Texturized Weft – Daryl's Blog

Full Days and Future Possibilities…

Once again, I’m prepping for my next trip, if it is fall, I’m probably somewhere. This fall I’ll be bouncing from NH to WA to WI to NC and points in between. To say I feel like a bit of a yo-yo would be putting it mildly. I have so loved having these last four weeks to myself, to be busy and productive and unencumbered by house stuff and contractors and children. My only issue if you will, is that my beloved Ranger is mad at me because I’m holed up in the studio most days and he has taken to lifting his leg around the house and marking his displeasure. I know he needs to be neutered, but the breeder wants to breed him once more and she owns those rights. So I have to put up with a dog who is pissed at me and give him as much me time as I can. And I have discovered what a black light can uncover…

Meanwhile, I have been working fast and furiously on updating a couple of my class patterns with details that have been requested and were sort of at the bottom of my very lengthy to-do list. I took advantage of some uninterrupted time and really dove in. Drafting a small detail like a hood on my tunic pattern is more complicated than it seems. Drafting the hood was nothing. I did that in about 15 minutes. Then comes drafting all the sizes. And while I was at it, I’ve had requests for more of a drop shoulder, common on men’s shirts, so I redrafted the tunic body as well with that option. Then I had to test it. I did it in a sheet first, and made it to fit my daughter, who is quite a different body than me, and a lot younger, apparently having a hood on everything is popular among millennials. She loved it.

Then I tested it on a version to fit me, with the drop shoulder, in a lovely wool I had in my stash, and I have to admit, I would wear that…

Once I know it is correct, then comes the fun part, not only do I have to copy all the patterns multiple times, but I have to design cover sheets for the pattern and redraw the handout. That meant another dozen or so illustrations, and then once the handout is reworked, converting the whole thing to PDF and uploading to my shop so students who want the directions for the pattern they have traced, can always have the latest version. If you have already bought a version of one of my pattern directions, you should be able to click on the link you were sent and download the latest version. It is free, and available here, but of course, you have to take my class to get the pattern. Please don’t write me nasty letters about me not offering the patterns for sale. Know that I want to, and that I haven’t had the time or expertise to do that conversion, but it is in the works. I just need to hire someone… More about that later…

And while I was on a roll, I went ahead and drafted the pattern for the combined jacket and collared vest. I had made this jacket a couple years ago, by combining two of my class patterns and a number of students jumped on it, but I had to physically help them do the conversion and there were of course no directions. So on my list was “draft Noro jacket pattern and write directions.” Here is the original jacket, woven with Noro Toiyo Lace in the weft.

I managed that last week, making copies of the patterns on Monday and writing directions, which I will say I do enjoy, and I love making those little illustrations, but my eyes were bleary and my brain was fogged by the time I got the proofed version. And there is no telling that I got it 100%. Just today I got a lovely note from one of my students who had downloaded my directions for the bias top she had traced in a class. I had added a swing dress to the pattern, and built a handout. I apparently left out a couple of critical steps, oops, she figured it out, but wrote to tell me. So this afternoon, I edited that, reprinted all the incorrect pages for the handouts I prepared for Harrisville next week, and updated the store file here…

Here is the test version of the collared jacket with zipper. This is a lovely woven wool that I bought from Mood fabrics many years ago. It worked out perfectly for this jacket. The directions are here.

I snuck away this weekend back to Peters Valley to take a class, something I promised myself I would do every summer. Sharron Parker is a wonderful feltmaker, and I had the privilege of rooming with her when I traveled to Cuba back in 2018. When I saw she was teaching at the Valley, I jumped on it. It was terrific fun. I have done a fair amount of felting in my day, but I’d rather thread 1400 ends on a loom than do the physical effort it takes to roll felted fabric. So I assumed I’d be quite sore by the end of the three day class.

Sharon actually had a lovely plan for helping get from point A to point B, the class was mixed levels and everyone had fun playing along. First we made geodes and cut them apart.

By slicing them further, and laying them on stacked batts, and further felting them into the batts, we made some lovely designs. The geodes did all the work. Later Saturday night I used my sewing machine back in the studio to outline parts and my needle felting machine to make certain areas more secure and flatter. I can still go back and do more work, something to look forward to…

She gave us each a page from a Wolf Kahn calendar, and told us to try to replicate the colors by blending, either with a drum carder or hand cards. I really worked at this to see how closely I could replicate it. I’m pretty happy with how close I came…

And then with another half dozen ideas for directions to go, I spent all of Sunday playing with wool and hot soapy water. I made a small stacked batt piece, and instead of slicing linear like I usually do, I cut into it horizontally and vertically, and loved the effect. I made a second batt, this one much thicker and more colorful, but I’m so in love with the surface I’m not ready to cut into it yet.

The scraps from cutting out the piece above got felted into a lovely work, because with wool, you don’t have to waste anything…

Meanwhile, I watched my daughter in action as the fibers assistant for the class. She didn’t disappoint. Felted unicorn horn and matching ears…

She has been up at Peters Valley all summer as the fibers assistant, and has been exposed to so much, but when I taught my yardage class up there three weeks ago, she had signed up to take a metals class working with tin cans way back in January so was unavailable to help me. Let me just say that I completely get it when she says after each class that the teacher wants to adopt her. And lucky me, I get first dibs and have made the decision over the last couple of weeks that I do need help taking my own business where I want it to go, especially after losing my beloved Cynthia who moved to southern NJ. My daughter is really really good. Of course if you have followed my blog regularly over the last ten years, you’d know that. There is a lot for us to work out, especially with the financial arrangements, and the thought that I’m taking on the responsibility for an employee and that she is related to me. Like today, when I was training her (she is between classes at the Valley and came home to help with the final prep for Harrisville), on how to create the composite handouts and upload to the eShop, she kept rolling her eyes and saying, MUTH-ER… I’m a millennial and I know my way around a computer…

One of the jobs I gave her today besides binding all the handouts, was to relabel all the Texturized Weft interfacing I sell, because when I bought another 400 yards, I got caught in the trade war with China and had to pay an additional 30% tariff on the two rolls. I knew the company who designed it was French, but the fabric actually is made now in China. Sigh… Anyway, I needed her to cut more of the Fusi Knit, and package and label, and handling 200 yard rolls x 60″ wide interfacing is brutal. Those things must weight 70 pounds. She did about two packages and said, I have an idea and she disappeared…

She returned with a bunch of poles and connections from my old craft fair booth, which we keep in old ski bags in the garage because well, you never know what fun things you can do with poles and connectors. She rigged up this…

And then after cutting another package, she disappeared again and came back with more poles, because she wanted an underneath support, so came up with version 2.0…

This is why I need to hire my millennial daughter, who is as bright as her late father, and needs to be in a position to grow her own brand and develop her own life as an artist and develop her own workshops and seminars and I wouldn’t be who I am today without the support of my late husband, and I feel like I owe that to her, she is talented and really really good. And I’ve already downloaded the classes for her to learn Adobe Illustrator which will allow her to convert my patterns, once scanned into vector drawings… Stay tuned for that…

And I’m even managed to do some weaving. The towels are progressing, and I love this pattern, from Webs, their Kaleidoscope towels, because you can change the weft and get all sorts of different effects. I think I’ve completed seven so far, on a 14 yard warp.

And I finally got the Retro Palette scarves up and running. I love the subtle coloring of this one, and I got to play with my new toy. Peters Valley had one of these and I immediately ordered it. It is a large lit magnifying glass that really helps for tasks like threading and in this case hemstitching on the loom. I want one in every room…

And because I desperately wanted to squeeze in one more thing, I made a padded bag from the leftovers from a towel run I did a few years ago. The last bit wasn’t big enough for a full towel, and the guild show and sale is coming in a couple months, and I have a lot of scrap to get creative with…

Stay tuned…

Puttering days…

I love to putter around, when I’m not super focused on any one project, and I’m reluctant to get focused on any one project because I’m leaving in less than a week for two back-to-back conferences, with a 12 hour turn around time in between. (I’m trying not to think about the whole airline situation, and how one missed connection can snowball into a nightmare…)

Anyway, there is nothing I can do about any of that, just let go and hope for the best, so I’m just doing what needs to be done, and enjoying the little stuff. I’ve made such tremendous progress on the book shelves, they are pretty much sorted in my studio, with a huge bag of trash removed, I can hear the studio breathing a little sigh of relief. I still have to organize the fashion books in my bedroom library, some of those are so big, they wouldn’t fit on the proverbial coffee table if I chose to display them there. They could actually be a coffee table…

The crock pot is still cooking away, yesterday’s color was “myrtle green”, which is a pretty teal, and today I’m cooking Rose, and I’m getting to the bottom of the fleece. At this rate, I’ll have the whole fleece plus some other errant stuff I found, dyed by the time I leave for Colorado next week.

Yesterday afternoon I spent a couple of hours, cutting two yard packages of interfacings, some for orders, some to ship to the conferences, and some to refill my supply in the studio. This is a boring job, and it requires a complete clean off of my cutting table, because I need the room to layout 100-200 yard bolts of 60″ wide interfacing to be able to unroll and cut off two yard pieces. Then they have to be bagged and tagged, and ready for shipping. So I listened to the last couple of episodes of Weavecast while I unrolled and cut, tagged and bagged.

In case you are wondering what interfacings I’m cutting, I use two primarily, for a fusible underlining with handwoven fabrics, one is a fusible knit nylon tricot, and the other is a texturized inserted poly weft interfacing, both have a crosswise give. Each gives a different kind of support, the tricot gives a crisper flatter feel, and the poly weft gives a loftier fuller kind of feel. Both come in black and white. I encourage sampling… 🙂

Update on the reworking/salvaging of my poor design journal. I added the pages for the purple and green paraments and was pretty surprised to find out I had no notes on sett/size/yarns, etc. I’m going to assume I just used all the information from the previous paraments, and there wasn’t much to figure…

Now I get to the fun pages, these are ones where I took all kinds of copious notes, and figures, and I’ll be damned if I can decipher half of what I wrote. I spent an hour or so earlier today, just trying to recreate what I actually did, what I didn’t do, and what information I needed to actually transfer. I added photos of the finished item, and I was able to beautifully recreate the notes for my infamous Evolution piece, that appeared in Issue 111 of Handwoven Magazine. (Sept/Oct 2002).

I thought I took great notes, but if there is anything I’ve learned, it is how important note taking is, and how important it is to label what every number is. Never just write a number, always identify what the number is, like 3200 yards per pound, or 20 e.p.i. This is a great exercise in note taking, and recreating old work. I’m glad I’m taking the time to do this. I also found a copy of the inkle draft I used (my design) to weave the inkle bands that made up the neck trim. The fabric for this vest was an 8 shaft shadow weave which I found in the now defunct Weavers Magazine, Spring/Summer 1999, pg. 48.

And last night, I spent a number of hours playing with my new puppy. No, not that kind of puppy. The electronic kind. I got my new EeePC yesterday, a little mini laptop NetBook. It is sooo cute, and sooooo tiny. It will slip in my Vera Wang purse. I’m trying to load in all the software I need, and figure it all out myself. I do rely on my techie husband way too much, he is so good at what he does, but I don’t stay with something and try to figure it out, like I would with the loom or the sewing machine. I usually quit too soon and just ask him. And I won’t ever be any good at this if I don’t keep trying. So this morning, I managed to figure out how to manually configure my email account into it. And it worked! 🙂

I’ve got Photoshop Elements loaded in, and I transferred my PowerPoint presentations over manually, because I still haven’t figured out how to access the in house network. But I’m working on that…

A “Small World” Story

I have a great story to share, one of those “Small World” stories, one where I have been waiting for a final chapter for many years, and now I can put some closure on it.

So here is the set-up. One of my favorite seminar/lectures I give, is one I do on finishing fabric, and selection of setts, for handwoven yardage, which is quite a bit different than the sett you would chose for a hand-woven scarf. (For the non weavers reading this, sett is how many threads you put together in one inch). I love this lecture for two reasons, one, it involves a whole pile of touchy-feely samples, lots of before and after, as in a) straight from the loom, b) gently washed in the bathroom sink and air dried, and c) thrown in the washer and dryer along with the regular laundry. The other reason I love this lecture, is the look on the participant’s faces when they see how the washer and/or dryer can be a fabulous part of the design team. Most handweavers lack the courage to plunge their yardage, into the washing machine, and then throw it in the dryer, thinking it will produce a mess, or cardboard. This is one place where sampling is a fantastic and absolutely essential idea. Sharon Alderman, author of Mastering Weave Structures from Interweave Press, wandered into my classroom during one of the breaks and happily added her support of “It isn’t finished until it has been washed”!

But that isn’t the actual story. A number of years ago, I was giving the lecture at a conference, the name of which escapes me. It may have been 2001, at a conference called Creative Strands, a small venue in the mid-atlantic region, which was held at Bucknell College in PA. Anyway, I do know the conference where I gave this lecture was somewhere in the north east, I can picture the classroom, but not much else.

I gave this lecture, on finishing your handwoven fabric, and after the lecture, one of the participants handed me a lovely, drapey piece of yardage, which she said, after listening to my lecture, wasn’t finished properly, sett properly, or was even pretty. I didn’t agree about the pretty part, I loved the combination of aqua, plum and brown, and the gorgeous collection of knitting yarns that were used for the weaving. It was at least three yards of fabric as I recall, and the participant, (whose name escaped me shortly after the conference and I’ve been wracking my brain ever since to remember), didn’t want the fabric anymore, and insisted that I take it. Not one to ever pass up a free addition to the stash, and very confident that this fabric would really be great once I washed it aggressively, I agreed to take it off her hands. I assumed that the workshop participant was actually the weaver. Little did I know…

So after I returned from this conference, many years ago, I washed and dried the yardage, as I normally would, seven times. Nothing happened. Which led me to finally realize that the yarns were mostly acrylic, and no amount of washing and drying would change the ultimate structure of the yarn. So I was left with a lovely, poorly sett fabric, for garments purposes, it would have been great for a scarf. Which means, we go onto plan B.

Plan B would probably require fusing something onto the back of the fabric, like Fusi-Knit or a Texturized Weft product, and then the yardage would be fine for a jacket or vest. There probably wasn’t enough fabric for a jacket, but all the fall fashion catalogs were showing the cutest tweed skirts with just fringe on the bottom. My rule for handwoven yardage, is it must be stable enough to support the construction details for the garment design I have selected. If it isn’t, then I support it in some way, like a fusible interfacing, or possibly the Chanel method of mounting the fabric directly onto the lining with rows of machine stitching, which I outline in my book on Seams and Edge Finishings.

So what if the garment I am making has little in the way of construction details? What if I made one of those cute little tweed skirts, and interfaced the waistband, and then just let the skirt hang from the waistband, with fringe on the bottom? I had just enough fabric for this adventure, and I decided that this piece of donated fabric would become a skirt.

I made the skirt up, and put in a drop lining. I have worn the skirt for years, it is one of my favorites, still in style, with black tights and black boots, it fits neatly in my suitcase, and I just love it. I always get compliments, even after all these years. and the sett has held beautifully, no sagging, and I’m thrilled to have been the recipient of the yardage.

So fast forward to the second day of my three day jacket class at the conference last week in California. I am giving this lecture to my students, and as I tell this story, and pass around the fabric sample I keep in my bag, one of the participants gets the oddest look on her face. She holds onto the fabric, studying each of the little visible warp threads, and suddenly says to the class, in a sort of embarrassed way, “I think I wove this fabric!”. We were all sort of speechless, and then once I recovered, trying to figure out how the fabric got from this student in California to a conference in the north east, we started putting together the puzzle pieces. Some are still missing, because it wasn’t Patricia Martin, my student in the California workshop, who originally gave me the fabric.

Apparently she wove a lot of yardage like this about 15 years ago. A prolific weaver, Patricia has a great eye, and churns out work effortlessly. This particular yardage, which she became increasingly confident she had woven because she recognized all of the warps used, some were still on her shelf, was one she didn’t particularly like once she was finished with it, and passed it on to some unknown person in some unknown situation, maybe at a guild swap. How it traveled across the country is still a mystery.

So, I am really thrilled to include Patricia Martin in this blog, she shouldn’t be embarrassed, we all have things we aren’t particularly drawn to, even after we make them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t wonderful and someone else may think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. My only regret is I didn’t weave this, because it is actually one of my favorite pieces of yardage, and one of my favorite skirts to wear.

Take a good look at the jacket that Patricia is wearing in the photo. Patricia brought to class, three small cuts of handwoven yardage, some with additional shibori dyeing, none of which were enough to make a jacket by themselves, but with a lot of patience, and some creative cutting and piecing, Patricia combined all three pieces of yardage into one wonderful jacket. There are still a lot of pins holding it together, but she looks terrific, and it gets the gold star for being one of the more creative jackets made in one of my classes.

So I’ve now discovered the original weaver for my skirt. I couldn’t have been happier. I am wearing the skirt as I write. Thank you Patricia, for taking the class, and being a great handweaver, and generously allowing me to tell the story!