The Weaver Sews – Page 3

The One Armed Bandit

It has been three weeks dear readers since I took my unfortunate fall that left me with a fractured shoulder right before Christmas.

Obviously it has been a painful few weeks, and challenging trying to get appointments, scans, etc. Between the holidays and Covid, I was not able to get what I needed in a timely manner, so I did miss the window of opportunity for surgery. I was on the borderline anyway, surgery might give me more complete range of motion for my shoulder, but the decision was made for me. I just couldn’t line things up fast enough.

Obviously things have been challenging, because I can’t just sit. I know I’ve been firmly told to just rest and heal by well meaning friends, but even after surgeries I’ve had in the past, resting and healing did more harm than good. I can’t sit for too long, because then my back gets out of whack. And my brain, which never stops, gets into lots of trouble if I can’t actually do things…

Once I got the pain under control, I kept thinking about what I could do with only one arm. Turns out a lot. Unfortunately the things I can do aren’t the kinds of things I love to do. Like paperwork, payroll filing, bookkeeping, tax prep. And cleaning. I can run around with a Swiffer duster on a wand with just my right arm. And I have a Dyson Cordless, which easily zooms around with one arm. Unfortunately. So there was no rest or vacation from cleaning, and that’s probably a good thing, because three animals make a mess.

I can also fix puzzles. We always have a puzzle going in a designated corner of the living room. I rotate through probably 100 puzzles that sit on the shelves. With Brianna’s company, we fix a 1000 piece puzzle about every three days.

And I can read, I’m about half way through the latest book in the Outlander series. It is like visiting old friends. And I can watch videos, I signed up for Jane Stafford’s School of Weaving back in October. I’m sure you are wondering why I would sign up for a series of videos on learning to weave. I get asked a lot where the best place is to get good information on how to weave. I’ve heard good things about Jane’s School of Weaving but I can’t recommend what I haven’t actually experienced. I can’t recommend her enough. She is thorough, and although I don’t completely agree with everything she is teaching, I absolutely think it is completely worth the $99 a year fee. Mostly where I work or think differently is because I weave for garments, which is a completely different set of parameters. And I’m also curious about how other teachers use a video medium. And I’m actually learning a few things.

Normally in January I’d be running daily dyepots. I had plenty of new Fiber Reactive Dyes, and lots of new yarn to play with. I thought long and hard about what I could do. I got my daughter to help me pull down all the yarn I had that could be dyed and organize and label it on the cabinets so I knew what I had.

I figured out a way to wind skeins with one arm using my AVL warping wheel.

I have a nice deep waist high stainless steel sink so I could mostly do the dyeing and rinsing with one arm.

I’ve already done two batches, a lovely Blue Grey and Eggplant. Though I could have picked an easier color to dye than Eggplant, lots of rinsing there. I can’t snap the skeins back in alignment, I get Brianna to help with that, and she can reach up to hang them easier than I can.

And I can weave on this warp from hell. I put on this 8/2 tencel warp for a Rainbow Double Weave Workshop last October. 48 ends per inch. Two layers simultaneously. So that would be 48 picks per inch. What was I thinking putting on 4 yards? This is the warp that never ends. The workshop was great, and I got to initially explore all the possibilities with the many skeleton tie-ups that the teacher suggested. But I can’t see myself crawling under the loom to try to tie up different combinations. Especially a Macomber. I think all looms need two hands to attach cords, chains or hooks.

So I went with whatever the last sample tie-up was, and I’m just weaving away, 6 inches a day, repeating the same motifs, working through all the bobbins I wound. I can do this with one arm because the shuttle is wider than the warp. I can push it in on one side, let it rest on the race, and pick it up with the same hand on the other side. 4 yards… 48 picks per inch. Sigh…

And I figured out how to sew. Sort of. I was working on a four part series for my YouTube Channel The Weaver Sews, on piecing, and the studio was a mess. There were pieces and partial works, and scraps everywhere. The piecing was basically finished, I was working on the binding strips when I fell, so I realized that if I removed the table from around my sewing machine, I could bring it up close and use the fingers from my left hand, peeking out of the sling, to help guide bias strips through the machine. Awkward but doable.

I couldn’t use a rotary cutter, but I could cut the bias by hand, with the scissors. The old fashioned way. Everything just takes longer.

And I can knit. Small things. With my fingers hanging out of the sling. I had purchased some 100% hemp yarn from Lunatic Fringe, Fibra Natura Java, in a few lovely colors. I had heard a lecture on the value of hemp, its antibacterial properties, and I decided to knit up some dishcloths, but I’m actually loving them as body washcloths, they have great exfoliating properties, and I can assure you, showering is challenging so I’m not doing it as often as I’d like and exfoliating is a welcome thing.

I am able to do most things for myself. Except for my hair. I can’t put my hair up in a ponytail or bun. I have to get my daughter to help. Silly I know, but I like wearing my hair up, and out of my face.

A huge thank you to all of you who reached out, privately, on social media, through phone calls and letters and cards. You all make every journey I take so much easier, knowing you walk with me in spirit. This arrived just the other day from the Southern California Handweaving Guild. It just brightened the whole room.

And my wonderful friend Misa came New Year’s Eve to celebrate the coming New Year with a real honest to goodness high tea. She ordered from a wonderful bakery in a nearby city, packed it all up with her favorite tea dishes, and the overshot runner she purchased from a fellow weaver at our guild show and sale last November. It is her favorite thing in the world and she desperately wants placemats to coordinate. I reached out to the weaver who made the runner. She isn’t interested in making placemats. But she pointed me to the Handwoven Magazine article from 2010 and said, “Help yourself!” 20/2 cotton. Really. Another warp from hell. I actually have the yarn on the shelf. And this is a really really good friend. And my shoulder will heal someday and I have plenty of available looms…

And so dear readers I carry on valiantly, resting when I need to and staying busy when I can. I have an article due for Handwoven Magazine at the end of the month, and more videos to shoot, we shot two last week believe it or not. I’ve starting exercises five times a day to get my arm and shoulder to work again. It is painful but a relief to open up and extend my arm. Let the healing begin…

Stay tuned…

My arm gets twisted a lot…

I admit it. No matter how hard I try, it is hard to say no when people genuinely beg…

I’m not big on holiday gift giving. There isn’t a huge family to buy for, my kids are of the age where they need something specific that only they can pick out, and I write a check. I have two sisters. We decided long ago that gift giving was not necessary. My mom at 90 doesn’t need anything but company. I’m going to Maryland to visit her for a few days in the morning. My daughter will hold down the fort here at home and manage the animals.

A number of years ago I jumped on the handwoven dishtowel bandwagon. I’ll admit that I had never woven a dishtowel prior to that, and it all started when some generous hostess gave me one as a parting gift for teaching at their guild. I put it to use and have never looked back. My drawer is full of handwoven dishtowels, none woven by me, all from guild towel exchanges, my daughter, some purchased because they were really beautiful, etc. But each year I started a tradition that I would weave a run of cotton or cotton and linen dishtowels and give them to friends and family who I thought would love and use them. They also made great wedding and hostess gifts. The list included people who were really important in my life, especially after my husband died. My handyman and his wife. My tech guy and his wife, etc. And when my son moved out last year, his big request was for some handwoven dishtowels. Which I might mention he is afraid to use, they hang proudly from his oven door.

This was a busy fall. I had lots of private students come in, lots of remote teaching, and my life was generally too busy, after a lovely blissful year of quarantining. And more importantly, some of my lovely friends and family were very honest and told me that as much as they loved my dishtowels, they didn’t need anymore. Their drawers were full. And so I hadn’t planned to weave any dishtowels this year.

Word got out that I wasn’t going to have the annual towel and some of my other lovely friends and family threw a fit. I had to laugh. The drama that unfolded that I wouldn’t be giving them one of my prized towels was just too hilarious.

So I was arm twisted about a week and a half ago to see what kind of towel I could throw on the loom, with what I had in the studio, and whip out 8 or 9 towels for those who truly wanted them.

I had a cone of 5/2 and a cone of 6/2 cotton, in natural, that blended well. I wound a 10 yard warp. I looked at structures that would be beautiful in white on white. I found an 8 shaft Bronson Lace placemat from Clotilde Barrett in the Best of Weavers Huck Lace. I adapted it into a towel.

I just finished weaving towel number 7.

I’m enjoying these towels, easy to weave, and hopefully those that arm twisted me into this will enjoy this year’s very limited edition.

Meanwhile…

I’ve had a number of people write to me about how frustrating it is to know they saw a technique or tip on my YouTube channel, The Weaver Sews, and they can’t remember where it is. And some of these videos (there are 67 now) are a half hour long. That is a lot of screen time, and I get the frustration. The requests have been for some kind of index with time codes. Really. You cannot imagine what a time consuming task that is/will be…

I attempted to begin to update my pattern directions for all 12 of the pattern silhouettes I sell in my eShop. Honestly, I couldn’t remember what I covered in which video to try to link them to my directions. Was the alteration to the Y line covered in Sleeve Alterations part 1 or 2?

So a couple of months ago, I started watching my YouTube videos from the beginning. I found a number of typos in the Closed Captioning, which I immediately corrected. Those are easy edits. Creating an index is an enormous amount of time, watching and rewatching videos, noting time codes and figuring how what someone would look for when looking up a specific topic.

And would they want to look at the topics by video, or a complete listing alphabetically by topic, with the video and time code. The only way I saw this as realistic is to do an Excel spreadsheet. And though I can create a PowerPoint presentation with my eyes closed, and write anything and everything in Word, and I’m a pro at Adobe Photoshop, I’m pretty poor in my Excel skills. So this has been a labor of love. A gift I got arm twisted into…

I’ve indexed about 25% of my videos. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. So today, I spent the day figuring out ways to actually generate the index. I have a couple of really trusted friends who weighed in and told me honestly how readable it was and how easy it was to navigate. Initially it wasn’t. The jury is still out, but this is as much as my skills allow at this point. And my daughter keeps yelling down the hall, “You owe your free fan base NOTHING!”

So as I hit my 2000 subscriber mark, this is my holiday gift to all of you, an incomplete index, for my YouTube channel, The Weaver Sews. Know I’m still working on it, in the perfect world I’ll update it weekly but don’t hold your breath. I just got in about 50 pounds of yarn from various sources, R&M, Peter Patchis, and Silk City Fibers, and a huge box of new Procion dye colors from Dharma, and a kit of acid dyes from Greener Shades. I bought the kit from the Woolery. There are a couple more Structo looms that have come in in the past couple of months. I have looms calling to me, videos to record, yarn to dye, and ways to be creative. So many ideas…

And so dear readers, I yielded to the pressure, and because I can’t even remember what I recorded and when, and my holiday gift to all of you is this index, a work in progress.

For a PDF of individual videos with their topics and time codes, please click here

For a PDF of topics in my YouTube channel, please click here.

These indexes will live on my website under EXTRAS, right next to the directions for all of my patterns. There is a date on the page with the links to let you know when the index was last updated.

I’ve been blogging now for 13 years. I’m fast approaching 900 posts. It has been my pleasure to have shared my life in such a way and I’m continually grateful for all those who subscribe and follow me regularly. You are and what will keep me going into the next phase of my life, more yarn, more dyes, more looms, more garments, more articles, more to explore.

I love you all! Stay tuned…

Drunken Looms…

I haven’t forgotten you dear readers, life is full of whirling crazy days, I’m busy, sometimes too much, but I have no complaints. I’m never bored…

My last blog post, I talked about a draft I’ve been mulling over for quite awhile. It seems to be the draft du jour, and all of my friends with multi-shaft computer assisted looms are just knocking it out in record time.

One of them sent me a picture of her version, a few yards, accomplished easily and quickly on her 32 shaft loom. She wove hers with a black weft. It was really cool. I only have 8 shafts, and spent months figuring out how to accomplish it with so few, and I was really proud of myself for making it work. But I really liked her black weft.

So I went back to the drawing board, so to speak, or in this case my computer weaving software, and realized that this had real possibilities. So I wove a block repeat with a black 20/2 cotton weft. The tie down thread is a dark brown linen.

I loved it and wove another block.

I called my daughter down to the studio and showed her how excited I was. She looked at it, now that there was a clear line between the black and white wefts, in relation to the breast beam and said, without missing a beat, “That’s cool, but it isn’t weaving square.” I looked carefully at the two sides of the cloth in relationship to the breast beam, and sure enough, the cloth was off by nearly half an inch. I just sat there in stunned amazement while she moved over to the left of the loom and said, without missing a beat, “Well there’s your problem, the ratchet on the cloth beam is on the opposite side of the brake, so when you tighten the warp, it throws the loom out of square. It is a torque physics thing mom…” She rolled her eyes and walked away.

I’ve been weaving on this loom since the very early 80’s. Mostly I make my colorful warp striped scarves, which are only 10″ wide, and the max width of this loom is 25″. I love this loom. How could I not have noticed that?

I turned around to the loom behind me, a recently acquired 32″ 4 shaft, also a Tools of the Trade, but one of the really early ones, because I’ve had problems with it weaving square since I bought the loom. Turns out, the ratchet and dog on the cloth beam are also on opposite sides of the brake.

Now what…

This haunted me for days. I had a student coming for a five day weaving class, and I just couldn’t get out of my head that my looms were drunk and though I had yards of warp on each one, I couldn’t see weaving it knowing the loom was off and why.

I laid awake as any good weaver will do trying to figure out how to trouble shoot this seemingly impossible situation…

The only solution was to cut off what I’d woven, flip the entire cloth beam mechanism, including the side supports that held it, and put the ratchet and dog on the same side as the brake.

With a glass of wine, and a huge sigh, I removed the yard of cloth I had already woven on each of the two drunk looms. I got out tools, and started to work. It was challenging getting to all the internal screws holding the side supports with a still intact warp, tied off at the reed, but surgery was the only option here.

I slowly reassembled the parts on each one, and realized that the ratchet also had to flip, so the teeth would face in the correct direction, but the metal ratchet was counter sunk on the wrong side, so I will eventually have to investigate different screws since I can’t really counter sink the metal from the opposite side and trust that the hole won’t break away. Meanwhile, I just wanted to weave again.

So both looms have “sobered up” and I’m happy to say that they are weaving square. Perfectly. I am pretty proud of myself.

And I had also corrected, before I put the Harvest warp on, a split warp beam on the 32″ loom, that happened when my strong as an ox daughter was trying to tighten a rug on it. And this loom did not have a friction brake which drove me nuts.

I pulled that beam, glued it and clamped it with a permanent pipe clamp, and taking a page out of the Macomber loom playlist, which has a mechanism with a cord and chain that creates a drag on the warp beam of a loom without a friction brake, I rigged up a couple of bungee cords which works perfectly!

Meanwhile, my student came, and spent five days in my weaving studio designing and weaving off four yards of pretty complicated fabric, with combination structures and supplemental warps. She brought all of the yarn with her, and was able to use most of it.

Because there was a lot of time just hanging while she sleyed, threaded and wove the four yards of fabric, I sat at neighboring looms and just wove, on the simple stuff so I could always be available for questions.

I cleared the Zanshi fabric, woven from tying all the thrum ends together of my leftover warps, which I did while watching endless Zoom presentations for the last couple years. There might be 6 yards. I haven’t cut it off and washed it yet.

And I cleared the other loom that I had performed surgery on, just the morning before I picked her up at the airport. Another 6-7 yards probably.

And I sat in the back corner of the studio, within earshot and wove a substantial amount of my doup leno structure on the table loom from hand dyed cashmere, while looking out the window at the beautiful lush November rain falling on the pond.

I was wishing I had more days where I could just sit in the studio and just weave. My days are full of stuff that doesn’t allow me to be in the weaving studio. I’m always at my desk in the 2nd floor office, like I am now, or in the basement sewing studio, prepping for another YouTube video, The Weaver Sews. Things are coming along there, as I build a tunic from a beautiful hand dyed and hand woven wool.

And the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ is finally having an in person live performance at their theater, first since their production of A Christmas Carol December of 2019. I volunteer as a stitcher in the costume shop, which is just gloriously fun for me, and they called and asked if I’d come again. With a mask, and my sewing kit, I head there once a week. I hem pants and sleeves, move buttons and add snaps, just easy stuff that gives them an extra set of hands, and I love seeing the behind the scenes look at a very professional costume shop.

To all of you who celebrate some kind of seasonal gathering with family, like Thanksgiving for my American friends, stay safe and wear a mask. We aren’t out of the woods yet. I’ve had my booster and my flu shot. I’m staying local and visiting my son, who will make his first Thanksgiving meal.

Stay tuned…

Mea Culpa…

Please Forgive me dear readers, no wonder I’ve been getting letters to make sure I’m still alive… I remember well Saturday night Catholic Church confessional when I was a kid, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been six weeks since my last blog post…”

At the beginning of the month I caught this horoscope in my newspaper. Once in awhile I’m brought up short.

I need that reminder frequently.

I’d love to say that life in retirement is blissful and easy and boring. Yeah, no. I only retired from teaching on the road. I didn’t stop my calendar from filling up. I wanted to avoid this photo below, a photo I shot before I loaded my car to teach 8 classes at the NY Sheep and Wool Festival 9 years ago. It popped up on Facebook as a reminder…

I need these constant reminders that as chaotic as my life is now, it was much much worse…

I did take on a number of private students this fall. I’m pouring a lot of money into producing the YouTube videos, and paying my daughter a salary to make them happen, and I could use the income. (No, I don’t make anything off of YouTube, I’d need a couple million subscribers.) And I wanted to see what it was like to be in my space, using my equipment and supplies to do what I love.

And I’m enjoying the experience of having students in house. Cooking for different types of diets is a bit daunting, but I’m managing that, good skills to develop. But the calendar is rather full, one group leaves, another one comes in. That should slow up in another few weeks, but I also, in my quest to learn all the things, signed up for things I didn’t really have time to fit into the schedule. They were remote right, so they should be able to just fit right in… Between the student on Saturday, and teaching in Michigan on Monday and Ontario on Tuesday… I’m finding the need to print my schedule out hourly. That’s a first.

Still, no regrets… My guild was sponsoring a workshop with Jennifer Moore, whom I adore, the expert on double weave structures. For those that aren’t weavers, double weave means you are weaving two (or more) layers of fabric simultaneously, one over the other. There are advantages to this, but our focus was on weaving blocks, where the layers could change place, side by side. And the warp was her famous Rainbow warp, I used 4 ends of 8/2 Tencel as I moved through the color wheel.

Though I did have experience with double weave, this was a fun and challenging workshop, and I finally was able to get a warp on the new to me 25″ Macomber that I rescued and rehabbed. It wove like a champ…

And while I listened to a guild presentation last week, a different guild than the one that sponsored the double weave workshop, I sat and made cordage from leeks (the green parts), which I had sliced very thin lengthwise and let dry, giving a little spritz to soften them up when I was ready to use them. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to make cordage for basketry.

And in my spare time, I’ve been mulling over a draft I got from a friend, it has been making its rounds. This one is for something called Drunken Squares. It is a wicked cool fabric, and the draft was sent to me in the form of a profile draft. If you aren’t a weaver, skip this paragraph, it won’t mean anything to you. If you are a beginning weaver, this is a profile draft, meaning it isn’t something you can weave. You have to substitute each block in the threading and treadling with an actual structure. Each block is a unit. What you put into that unit depends on what structure you want. And since this is a six block structure, I thought I could do it with my 12 shaft loom. I tried, for a month. I got it to 10 shafts, and then when I spent another week or two I realized I could actually do it on 8. Most of my friends have done the draft effortlessly with 16 shafts. I don’t have that many. I plugged the profile draft into my weaving software (Fiberworks) and went to the block substitution tool. I worked for hours. I ended up with a tied weave, on 8 shafts, but it needed 14 treadles. I have 10. So I worked for hours more… In my spare time.

I got something I thought would work, 8 shafts, 10 treadles using more than one at a time. And no, I’m not ready to share the draft. I worked too hard on it.

I wound the warp, and went to my small 25″ 8 shaft Tools of the Trade floor loom, and looked at the treadles, and decided that this poor little loom, which I’ve had since probably 1982, could use a really good treadle scrubbing. I used a magic eraser, they are amazing for removing years of gunk, and gave the treadles a good polishing with my go to loom feed, Howard’s Feed and Wax. Even though my poor little loom still has its nose a bit out of joint since the acquisition of the Macomber, my treadles are very happy.

I beamed my warp. This is 10/2 perle cotton, in colors I had on the shelf. I had to drop one stripe to fit on my 25″ loom, but that’s OK.

And I got everything working and started to weave. I did it. There is such a personal triumph when you focus on something really challenging, determination keeps me going. I refused to admit defeat. And it worked. I did it. The drunken squares are really drunken rectangles, but I didn’t care.

While I was working on the loom next to it for the doubleweave class, I glanced over and thought, duh, just change the size of the blocks… ’cause that’s what we were doing in the doubleweave class. There are days I’m freakin’ brilliant, and there are days when I think, where did I leave my brain?

So I did another block of the repeat, and now I have real drunken squares. I remember years ago working on a two shuttle structure and having the shuttles constantly falling in my lap. And I designed a fix… This is a small loom with a small weaving area. So I took the second back beam (there is a second warp beam which automatically comes with a second back beam) and I slipped the cover on it I had made years ago, inserted a 5″ wide plastic ruler, and slipped the whole thing on the front to make a shuttle rest. I’m amazed I found all the parts considering the studio move.

And we are back to filming videos again for my YouTube channel The Weaver Sews, after a 6 week hiatus. Each video takes about 20-25 hours a week between my daughter and me, to produce. In my spare time… hahahahahah!

I finished filming the videos for my summer shirt. Just in time for fall, which has been delightfully summer weather… Handpainted skeins circular wound into an ombré effect warp. I sell this draft on my website… Also, the pattern is my 1000 swing dress cut into a shirt length, with the neck and in-seam button-down placket (no buttonholes to make!) from my 700 or 1700 Tunic. Those patterns are available in my eShop. Videos will soon be released on how to do the collar and armhole facings, last week’s video drop featured the in-seam buttonhole placket.

I planned this fabric from a few handdyed skeins while my husband was dying, worst week of my life. Took everything in my brain to focus on anything but what was happening to our lives. I’ve held onto this fabric for five years waiting for it to tell me what it wanted to be. I can’t tell you how proud I am of this shirt. I did add shoulder epaulettes, since I couldn’t get the shoulders to match. It is one of my favorite cheats. The contrasting fabric is a heavy weight linen. Here is a photo of the original skeins I used to create this fabric. I called the fabric Chaos. Fitting…

And so my retirement life isn’t any less chaotic. And as I vacuumed and dusted my weaving studio this afternoon, I thought about how much, as chaotic as it is, I love my life. There is always something calling to me, wanting to be designed, engineered, played with, created, or even cleaned, cooked or washed. And now as I cook I think, gee, can I use this for making a basket? Will it make cordage? And the animals always demand time. I’m never never never bored. There is a lot of life to cram into my remaining days and I want every minute I can get. Because we never know. I want to learn all the things, do all the things, and be all the things, in my spare time…

Stay tuned…

Hurricanes and Vines…

Grab a cup of tea, or your liquid of choice (go for the wine) and grab a seat, it is going to be a long one.

So much for retirement! If these last couple weeks have been any indication, I’m toast! Almost all of the events of the last couple weeks have been ones I chose, ones I intentionally put on the calendar, and I don’t have a single regret. But I’ve worked hard…

At the end of August, shifted by a few days for a scheduling conflict with one of the students, I had a couple of, I really can’t call them students as they are at this point old friends, come for a five day retreat to sew their pile of patterns, and garments from their handwoven cloth. These are friends who have studied with me for years at one of my regular venues. They immediately found the part of my property where they loved to sit and rock and have wine at 5 o’clock. Friends help me find new ways to enjoy what I have, in the studio, in my yard, and in my house.

They came with an agenda, and I’m happy to report that they accomplished everything they had on the list, and then some.

One of the students brought pieces from a handwoven coat, she had made years ago and never liked, and using my 1800 zippered jacket pattern, created this variation. I’m always thrilled when I or one of my students repurposes.

This student brought a dress from commercial fabric she made on her own, but didn’t like the way it fit. We were able to take up the whole dress from the shoulders creating a more attractive neck. The pattern is from Merchant and Mills, the Dress Shirt

She also tackled a piece of loosely woven handwoven fabric, which we saved by using a fusible underlining to create the start of a dress, The Augusta Dress from Grainline Studio. She is experienced enough at this point to finish the dress on her own. It was a complicated asymmetrical neckline, but she pulled it off.

The other student started with a handwoven fabric from her stash of Zephyr Wool and Silk from Jaggerspun. She created my 200 Jacket with a shawl collar, and used this wickedly cool silk lining she had in her stash. And she spent the first day learning to insert a perfectly matched welt pocket.

She also fitted and sewed up a really cute summer cotton top from a crinkle fabric she had in her stash. The pattern is from Simplicity D0676.

And then she copied my 1000 swing dress, with the A-line variation, something I cover in my YouTube Videos, The Weaver Sews. I think it was the episode on Combining patterns. She had a length of handwoven fabric she had woven a few years ago, and decided that everyone needs a brightly striped dress for the summer!

So mid week, we had another visitor named Ida. This visitor wasn’t part of the agreement and was definitely not welcomed. My sewing studio is in the basement, and through the years I/we took steps to mitigate water issues, new gutters, a sump pump, and a replaced retaining wall under the front stoop, keeping water running off the street in an exceptional situation from entering the foundation. This is a 100 + year old house with poured concrete over a dirt cellar floor. There are cracks and in the boiler room where we ripped out the old oil, converted from coal furnace back in the 80’s, there are even holes going down to the dirt. The floor is porous, but I rarely have issues. I did design the studio just in case, to accommodate a bit of water, just in case.

So Wednesday night Ida came to visit, wrecking havoc in NJ and NY, and of course all the states in its path. When we moved here in the 80’s we knew that more than half the town was in the flood plain, but we were up on the hill, so we knew we wouldn’t be flooded at least by the river. We have watched our neighbors in the flood areas of town lose everything many times over the years since we have been here. It is always devastating to see. The flooding here was catastrophic. Because I am higher up, river flooding isn’t an issue, but 10″ of rain in four hours is too much for the storm drains coming off the hill, and if it hadn’t been a hurricane and dark outside, I would have loved to have stood in the street and watched rivers of water come cascading down my street, jump the asphalt curb and run right into the front wall of the foundation.

I would have been teaching up at Harrisville this week had I not chosen to retire. And had I not had students, I wouldn’t have been in the studio late to turn things off and move a few pieces of sensitive equipment like sewing machines off the floor, just in case. The sump pump was happily humming along, so I was pretty confident I’d be OK. I turned to walk down the little hallway in front of the boiler room, which is walled off, to head upstairs and I was horrified to step on a mat with water squishing out everywhere. I yelled for my daughter, and thus began our evening, finding every towel in the house, because, yeah, we had a mess. We opened the door to the boiler room and were appalled to see water just pouring in the front wall of the foundation and actually seeping up through the floor. I stood looking at the water and said to my daughter, what did we have in the house that could suck up water, because I had given away my shop vacs, as I didn’t need them and needed the garage storage space for my 39 shaft looms. She looked at me, without batting an eye and said, “A Turkey Baster”.

For the next four hours, I sat on a stool, after channeling the water into the holes in the floor, sucking up quarts of water into yogurt containers, and Pyrex glass ware from my dye studio, while she hauled wet towels to the upstairs laundry and dumped the containers of water. All the dry concrete in front of me had been covered in water, so this was no easy feat. I’m glad I’m a textile artist with a lot of bath and beach towels.

We won. I’ve never been so tired in my life. When the rain stopped at 2:30 in the morning, the water stopped entering the basement, and I took a load of newly washed and dried towels and covered the area and went to bed. Class started again in a few hours and teachers gotta do what they gotta do… My students slept not knowing what was happening two floors below. I’m grateful I was home, I’m grateful my daughter was here, I’m grateful for a lot of towels, I’m grateful we never lost power, and I want to bronze that turkey baster and frame it as a reminder that sometimes the simplest thing can save the day. I will though, buy a new one for the kitchen, should I ever need to baste a turkey.

My students left on Friday night, and early Saturday morning I headed out to Peters Valley School of Craft for a five day basket making class using foraged materials. Because Peters Valley sits in a National Park Recreation Area, we weren’t allowed to forage for the actual materials, but the teacher Steven Carty, brought a van load of materials, bark, vines, tools, and everything we needed to create baskets from stuff found in the wild. (Note: they have closed the physical shop, but maintain a Facebook presence and have mail order basketry supplies available.)

My purpose in taking the class was to begin to identify what I had in my yard, what could be a basket making material, how to harvest it, store it and actually use it. I found out pretty quickly that almost everything out there is usable. I have to have a talk with my yard guy since I mostly pay him to rip out invasives, but now I need to harvest them and I have a lifetime of materials right out my door.

I discovered I had vines that I never planted, Bittersweet, and Akebia, and this one that has just the coolest leaf structure called Crossvine.

Anyway, we started with a simple garlic basket from rattan so we could learn to twine, and then he showed us how to make cordage. Which is something I always wanted to learn. I made a lot of cordage stripping the bark off wisteria runners.

Day 2, I made a basket with Arborvitae bark staves and wisteria runners, the bottom tier had the bark stripped which I twisted into cordage. The top tier has the vine with the bark intact. The rim is cedar bark and the lashing wisteria bark from the runners.

Day 3 we learned how to create a bark basket, scoring the bark so it folds into a container shape. This is pretty cool, but I don’t see myself traipsing around the woods looking to fell young hickory or tulip poplar trees. I don’t want to work that hard in my old age. We scraped the bark from cedar strips and used it for the lashing.

I spent the morning of Day 4 researching what was in my yard. I brought a few samples of the vines from my yard, and used his reference books and a couple of phone apps and Google to help identify what I had. So I started this basket, using more of the tulip poplar strips as staves, and started twining my vines, still green, so a bit fragile, because I wanted to see how they worked and how they dried. I started with the bittersweet at the very bottom, used trumpet vine, which was pretty fragile at the joints, and ended with the Akebia 5 leaf, also called Chocolate vine. That was great to work with green. I added a cedar rim, and that night I challenged my daughter to figure out how to end the staves, and she slit them lengthwise and braided them into an interesting top rim. The afternoon of Day 5 I made a few yards of fine cordage from Dog Bane, also called Indian Hemp, which I then used to lash everything together.

My daughter had assisted this instructor back in 2019 for a basket making class when she was the fibers assistant at Peters Valley. She loved making baskets and was really jealous that I took his class, and pumped me for information each evening when I came home. I saved some of the lashing work to do at home and I had lots of help from the cat. He happily stirred the soaking water for me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that wasn’t necessary.

The morning of the 5th day, the class when on a nature hike through areas of Peters Valley, protected of course because it is federal property, and Steve showed us all kinds of flora and fauna, edibles, plants for dye stuff, vines, invasives, and I thought he would have a heart attack when he found a lone hemlock tree. Gave a new meaning to the word Tree-Hugger. Our goal was to reach a rock formation I did not know existed, dating back centuries, hidden in a part of the Valley off the road to the Thunder Mountain studios. It is called Bevans Rock Shelter, and there are even traces of early ochre paintings.

We took a class photo with our baskets.

When I got home last night, Brianna had already begun to harvest stuff from the yard. We rigged up a storage system in the garage studio, for some of the wisteria and English Ivy vine I brought home from class. I long ago committed chemical warfare on the wisteria that had invaded our property in the 80’s. This morning she went out and harvested more bittersweet and some really out of control rose runners that I swear grow 6 feet overnight. She can’t wait to tackle the gazebo.

The first morning of class, when I stopped to check in at the office, Jen the person who keeps the Valley humming along, excitedly pulled a handful of magazines out of a box that had just come in, a free publication for the tri-state area (NJ, NY, PA) called the Journal. It had just been delivered the day before, and there I was, or rather my daughter, wearing one of my handwoven coats from a number of years ago. My daughter modeled for me when she was something like 11 or 12. She is now 28. The publisher of the journal had reached out to me a month or so ago, and asked for a piece on creativity, tied into Peters Valley, and what it was like to be a fiber artist, and for lots of pictures of my work. I was hesitant at first, I live in a different county, and I’m no longer teaching on the road or selling my work, but she insisted that I had a story to tell, and they wanted to publish it. The issue is full of images of my most colorful work over the years, and my daughter is beside herself that she made a cover, even though she was only 12 at the time. You can read the early Fall issue of The Journal here.

And so, I actually get to take a mini vacation, I’m heading down the shore Saturday morning with my sisters for a three-day getaway, which I sorely need, and Brianna will hold down the fort and be with the animals. All seems to be quiet in the Atlantic, let’s hope it stays that way.

Stay tuned…