads I found in the attic from my production days, I bubbled up some 41 dress forms to fit my garments.

All the forms were stored in my corner guest room. I also invested in something like two dozen shirt forms, for the smaller less important pieces that were necessary for the stories. The gallery director came up with a 40 form limit for the existing gallery floor space, and so I needed to also fill the walls.

On Tuesday, I moved everything to the living room to wait for the van. The dogs were initially curious but ultimately bored, nothing I do is of much interest to them. Unless food is involved… That was my workout for the month. I moved probably 40 pieces down a couple flights of stairs, one at a time.

And so everything for the show is now at the gallery. Except the demonstration loom. I designed a 4-shaft fabric, that sort of looks like my 8-shaft fabric, (a variation on my Custom Runner draft in my eShop) on a 25″ floor loom. I started with a poster from one of my Magic Puzzles. This one is called Sunny City. It was sort of sepia-toned and nostalgic. All the yarns are hand-dyed with fiber-reactive dyes.

I got the loom set up in record time. 5 yards beamed.

And I played around with wefts, struggling to decide if I wanted to focus more on the soft palette of vintage looking colors, or showcase the interesting combination of structures which would require a darker warp. In the end I settled on a mid-grey Alpaca/Silk, from WEBS, but I didn’t have enough on the cone for the 4 1/2 yards I would ultimately be weaving. I went to the WEBS site and not only did they still have the yarn, but it was on sale! Score! There is a second cone coming soon. (But I won’t be weaving this off until the fall. The loom will be at the college until the end of the summer.)

Here is the flier for the show, or rather both halves of the postcard. The show technically ends the end of March, moves to a smaller gallery (just the bodies) and everything else goes into storage while the college puts on its students’ final show. Everything gets remounted the beginning of May, there is another opening, and I give the keynote address for the Morris County Teen Arts Festival. The show will remain in the Main Gallery through the summer. Apparently CCM is redoing its website, so if you Google the gallery, the information is from last October and that won’t be helpful for this show.

We recorded a 12 minute video on ‘how to weave’, and there will be three Structo/Leclerc Sample Looms there for gallery patrons to try. I’ll swap them out each week to freshen, re-warp, etc. I gave a number of my teaching Structos to one of my guild mates who will be taking over the Learn-to-Weave program for my guild, so I needed to clear one of the 4-shaft looms I had set up previously with some random structure. I chose the Leclerc Sample Loom which had a linen warp and wove off the couple yard huck lace sampler. I still had linen on the spools so I figured, this should be easy, I picked one of the designs, and started to weave off the rest of the spools. This was a couple months ago. I’m still weaving. I’ve determined this loom is magical and that it is a warp that will never end. I know a pre-warped Structo spool, back in the day, could hold 20 yards of 20/2 cotton, and this linen is a similar weight. Dear Lord… The spools came to me with the loom, a hand me down from my late mother-in-law. I had no idea how much linen was still left, but how bad could it be? Bad…

I weave an hour or so a day, and still I look back there and it looks the same. I keep hoping I’ll start to see the end soon. I need this loom. Five of the six sample looms are ready to go. I have a five yard carpet warp waiting. Sigh…

So that’s a wrap up of Daryl’s Greatest Adventure, a 40 years look back over an amazing body of work, which isn’t even half of what I’ve done, because there is a ton that has been sold and I didn’t even count the hundreds of garments I sold in my 10 years of craft fairs. I promise to take pictures, and my daughter, who is currently on a Star Trek cruise to the Caribbean, promised to film a documentary when she gets back.

My only real problem now, is I have nothing to wear to the opening, since everything I have will be on exhibit… Hmmmm…..

And I should mention that today, in spite of everything else that is happening in my life, is the 22 year anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis. 2/22/2002. I will never forget this date. And so it is fitting that I’m mounting a retrospective of what I’ve accomplished in the years since that diagnosis, and there have been many of them. I wish my late husband could have been here to see this accomplishment. I was one of the lucky ones to have lived through a cancer diagnosis…

Stay tuned…

The great quest continues…

There is probably some sort of literary word that describes multiple plot lines of a story, all coming together to create a spectacular ending. I won’t say this is a spectacular ending, but I’m at least amused by it all…

A little backstory here…

When Covid shut the world down, I was not unhappy to have to cancel all my bookings and reevaluate my life. I was tired, and Covid gave me a great excuse to just stop. Get off the merry-go-round of endless airports, suitcases, shipping and prep and doing it all over again just a couple weeks later. Most of my peers (not in the weaving world) were retiring from their careers, moving to warmer digs, but I’m an artist. Sort of. Creative people don’t retire. They just reinvent themselves.

For most of my creative life, I’ve had to focus. That’s sort of a thing in the art world. Defining your vision, narrowing your focus for your work, is really important if you want to show/exhibit/sell your work. I started my career as a production weaver, making other people’s work, and then narrowed my own vision so I could get into craft fairs. You can’t do one of everything. It doesn’t work that way.

My first craft booth, circa 1980, did have everything I’d ever done to that point, tapestries, table linens, scarves, shawls, garments, rugs, throws (we called them afghans back then). I found out that to get into serious shows, I needed to narrow my vision.

I make clothing. I’m good at it, and I pretty quickly found a way to link garment construction and handweaving, and though I’d often wander off the path, my work is pretty consistently mine, and I’m proud of it all. Wander through my gallery…

From the beginning, I avoided participation in weaving guilds. I didn’t have the time to devote, and take workshops, and be a part of a team of guild members, and I was lecturing to many of them, so it was sort of a conflict of interests. But truth be told, I was jealous. I was jealous of the family a guild creates, and the exploration of different structures, ideas, cool things to try. I didn’t have the time anyway, but I always wondered what it would be like to do what I do as a hobby, and not as a career.

So when I found myself unexpectedly retiring from teaching on the road, and locked down in my studio for a couple years, I thought to myself, what’s the one thing you always wished you could do? I started telling people, “I want to try all the things…” As a matter of fact, I said something to that effect when Kathi Grupp, host of HGA’s Textiles and Tea asked me, “What’s next for you?” when she interviewed me March 22, 2022. I just wanted to try all the things…

I managed to take a few workshops where Covid allowed, and I listened to a lot of remote lectures and conferences. All sorts of things crossed my radar, but the one thing I really wanted was to be better at woven structures. I am a good weaver, I should be, I’ve been doing it long enough. But I stayed in one path, and rarely deviated.

Over the last couple of years, since my daughter and I built a new weaving studio in the garage, after she moved back home with her five looms and paraphernalia, more looms have found their way in to add to the mix. Especially Structo looms. There are 26 small metal Structo looms, and 5 small 10″ Leclerc Sample looms alone. I have 14 Tools of the Trade looms, 4,8, and a 12 shaft loom, some are floor looms and some are table looms. And we have a mix of others, from Leclerc and Ashford, a huge assortment of inkle looms, Ashford, Schacht, Beka, Gilmore, and Glimakra, and a custom tablet weaving loom from John Mullarkey. I lost count after 50…

During one of my remote guild meetings, someone asked me when it came up that I had this ridiculous number of looms, “Are they all warped?” I laughed, of course they weren’t all warped. But that thought sort of nagged at me. Over the last year, I became a bit obsessed in seeing if I could set up all of the looms. I loved researching a structure, and coming up with what I thought would be a draft that would interest and inspire me, and then pick the loom most appropriate. I’d put on however many yards the loom could hold based on how much yarn I had and again, what I thought was appropriate. There is no plan as to what any of these warps will become. For the first time in my life I’m just exploring. I had a blast doing something like a warp a week. I didn’t have to actually weave any of it off. I just wanted to see if I could actually get all of the looms operational at once. Many of them came in needing some major tender loving care. The Macomber (yeah, I’ve got on of those too), was in really poor condition and I spent more than $1000 getting it up and running, much to the annoyance of all of my Tools of the Trade looms. They weren’t happy when I brought in this “other” brand floor loom. Did I mention I think of my looms and equipment with anthropomorphic traits?

With more than 50 looms, there is a lot of noise in the studio on a daily basis, all of them shouting for attention, all of them needing to be “dressed”. They quiet down when they have a cool warp on them, and know I’ll eventually get to weaving on them. So I’m coming down the home stretch. There were only four looms that were left to be warped, one is a 12 shaft Dorothy from Leclerc, which belongs to my daughter, which isn’t mine to warp, but I had two 4 shaft Tools of the Trade looms, both 25″ wide, one a floor loom and the other a table loom left to dress. I hesitated, because it is always good to have a loom at the ready for emergencies. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, but it seemed like a good excuse.

The fourth loom was a “frankenloom” of sorts named Burnham. I created it from all the piece parts I had around the studio and in the attic after that huge shipment of Structos and parts I got from a school across the country. I blogged about that here.

It was 8 shafts, and I actually had some spools with usable cotton thread left on them, so I thought, what would be fun on this loom that I haven’t already tried. And “Rosepath” popped into my head. Strickler’s book of 8 shaft patterns has a number of pages devoted to Rosepath designs, a basic point twill, but the designs give the ability to weave little pictures of simple flowers, trees, hearts, anything that can mirror repeat itself over 16 threads. And so I set up this odd “FrankenStructo” and it is really happy to be part of the mix.

I was driving to music rehearsal the other night, and I got a call from a friend, who wanted to know if I would weave a commission for a table runner. I immediately said, “No”, and then continued to ask what the specs were, what was she looking for. She couldn’t do it herself, because like me last year, she was out of commission after a fall. I was driving so couldn’t get too involved, but I told her to send me pictures, of what she was looking for, and thought I was 99% sure I was not doing a commission for anyone, I said I’d check it out when I got home.

That kind of thing is like a light switch for me. I did have two looms without warps, but this would need to be woven quickly, so it would need to be a floor loom. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would do something like this, with the limited equipment I had left. This is the sort of emergency project I figured might come along, needing a loom. I could always clear a loom, but I had this now ridiculous goal of warping every one of them. I asked my friend what kind of structure she had in mind. She said, “What’s your favorite?”

Well my favorite structure is all of them, I mean combining as many as I can into one warp. I wrote an entire issue of Heddlecraft magazine, issue #38 specifically on the subject. Typically I use an 8-shaft loom, but alas, I only had a 4-shaft floor loom available. I sent her one of the WIF files from the issue, one I used from G.H. Oelsner’s Handbook of Weaves that was actually 4-shaft.

She liked it, but I kept thinking, how can I make this more of my own? I went back and read the issue that I wrote…

I picked four colors from my vast stash of 8/2 cotton, based on the interior photos she sent, and she liked those choices.

I spent a few hours working on a draft, playing with repeating side by structures and tossing in some basic straight draw twill. I added a bit of color and weave effect, and she liked it as well. I was really shocked at how varied the draft was, with only 4 shafts. So I wound the warp, dressed the loom, and this morning I started to weave.

Needless to say, I’m pretty proud of myself. Necessity is the mother of invention? Or using up all your looms and not leaving any options? I’ll eventually make the draft available, maybe put it in my shop as one of my $2.99 downloads.

And while I was winding the warp, I heard this pitiful little voice back in the corner on the floor of the garage studio, “What about me?”

So I assured the one remaining loom of mine that needs a little TLC, that I would be addressing that matter soon. I started to think about what other structure I could play with. The voices in the room shouted, “Rep!” Completely impractical on a table loom, Rep is a very dense warp face structure, but there is a big difference between impractical and impossible. And I want to try. I’m already pulling yarn, and getting an idea of where I want to go with this, and I promised that little loom in the corner named Kim (Star Trek Voyager) that I wouldn’t abandon him. I’m on it…

Stay tuned…

I’d just hate to call it an addiction…

It’s just that I can’t resist those emails. The monthly ones from Peter Patchis Yarns. The frequent ones from Webs. The one to me personally from a yarn company that shall remain nameless, “Hi Daryl, we are going to discontinue a product line, one we know you like, let us know if you want to purchase what’s left…”

I had even avoided opening the monthly newsletter from Peter Patchis, until a friend on a Zoom call mentioned the great yarns for the month. It is only $6. a pound. Sigh… So after filling up on one of almost every color of Webs 8/2 cotton, on sale for an OK price, and a number of $6. a pound cones from Peter Patchis, and another box from the unnamed company… I sort of panicked. Where the heck was I going to put all this yarn when it came in? I swear there is no room in the inn… And no, as a friend suggested, I’m not renting a storage unit… Can you imagine wanting to know what colors I have in 8/2 and driving to a storage unit to retrieve a couple cones? Absolutely not…

So sitting in the studio, doing odd tasks like winding cakes from my dyed skeins, a boring and tedious task, I’ll get to that in a minute, I just sat looking at my wonderful, incredible, overfilled monstrous space of a studio and it occurred to me that I could move some of the Structo Looms out of Yarn Alley, the alley behind the bookcases, to another location in the studio, and the felting supplies I have for teaching, which I’m not doing, could store someplace else.

In case you are wondering, I have 18 Structo Looms, I believe five are 8 shaft, plus I have 2 of the 10″ wide Leclerc versions of the Structo’s. Those are the greenish ones on the top shelf.

That left the top of the bookcases in Yarn Alley empty.

Which I immediately filled up with all the yarn that came in the past few days. It really isn’t an addiction. Of course I’ll live long enough to actually use it all… Stop laughing dear readers, stop laughing…

In between all that, I took that pile of dyed skeins that I thought would be pretty together, refer to my previous blog, and I lined them up to plan out a scarf warp.

I thought of calling this run “Winter Sky”, because that’s what I saw out my window, January in NJ. But then the title A Winter’s Tale, with a nod to the Bard, popped into my head, and this has certainly been a winter to tell about, what with my fractured shoulder and all, and getting this warp on the loom, especially one I haven’t put 12 yards on two beams before, I earned the title.

So, skeins have to be wound into cakes.

Cakes have to be wound into warps.

Warps have to be sleyed, I work front to back, and had to use an 8 dent reed for my 27epi, because the 9 dent is tied up with the Drunken Squares Warp, which I can’t weave on yet because my arm won’t do a 25″ wide warp easily. Note to self, you need more 9 dent reeds…

Sleyed warps need to be threaded.

Threaded warps need to be tied onto the back apron. Tensioning devices are added…

And the warp is wound. All 12 yards. I did have my daughter help, it really does go easier with two people, though I rarely have that luxury.

And then I had to rig up a way of attaching my sectional box to wind the supplementals onto the lower warp beam. My Leclerc Sectional box does not fit on the second back beam of the Macomber. Weavers are so resourceful.

Everything is now in place, second back beam installed, and I’m ready to tie onto the front.

And the weaving has commenced. I’m loving this warp. Very understated. A true winter’s tale…

Meanwhile, I cleared the Harrisville Warp I put on my small four shaft loom. I was trying out an idea, and threw on five yards. I wove a couple narrow yards with the two skeins of sock yarn I have, sett way too dense for a scarf, which I did on purpose because I was testing for garment weight fabric, and the end result is pretty cool.

I must have screwed up the calculations because I thought one 50 gram skein of sock yarn would do a two yard scarf length, but it took both skeins. So I pulled some small leftovers of mohair I had laying around and wove the other couple of yards. Both are washed, and these will eventually become panels for some sort of garment. I’m mulling over possibilities…

I’m always thinking, always thinking. Nights are the hardest to shut off my head, and especially now because my shoulder constantly aches, and I just can’t get comfortable. So I spend many hours at night just thinking…

I’ve mentioned before that my daughter and I adore fixing puzzles. She purchased a series that she adores, from the Magic Puzzle Company. We were working on one called The Busy Bistro, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about the color relationships in this puzzle. They were gorgeous. I spent many hours at night just thinking… And I have all this dyed yarn.

So I took the poster from the puzzle box and started pulling color groups, lining them up in the apron of my 12 shaft loom, which I got, new to me, last Mother’s Day.

I’m determined to get a warp on this before this Mother’s Day, it cries every time I walk by it, “Warp me, please…” I’m basing this on a fabric I did before, except I want to expand some of the design areas, to include an additional 4 shafts. This is the fabric I wove years ago, probably 10, and made a tunic out of it. It was 8 shaft. Now I have 12 to play with.

I’ll move yarns around and eventually start snipping samples on a draft, and see what I get.

Meanwhile, I found fabric to use with my 3 1/2 yards of the Rainbow Double Weave sampler I painstakingly wove off right after my accident. Of course this fabric was on my shelf, and there is a story behind it, but that story is for another day. First I want to see if this will work… Everything is hanging up to dry, and I’m loving the palette.

And finally, I got a large envelop from the US Government earlier in the week. And this just made me smile. Back when I developed the YouTube channel, and came up with the name, The Weaver Sews, and had my daughter help me with a logo, I thought it would be beneficial to have it trademarked. What a process. After a couple of rejections for technical reasons, I failed to read the unreadable directions properly, I managed, after a year and a half, to procure a real trademark document. Perseverance, a typical trait of most handweavers, paid off and I’m official.

Spring is coming, and I got out for a walk today. It was near 50 degrees. I am still terrified of ice, but I got out, bought a couple things from the grocery store, and walked home. It felt so great. Stay tuned dear readers, there are more adventures to come, and lots of yarn to play with. and lots of looms just calling for warps…