Theo Moorman – Daryl's Blog

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 Phoenix, 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.

The 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.

So 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.

So 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!

I’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)

I’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.

Anyway, 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 front 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.

A Cast of Characters

I could not get focused today. Maybe it was because I got up at 3am to drive my husband and son to the airport. They are taking advantage of some frequent flyer miles, my son’s spring break, and some new snow in Utah, and off they flew to Salt Lake City for the week to enjoy some guy time on the mountain. 🙂

I did go back to bed once I returned from the airport, and I did manage another four hours of sleep, but the day felt very disjointed. So I puttered. I did a little of this, a little of that. After all, it is Sunday, and most normal people get off a day or two a week. That would be a foreign word for me. I did some grocery shopping, cleaned my bathroom, started cleaning the kitchen, the dirt doesn’t stop coming just because I left for a week for a conference. I tackled a pile of files, deciding that my son’s progress reports and school files from elementary and middle school, now that he is in college, didn’t need to be taking up space in my file cabinet any longer. They’ve been on my floor for awhile. So that pile is gone.

Speaking of piles.

This is what happens when a loom is left unused for a period of time. Piles start to cover it. It looks lost amid the debris. I had a major guilt attack today over my poor naked looms. I’m in the middle of too many other projects to even think about getting a warp on this puppy, my beloved first loom, a 45″ 8 shaft double sectional back beam Tools of the Trade, I bought in 1978, right out of college. I love this loom, I will never part with it. I have woven thousands of yards of fabric on it. But at the moment, it is looking like a neglected child.

Enter the twins.

This pair of looms sits beside the big loom. I never named my looms, not sure why. It was hard enough to name my kids. So this pair, both from Tools of the Trade as well, bought in the 1980’s at different times, helps me out when my big loom is busy. The one on the right, 25″ wide, is four shaft, and it is warped with 10/2 cotton for my daughter’s and my placemat exchange we are doing with the Jockey Hollow Guild. More about that later.

The one on the left, is pretty well equipped, for a 25″ wide loom, it has eight shafts, double sectional back beams, and is a little work horse. I wove the Arctic Sky fabric on that loom. It currently has the remaining yard or so of tencel warp from a Bonnie Inouye class I took last October (oh how embarrassing). It had my only 25″ 12 dent reed in it, which I needed for the placemat exchange loom on the right, so I stole it. Just pulled the warp out of the reed and moved it over. So I couldn’t have woven the rest of the warp if I had wanted to.

To the left of that loom, I have a 25″ Tools of the Trade table loom, also four shaft, that I keep warped with a Theo Moorman 10/2 cotton structure, for my art pieces. I just finished the Big Sister piece, and I had originally needed the 12 dent reed for that one, but settled on a 6 dent reed, though I wasn’t completely happy with the reed marks it left.

So I was pretty embarrassed that nothing was happening on any of my four looms, one without a reed, one with the wrong reed, one with a warp and nothing started, and one with no warp at all.

So I looked through my vast stash of reeds, and found an extra 12 dent reed I had purchased used many years ago, for my 45″ loom, and I had my daughter hacksaw the thing into two pieces. I decided that I needed to spend the day paying some attention to my poor neglected looms, and I resleyed the tencel warp into the replacement reed, and I switched out the reed on the table loom, tied both warps on the front beams, and they are ready to weave.

I turned my attention to the placemat exchange, and spent some time getting the structure to work right. I took it from a workshop I took many years ago with Barbara Miller on 18th Century Structures. It is a four shaft overshot pattern called Dog Tracks. My daughter and I are both participating in this exchange, each of the 16 participants picks a 5/2 cotton weft color, and winds off a couple ounces and passes a ball off to each of the other 7 participants in their group. My daughter and I are in two different groups. So we will each have eight different overshot placemats at the end, all in our selected color. I chose a grayed green, and I started the whole thing with mine. Once I reworked the treadling, to give me the placement of the blocks I wanted, it started to weave quite well.

I detest two shuttle weaves. I know, I know… But I am use to weaving yardage, lots of yardage, I like my shuttles to fly, and two shuttle weaves just don’t produce the speed of a one shuttle structure. Part of the problem here is the size of the loom. There isn’t room for the two shuttles to fit on the web, when I beat, they bounce right off the loom into my lap and onto the floor. I solved this problem on another warp I did, by taking the unused second back beam from the eight shaft (remember two warp beams require a second back beam), and clipping it onto the front of the loom, with a heavy plastic ruler clipped to the surface so I have an extra ledge to support the shuttles while I’m weaving.

I did manage to get to Morristown today, to practice with my recorder group. I probably didn’t mention that I play Baroque recorder, I play alto with this group, and we got all new music today, something new to practice, a whole play list of French love songs from the 1600’s. And I did manage to get down to my neighbor’s house for our Sunday night ritual, a gathering of the women to watch Desperate Housewives. We hoot and howl all the way through it, and will be really sorry when the season ends, it is a long way until September….

It turned out to be a productive day after all, and the looms (all except my big one) look so much more happy. I think tomorrow I will clean off the big loom so it doesn’t feel so burdened with my junk…