Tag: Theo Moorman

My favorite month…

I recall a similar blog post, a number of years ago, where I said that I always thought of September as the start of my new year. There is something about new beginnings, even though I’ve been out of school for a long time; fresh pencils, new clean copybooks, newly covered textbooks with brown shopping bags (I was a pro at this), and the chance to learn new stuff. I loved school, I loved learning, and still do.

I’ve talked throughout this year about how important it was to keep myself busy. I think I took probably a dozen classes so far this year, many of them through Peters Valley School of Craft, which is only an hour from me. The last of the classes I signed up for there, occurred Labor Day weekend, a three-day weaving class actually. Unfortunately the teacher, Brittany Wittman cancelled the week of the class. The title of the original class was ” Tactile Sensibility: Weaving Compositions”, focusing on weaving as a creative process and enhancing tactile sensibility through experimentation with structure and surface. Sounds like art speak, but hey, I’m a good weaver, but can always look at the loom differently. I was of course disappointed when I found out she cancelled, but Jesse Satterfeld, who is the fiber fellow this year at the fiber studio of Peters Valley, stepped in to run the class. He is quite talented, master’s degree from Kent State if I recall, and though the course description changed somewhat, I decided to follow through because, well why not…

I was a bit surprised that the three other participants in the class were all brand new weavers. But my needs would be different than theirs, and I’m a self-starter. And the looms were already warped, so I plowed ahead.

The looms were set up with the most basic blank canvas you could ever have in weaving. 10/2 cotton, 30 epi, about 9″ wide, and all white. In a straight draw. For the non weavers, that means that the threading was 1,2,3,4 and repeat. I brought some odd funky yarns from my studio, and a bucket of some of my oddiments left from the basketry class. We were given directions for plain weave, various twills, rib, basket weave, many of the same structures I already teach when I do a Learn to Weave class. So I started to play. I sat at the loom, with this “blank canvas” of a warp, and just wove.

Who does that in the weaving world? For three whole days? With no plan or goal? Just sample, play, see what happens if? I even jumped ahead to clasped weft, while the rest of the class was still trying to understand how to do a twill structure. I probably had a yard and a half woven by the end of the day.

Day two I came back, and tired of just weaving odd yarns in basic structures, I really started to look at the four shafts and what they were capable of. Honestly, to spend three days, with one canvas, just looking at it and seeing possibilities I really hadn’t looked at before, was such a gift. It was also a challenge beyond belief, to keep reminding myself that I’m not the teacher, to keep my mouth shut, and let the teacher do his job with the new students. This entire year has been a challenging exercise in this regard, and not always have I been successful, but I’m determined…

I started to play with a mock Theo Moorman, using one shaft as tie down, using a pick up stick to isolate where I wanted the threads. I had a few Catalpa pods and I played with adding them to the mix.

And I took some of the cordage I had made leftover from the basketry class I took back in the summer, and used that same inlay technique.

I even tried weaving in some of the little actual seeds, in the same technique.

The third day, I played around with things I know about but hadn’t ever thought they could work on a four shaft threading. I did some Brocade, which is nothing more than combining a 1/3 twill with a 3/1 twill, using a pick up stick.

And I did some actual inlay, which I haven’t done since a workshop I did in the 1970’s. I’d like to go back and revisit this technique, with a different warp and sett. We combined the inlay with damask, which was pretty cool.

In the end, I had a sampler that reached taller than any ceiling in my house.

I realized it would fit perfectly between the garage doors in the weaving studio, hanging from the ceiling, with a little prop support to keep it from dragging on the ground, becoming cricket fodder (even though Mulder is stalking them every night, I didn’t want my sampler to get in the way of his routine slaughter…)

And of course, September means that the weather is gloriously cooler, and that the garden season is starting to wind down. My gardens are amazing, considering where I started last spring with tiny little plugs. I am including lots of pictures because my 93 year old mom, has by request, no access to anything digital, and the only way she can enjoy my blog, which she loves to get, is by snail mail. So mom, here are a bunch of garden pictures…

The pool in the back of the picture is the neighbor’s yard, there is a stockade fence between us, running along behind the greenhouse, which is in the middle of my vegetable garden.

And of course, my tomatoes are coming in like crazy! I just oven dried a bunch of the little guys to pop in my freezer for the winter

And I’m starting to put the appliqué quilt blocks together. There is still a massive amount of work to do, even once all nine are together, because there is a 380 piece vine that runs through the entire quilt. But it is really cool to see the blocks take shape, and I’m beginning to finish the blocks that I couldn’t initially finish because they extended over the borders into the adjacent blocks.

The Maine Coon on top has a glorious tail that will extend into the adjacent block once it is added.

I’ve never understood the lure of a kit, and I’m a complete convert. Where I spent three days just staring at a blank “canvas” of a warp, just making stuff up as I went along, executing someone else’s design in a kit that provided all the materials, fabric selections and schematics has been such a different experience. I can see the benefits of both ways of working. One is a creative exercise and one is a technical exercise. Different parts of the brain! Different skill sets. It is probably why I love volunteering as a stitcher at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ costume department. I just get handed assignments and I have to figure out how to do them.

Last night, I drove up the NY State Thruway, in the pouring rain, to a wedding of one of the girls my kids grew up with. Her family has remained close, and though neither of my children could attend, I was privileged to have been invited and made the trek up to the country club where the wedding was held. During the cocktail hour, the weather started to clear, and I wandered outside to look at the fountains and to my complete shock, there was the most glorious rainbow I’ve ever seen. Guests started pouring outside, and there were more photos of the rainbow I’m thinking than of the bride and groom!

And then as we all watched, a double rainbow appeared. That has to be good luck and a strong omen for the newly wed couple.

And tomorrow, I get to go “back to school”. My ten week class in natural dyeing starts, through Maiwa, and I’ve watched the intros, started a binder of the PDF printouts, organized my dye area, unpacked the “kit”, and am ready to sink my teeth into yet another opportunity to learn.

Fall is coming… stay tuned…

Shopping In The Attic…

A long time ago, seems like another lifetime, I gave up ten years of craft fairs and production work, because 1) I was so burned out I didn’t want to weave anymore and 2) I was pregnant in my mid 30’s with my first child.  He turns 30 in February.  It was a long time ago.  Talk about an abrupt life style change…  As much as I can’t imagine my life without my children, especially since my husband is gone, those early years were tough.  I had my daughter just about three years after my son.  So most of my 30’s was about raising kids and desperately trying to recreate myself creatively, incredibly challenging.  For many years the looms stayed fallow.  It was just too hard to set up a loom, be uninterrupted without paying someone to watch my kid/kids while puttered away designing and threading.  And without the source of craft fair income, it was had to justify yarn purchases.  

But I had scrap.  Boy did I have scrap.  Handwoven yardage that is.  I was able to recreate myself and make use of lots of those scraps in the years my children were young because it is easier to be interrupted at the sewing machine than at the loom.  I’ve talked about this before, because a few years ago I started looking at all that scrap in the attic and downsized a bit, especially the early fabrics by making one pound packages and selling them off.  Those are all gone, but there is still a lot up there, and more recent work has netted me some pretty fantastic colorful scraps that I can do some pretty fantastic stuff with…

Sidebar…

I’m heading to Whidbey Island next Friday with a stop off in Bellingham, WA to give a lecture to the Whatcom Guild.  They chose to have my lecture on what to do with Leftovers.  I haven’t given that one in a year or two, and it was really lovely to go through and pull all the ingredients for the lecture, because when I teach someplace where I have to fly, I have to ship a lot of stuff ahead.  The “ingredients” or samples and examples for the Leftovers lecture won’t fit in the suitcases I need for the five day garment construction retreat on Whidbey Island so they all have to be shipped head as well.  And because this is the Pacific Northwest, and I live in the Northeast, I have to give lots of lead time for stuff to get there.  Which means a lot of preplanning and prepping.  So earlier this week, I focused on cutting and printing and binding and packing everything I need for both the retreat and the Leftovers lecture, which made me go through the content of the Leftovers lecture and remind me why this topic is so much fun.  Everything has been shipped out and I have some time to kill…

The fun part for me is that I already have all the “ingredients” for a lifetime of playing with handwoven pieces that are really just trash.  The garment they came from is finished and somewhere in my closet or sold.  I only have one venue a year where I can sell things I make from scraps, and there isn’t a whole lot of money to be made, once the guild takes its percentage, but still, my Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild show and sale in November is a pretty strong venue if I take the time to actually make stuff.

So I have a week or so before I fly out to Seattle, and the prep work for the workshop is done, and I pulled a large pile of miscellaneous stuff from my attic, and set out to see what I could come up with.

I’m seeing a lot of images of bags and items on social media that use my long ago developed technique for piecing.  All you have to do is show a person or two the technique, in a class or lecture and social media spreads it like wild fire…  I’ve already made two bags and sold them immediately at the guild sale last year, and this last one used the remaining bits.  The technique uses a tricot backing, scraps are fused to the backing with cut edges butting together, and the joins are covered by bias tubes using a duct tie as a press bar.  I’ve documented the process along with the rest of the technique suggestions in my “What to Do with Leftovers” monograph. 

I also found a very large hunk of a woven piece I did years ago featured in a Handwoven Magazine article, using a Theo Moorman inlay technique with Pendleton Woolen Mill “worms” or blanket selvedges (I shipped home a couple of bales from the mill during a tour after the Pendleton Oregon ANWG conference back in 2005 I think).  I wove them in using tie down threads on a wool background using up stuff on my shelves.  This made for a great two sided fabric and it was a perfect candidate and just the right size to squeak out a vest from my collared vest pattern.  No need for a yoke since the “worms” changed color midway up the scrap. Here is the link to the original coat, long ago sold to my favorite customer.

And I made another padded zipper pouch last night, with a leftover piece from last year’s dishtowel run.  The piece wasn’t enough for a full dishtowel, and not really the right size for a napkin. I showed the first one I made a couple blog posts ago I think.  There are a boat load of YouTube videos from quilters on making zippered pouches, though I’m having issues with my serger, this still came out quite lovely.  (Note to self: figure out what’s wrong with the serger, changing needles didn’t help…)

And I got the idea of making greeting cards out of the smaller scraps, from some I got from a guild or conference tote or something.  I ordered a bunch of Strathmore blanks with envelopes and cello sleeves  and my daughter immediately stole all of them and made them into cards so she could sell them at the sale.  Her scraps are infinitely more interesting than mine, but I’ll have competition at the guild this year for greeting cards.  Hoping people still send snail mail greetings…

And of course there is nothing like a deadline.  

Additional sidebar…

I am a huge fan of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, their productions are incredible, and I always try to attend their annual gala fundraisers whenever I’m actually in town.  This October they are hosting another fund raiser, with requisite tricky tray, called “A Bard’s Barbeque“.  I’ve donated my handwoven scarves to their tricky tray in the past, but the BBQ theme needed something different.  I spoke with one of their development directors about donating a couple of handwoven dishtowels, you know, the Lady Macbeth “Out damned spot” kind of thing.  They loved it but it means I have to clear the loom of the 14 dishtowels to get two for them before I leave for WA next Friday.  No pressure. 

I think I just finished number nine…

And while I had my morning tea, I leafed through the new Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot that has been sitting on the table for a week now.  It has the conference registration for next year’s Convergence in Knoxville, TN, and I’m not on the roster by choice.  I didn’t apply to the conference because, well if you have been following my blog you know that I’m not interested in doing conferences anymore.  That said, I was surprised as I leafed through the magazine, to find myself on page 25, or rather my coat, which I had forgotten had won the coveted HGA award back in 2018 and was featured in a spread in the magazine that featured all the HGA award winners from last year.

I read on, and was surprised again to see me, like a picture of me, on page 7 of the conference registration book, because I’m one of the invited fashion show artists.  There are three of us invited, I was the juror for the fashion show in Reno in 2018, and now, I’ll be sending five pieces of work, so my work will be there, just not me.  Talk about a serious deadline…

And then I really was surprised when I turned to page 44, almost at the end, and saw a lovely ad featuring my dress, it was an HGA ad for Professional Membership.  I have this vague recollection of the editor asking permission to use my piece in something…  The ad is beautiful.  And of course I’m a professional member…

Nice to be featured prominently in a magazine without actually having to write anything!

Stay tuned…

Oops…

Oh I just hate when this happens.  I made a mistake.  It isn’t a huge mistake in the total scheme of things, no one died, but it is a mistake nevertheless, and I want to correct it.  Problem is, I made the mistake a number of years ago.  And I just found the mistake.  Which means a couple hundred or so monographs, handouts, PDF files, blog posts and any number of assorted communications from me are wrong.  Bummer…

It involves a weaving draft.  This is a draft I wrote a number of years ago.  Probably back in 2006.  And I kept cutting and pasting said draft into anything that required it.  So, anyone who purchased my monograph on Transparency, the Theo Moorman technique, has a draft that isn’t correct.  Anyone who has been doggedly trying to figure out how I weave the postcards I keep showing in my blog, has an incorrect draft.  Anyone who printed out that lengthy PDF I graciously provided on my website, compiling all the blogs that referenced the postcards, has an incorrect draft.  Bummer…

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon (I’m much better from  my bout with the flu thank you), trying to trace back all the places where the errant draft is hiding.  What’s really odd to me, is that no-one questioned it or found the obvious error.  Which means no one has actually read the draft and tried the technique.  Which could mean they really aren’t interested, but that doesn’t jive with the comments and letters I receive, or it means that no one has gotten around to actually setting up their loom, which is a good thing, so I can intercept anyone about to attempt to weave these little puppies.  The threading on the draft is fine.  It is the treadling.  It doesn’t make any sense.  I stared at the draft, while doing some updates to the Transparency Monograph yesterday, and couldn’t believe the idiot that wrote it.  🙂  (The idiot being me of course).

All this has lead me to entertain the idea of offering an actual weaving workshop, requiring looms (which I’ve never done before) and have students weave a personal photo on their actual looms.  I haven’t figured out the logistics yet, and am not in a position this exact moment to actually figure it all out, since I’m down to the last week and a half before I leave for the April round of conferences, but I’ve had so many inquiries on how to actually do these, that I’m thinking this isn’t such a bad idea.  I’m always looking for new workshops to offer.  Feel free to comment if it is something you think your guild would enjoy.  Probably a two day workshop.

Meanwhile, how to fix my mistake.

For those who have any of the above mentioned printed materials with the incorrect draft, here is a link to a PDF of the corrected draft.

For those who wish to purchase my now corrected and updated Transparency Monograph, click here.  I put a new cover on the updated monograph to tell it from the old version, with the incorrect draft.  It has step by step instructions, extracted from the blog post of how to weave the post cards.

For those who wish to view a PDF of all the related blog posts that pertain to the weaving of the Postcards I frequently blog about, the PDF has been corrected and can be downloaded here.  I also corrected the original blog post that started it all from February 2009.  Online archives are a wonderful thing…

For those who don’t have any of the above and are curious on what all the fuss is about, here is the draft.  There should be five rows (an uneven amount) of plain weave under each fabric strip, not four.  So alternating fabric strips are held down with alternating sets of tie down threads.  That isn’t possible with only an even amount of plain weave rows under each strip.  Duh…

Do you still love me?

Coming Down the Home Stretch…

I arrived in Tucson this afternoon, after a wonderful finish to the two day workshop in Phoenix.  It surprises me how different the landscape is as you drive through Arizona.  In PhoenixPhoenix, my hostess lived in a development that reminded me of the architecture of a development I once stayed in in Florida.  But what impresses me about Arizona is the vistas, driving along, and being able to turn in any direction and seeing for miles in any direction. I suppose it is something you get use to, and more than one person on my trip said that’s what appeals to them in this region, and when they go “home” wherever that is, that they feel claustrophobic.  I’m use to tall trees and canopies of green, and I drive through Arizona and feel vulnerable and exposed.  I guess it is what you are use to.  The mountains are stark, and stony, and majestic, and imposing and visible whichever way you turn.

PhoenixWorkshopThe Arizona Desert Mountain Weavers of Phoenix were a delightful guild, they worked so hard, and all 9 finished their vests by the end of the second day, except for the handwork, which is sort of a record.  What surprised me the most, was how many of the students told me they hadn’t made a garment since the traumatic home ec experience in 8th grade.  Listening to the discussions of getting D’s in Home Economics because of a bad sewing experience, made me so grateful that as middle aged adults, they tried it again, and woke up to the possibilities of what a sewing machine could do, especially with their handwoven fabric.  There were a lot of smiles yesterday afternoon.

One of the students arranged a complex way of getting me to the next guild on my itinerary which would be Tucson, by taking me home with her for the night, an hour east of Phoenix at the base of the Superstition Mountains, and leaving after breakfast the next morning to meet someone coming up from Tucson, at a cafe in Casa Grande, the halfway point.

Theo_MoormanSo I stayed at my 5th location on the trip, just for the night, in a lovely home in a retirement community, which looked like a weaver’s version of heaven.  My hostess for the evening brought with her to the retirement community, all her looms and weaving equipment and each loom had a prominent location in her house.  There was no dining room table, just a 24 shaft Leclerc Weavebird computerized loom.  Can I say I felt right at home? We did the tour of all her books, her weaving themed collectibles, her spinning wheels, and then she took me into the living room to show me a wall piece she had acquired, an early piece of Theo Moorman’s.  If you learned to weave in the 70’s, Theo Moorman was one of the key mentors and influences in the contemporary fiber movement, she wrote a wonderful tome, Weaving as an Art Form, which still sits proudly on my shelf, and my woven artworks I’ve been blogging about, are done with this technique.  To see a real Theo Moorman piece was worth this entire 16 day trip to the southwest.

TucsonViewSo now I am sitting at the kitchen table in home number six, on my last stop on this marathon tour.  It hasn’t escaped me that I left NJ the same day the Olympics opened, and I will return home Sunday night, as the Olympic torch is extinguished. I will teach in Tucson for the next four days.  The home I’m staying in here is spectacular.  Here is a shot of the view out the window as I look up from typing.  Those are the snow capped Rincon Mountains out there in the distance.

There has been so much to see, so many new people to teach, so many new kinds of food and culture and fiber things to share.  I’ve loved every minute of the trip so far, and am grateful for all those who worked hard to make this possible.  Four more days of teaching and I’m on my way home.

A Sunny Day?

Wow, the sun actually came out today.  What a surprise!  Course more rain due in tomorrow, there was even a front page article in the newspaper today about how serious climate/weather pattern changes are here.  Well the plants are loving it!

shippingI’m now in wind down mode, tying up loose ends, starting the preparations for my trip next week to the Midwest Weavers Conference in Grinnell, Iowa.  I’ve never been to Iowa, so this should be a treat.  A week before I leave, I need to ship out the consummable stuff, like the handouts, raw materials, and some monographs to sell.  So yesterday, I spent the entire day printing and binding stacks of monographs, and the handouts, and burnt out my year old new binding machine.  Bummer…

The box is packed, and on its way to Grinnell, and the good news, is it contains about 50 yards of Red Dot Tracer, which I’m happy to say, is finally available, from Pellon, after months of gnashing of teeth and complaining, and moaning, I got 150 yards of it via UPS yesterday, in time to chop it up in two yard packs and ship it with the handouts.  I have been in a quandry since HTCW stopped shipping early last fall, and the product became unavailable.  Pellon bought the plates for the Red Dot Pattern Tracing Material, but they printed it on their Tru-Grid base, though improved from the original Tru-Grid base, this one is more stable than the old one, I still don’t like it because it doesn’t hold a pencil mark well.  For a number of reasons, this is really important to me.  I have multi-sized patterns I use for my classes, and the lines have to stay true and accurate.  And so do the lines the students trace.  Anyway, the Red Dot has now been printed on a different base, one closer to the original one from HTCW, and I’m hoping it will perform as well.  I’m crossing my fingers.

So, now to the next project, which is a gallery talk I have to give next Wednesday as one of the exhibiting artists at HGA’s Small Expressions Exhibit at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery.  I wanted to finish one of the pieces on the loom that I started last spring, so I could get a shot of it and include it in my talk, since it is woven in the same technique as the pieces on exhibit there.  (If you click on “Small Expressions” under “Upcoming Events/February 24th” – which was when the show originally opened in Missouri, you will see the pieces they selected for exhibit)

loomsilkI’ve blogged about this technique, a Theo Moorman Inlay on a cotton ground, in many previous posts.  Search for “Big Sister” and you’ll find many references.  I printed the image on silk, and then cut it into quarter inch strips, and wove them back into the loom, in sequence while weaving a backing fabric at the same time.  One of my blogs has detailed shots of the process.  If I have time I’ll search for it.

wtcAnyway, the image here was shot the end of August, 2001, while vacationing a mere 20 miles away with my children.  We took them to the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, and then up to the roof of the World Trade Center.  I titled this photo “Top of the World”.  I don’t need to tell anyone what happened a mere two weeks later…

It is a chilling photo, the shaky appearance of the towering structure, from the rewoven strips, two innocent children doing what children do when posing for a photo for dad, (notice the rabbit ears my son is sneaking in behind his sister’s back),  I am haunted by this photo every time I look at it.  Reweaving it back together row by row, was somehow healing.

My daughter walked in tonight while I was photographing this for the blog, and plopped her latest adventure in boxesfront of me, a large paper box, carefully folded into a square.  She said, “Guess how many boxes are inside of this?”.  I took a wild guess at 10, and was sort of surprised when she told me I wasn’t even close.  Can you believe there were 20 little paper boxes, all just a fraction smaller than each one they nest into, and she proceeded to unwrap each origami box to unveil the next box, until she had them all lined up on my cutting table.  The smallest one was half the size of my thumbnail.

You have to love hanging around with my daughter.  She disappears into her room, and comes out with the oddest adventures, she should have been studying for her Spanish final tomorrow, but folding paper boxes was much more soothing to her soul, and she was quite proud of her accomplishment.

Ah to be 16 again…  See, that’s my problem.  I never blow anything off I’m suppose to be doing for the shear joy of creating.  I’ve gotten way too responsible in my old age…

Speaking of old age, we had a couple of great theatre adventures, last Friday we saw The Full Monty at the Papermill Playhouse, which was absolutely a terrific piece of theatre, the cast was unbelievable, one scene stealer after another, and if you live anywhere near Northern NJ or NYC, get yourself a ticket now!  The show runs until July 14th I believe.  There is a cameo appearance by stage veteran Elaine Stritch, who according to the papers is 84 years old.  I want to be able to get out there and still perform in my studio and on the road at 84.  That would mean I have another 30 years to go!

And last night, my husband and I escaped to the movie theatre to see “Up”.  Another Pixar/Disney hit, one of the most charming stories I’ve seen in a long time, well, you just have to take my word and go to the movies.  You won’t be sorry.  The star of “Up” is a very old man, who is about to be forceably taken to a retirement home, the love of his life is gone, and he gets his house to lift off into the air with a gazillion helium balloons and flies it all the way to Paradise Falls in South America.  I know it sounds like the oddest plot line imaginable, but to see it, and how the story develops, is truely amazing.  It is almost believable.  It has been a long time since I’ve been to the movies and heard an audience applaud at the end of a film.  The show was packed, and they did applaud.