I’ve seen the future and it’s looking bright…

I’m writing this on the plane, flying home to Newark from an amazing four days in Northern California at the CNCH Conference.  That would be the Conference of Northern California Handweavers for those not in the know…  First, I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to be asked to teach at this particular conference.  Eight years ago, I was scheduled to teach at CNCH 2002, and six weeks before the conference, with sold out classes, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I had to cancel a number of teaching commitments that spring, and CNCH was one of them.  Eight years went by without another invitation, and I always felt bad that I never had the opportunity to make up for having to cancel.

I taught four classes at the conference this past weekend, Friday morning I had a large group for my Photographing your Work seminar, followed by a class called Warp Fast, a seminar on warping techniques that involve methods using multiple threads, paddle warping, sectional warping, and using an AVL warping mill.  I had a very large class for that seminar, and I got a lot of very positive feedback after both classes, which always makes me feel good, that I’ve inspired and encouraged others with new information and sometimes a new perspective.  Friday night was of course, the fashion show.  Always a conference favorite, I had a front row seat, which I appreciated, since I would be giving the technical critique of the garments on Sunday morning.  I had spent Thursday afternoon previewing the garments as they came in, so I had a chance to look up inside, check construction details and techniques.

I had already sensed that there was something different about this conference, a different energy and enthusiasm I haven’t felt at a fiber conference in a very long time.  The conference committee was doing an exceptional job, the facility, the Santa Clara Conference Center, attached to our hotel, the Hyatt, so we never had to leave the building, was first class, my classroom perfect for my needs, all my classes in one room, and the food at the Hyatt restaurants, outstanding and very reasonable.

So my weaving buddy, great friend and roommate Robyn Spady and I sat up front for the fashion show, and what a treat.  I found the garments to be largely in one of two groups.  There were a number of lovely jackets, beautifully tailored, made from exquisite handwoven, sometimes handspun and handdyed fabrics, and the makers of the garments, or their friends modeled them on stage.  They were so proud of what they had done, and celebrated the moment.  The show opened with the wedding ensemble, the year long undertaking of relatively new handweaver Tien Chiu, who has painstakingly documented every thread woven and every stitch taken on her  blog.

Then came the rectangles.  A large percentage of the garments were quite the throw back to the 60’s and 70’s when handwoven clothing was a series of pieced together rectangles.  Yet, there wasn’t a single bog jacket, that Bronze Age shape made from a couple of strategically place rectangles, based on the garments found in highly acidic boggy ground water.  When I started making handwoven clothing in the late 1970’s the yarns available for the average handweaver were nothing like the yarns available today.  Colors were classic, understated, and dyed more for rug weaving and tapestry than clothing.  As a matter of fact, my art school,  where I first learned to weave, had bins of rug yarn, and carpet warp for our use, and not much else.  The first garment I ever wove was from a coarse wool, and it was actually a modified bog jacket.

Note:  this photo, of a garment I did in 1976 represents how NOT to take a photo of your work!

Fast forward some thirty years and the yarns available to the average handweaver would blow your mind.  We have the knitters to thank for that, and the brave spinners out there who have taken handspinning to a new level, spinning with the most amazing fibers that didn’t exist in the 1970’s, (like bamboo mixed with Angelina and soy silk) and the rectangles that are coming out of small simple looms are anything but classic.  I’ve known that the knitting community has found handweaving and is embracing it with an excitement and an enthusiasm never before seen, but I hadn’t actually seen this phenomenon in action.  Armed with the Knitter’s loom from Ashford, or the Rigid Heddle loom from Schacht, and some incredible yarn, in unbelievable color combinations, these new weavers  are  single handedly resurrecting the craft of handweaving, and taking it to levels I could have never imagined.  And by young women half my age with pink hair wearing lime green hand knit socks they very competently knit themselves.

I don’t know if there is a Project Runway influence here as well, but the rectangular shapes of the garments that came parading across the runway were not the shapes of yore…  I’m going under the assumption that since home ec is not part of the current curriculum in most schools in the US, that these amazingly talented young women are learning fashion skills somewhere else.  The influence is pretty clear, since the rectangular clothing up on that stage was thoughtfully draped over someone’s body (a dressform?) and folded and tucked and seamed, stitched and embellished into some extremely creative clothing.

Alas, I have no pictures.  I’m hoping the CNCH website will eventually provide some shots of the fashion show, but trust me to say that I was SOOOOO excited by what was in front of me.  And in many of my classes, including the Saturday workshop on making a jacket pattern, there were numerous new weavers, first time conference attendees, and some amazing enthusiasm.  The torch has been passed. And to my complete delight, the aging handweaving community seems to have opened its arms and embraced the new blood and the new creativity that has blown in like a fresh breath of air.

Keep in mind that this is California.  In my travels, every new trend seems to originate here.  It will probably take some time to make it across the country, but even in my discussions with the  HGA Convergence Albuquerque committee, an international weaving conference happening in July of 2010, registrations have gone beyond all expectations.  I have seen the future for handweaving and it is very very bright indeed.

Saturday night’s keynote address was given by Syne Mitchell.  I first met Syne probably five years ago, a  30 something former Microsoft programmer with a very young son, she took my class in making a pieced vest in Seattle.  Syne was a new weaver, coming from the knitting world with a huge background in technology.  It didn’t take her long to find a need, and Syne jumped right in there to fill it.  In a few short years, she has united the global handweaving community, connected them to the knitting community, and turned the fiber world upside down with her podcasts called Weavecast, (I’m episode 26) and her online weaving magazine Weavezine. ( I have agreed to  write a monthly column on handwoven garments for Weavezine, stay tuned for that.)  Weavecast has been listened to on six of the seven continents, still waiting for Antarctica to come on board.  Syne gave a keynote that brought the global sources of handweaving found on the internet into the laps of everyone in the room.  She showed the conference attendees what could be found with just a few keystrokes and a couple of URL’s.  Online weaving publications, like Handwoven Weaving Weekly from Interweave Press; handweaving.net, developed by software engineer Kris Bruland with over 60,000 weaving drafts; Weavolution, an online global community of handweavers, blogs, and resources and information have revolutionized how we think, create, and interact with each other.  Syne ended her keynote with some weaving karaoke that you had to be there to see, and she had the audience laughing with her through the entire address.

Keep in mind that this conference is right in the middle of Silicon Valley, and it isn’t just the 20 something pink haired knitters turned weavers armed with a drop spindle that are revolutionizing the handweaving community.  Sunday night, after the conference was over, I went out to dinner with Syne and Tien Chiu, of wedding dress fame, and Tien’s significant other.  I’ve always been one of the youngest of the handweaving community, having been trained in college and shortly after making a career of handweaving, but now, in my mid 50’s, I sat back listening to the discussions at the dinner table over Pad Thai and Ginger Chicken, about solenoids and dobby’s and software and 24 shaft looms, by two technologically savy women and a non weaving soon to be spouse of a weaver, and saw that the technologically trained programmers and software and web developers have not only found handweaving, but are running forward with the available technology at a speed that has left me in the dust.  Tien is a web developer so it isn’t a surprise that she began her journey into handweaving finding a medium that would challenge and satisfy her amazing brain and blog about the journey so that others around the globe have followed the creation of the wedding dress, every intimate detail of it.  Syne, Tien, and others like them are taking handweaving to places I never thought possible.  It is all so very exciting, and I feel oddly enough like I’ve simultaneously gone back to my roots while feeling like I’m peering in the window of something truly wonderful and I want to come in and play too.

I do know how to spin, quite well actually, and I had a real desire to dust off my spinning wheel and find my drop spindle, and try some of that wonderful colorful stuff available at the conference.  I only had an hour or so to wander through the vast displays in the vendor hall, but I did manage to pick up some beautiful silk/mohair roving to spin, hand dyed in gorgeous purple and orange shades by Red Fish Dye Works, and in the back corner of the vendor hall, at the booth next to the pen with three alpacas, I bought the first fleece from Montana, a baby Alpaca, and I’m going to start spinning some yarn.    It was hard not to get caught up in the new enthusiasm of the future of handweaving, and to my great delight, in addition to all of the wonderful things to spin and weave and knit available at the conference, there was a Janome sewing machine dealer who was doing quite the brisk business selling sewing machines.  I heard more than one person telling me about retiring that old Singer from 1940 and moving on to something that would inspire creativity and get them sewing again.  Along with the rebirth of handweaving is the potential for a rebirth in the sewing world as well.  Which makes my heart sing, since I keep a foot in both worlds.  I weave cloth, to sew into clothing, and suddenly the possibilities have exploded and I couldn’t be happier.  I have seen the future and it is indeed bright.

This morning, I had breakfast with Nancy Weber, one of the key organizers of the conference, and she showed me the “conference scarf”, woven by a committee of weavers, as a gift for all the organizers.  It was based on my weaving buddy and guild mate Sally Orgren’s article in Handwoven Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008,  on eight shaft and four shaft dimity.  Can I say they were exquisite?  The colors were hand dyed, and can I say I coveted one?  I have a loom, I have tencel, and I have that issue of Handwoven Magazine.  In addition, the table runner across the breakfast table in Nancy’s home was woven from self patterning sock yarn.  Who knew?  The beautiful ikat effects were just yarn that was engineered to pattern a pair of socks.  My head is spinning with possibilities.  These are perfect projects to put on all my baby Structo looms.  Can you tell it was a mind blowing weekend?  So now I’m heading back to NJ, on my last leg of the trip, sitting in first class, with my wine, and thinking that life is really good.  And the future is very bright indeed…

Puttering days…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Placemats Finished!

First, let me welcome all the ASG members who have just joined my blog,  following all of my creative escapades.  There has been a flurry of subscriptions for email notices for when I post a new blog, and many of them have signed on after my blog was mentioned in an ASG (American Sewing Guild) posting.  Thanks Marcia Russell from northern California for the mention.  Marcia has written for the ASG publication “Notions”.  For all of you out there who are new to my blog, you may be interested in a podcast I did for Weavecast, about a year and a half ago, though Weavecast is a podcast for handweavers, it crosses over into so many other fiber communities it is worth noting.  I was episode 26, “Sew Your Weaving“, and I approached the podcast, not as a weaver, but more as someone who has sewn for most of her life, and has a lot to share about the body and the spirit and the sewing machine.

After much angst, and frustration, we are finally finished!  A bit of background, for those who are new to my blog.  Exchanges are a fun part of weaving guilds, and they come in many different forms.  Last year, one of my weaving guilds, Jockey Hollow Weavers, which meets the first Wednesday night of the month in Mendham, NJ (Morris County) does an “Exchange” each year, starting it in September, and finishing up in June.  Last year, we did a crackle exchange, crackle is a weave structure, everyone did samples of a specific design in a Crackle structure, and at the end, participants had a notebook of all different designs.

My then 15 year old daughter had just joined the guild, and was anxious to participate.  No matter that she hadn’t really ever woven before, actually correct that, she hadn’t ever set up her own loom before.  There is a difference.  So, being 15, and not knowing how to plan ahead, leaving everything to the last minute, she learned how to wind a warp and set up an 8 shaft crackle the weekend before the exchange was due.  That was last June.  In all fairness, she pulled it off, wove the samples beautifully, and delivered them finished and mounted, and stood before the group explaining her draft and how this was her first warp all on her own.  Everyone, including her mother, was very proud.

Fast forward to September.  My 15 year old enthusiastically raised her hand when a poll was taken to find out who was interested in a  Placemat Exchange for the 2008-2009 guild year.  The theme was “Overshot”, all mats had to be woven in an overshot pattern.  Each participant gave the other participants 2 ounces of 5/2 perle cotton in their pattern color, and all of us chipped in and bought large quantities of 10/2 perle cotton in white for the background.  As it worked out, there were more than eight participants, but not enough for 16 (two groups of eight), so we invited a few members of an adjacent guild, and ended up with two groups of 8 each.  My daughter joined one of the groups, and I joined the other.  So my daughter, Brianna, started the set up, gently prodded by me, during her Winter break last December, and has muddled along, weaving when she could, hampered by school activities, broken warp beams, broken threads, and a major threading error, which she painstakingly took out and re-threaded because in weaving, there is nothing else to do but take it out and re-do it.draft

Bri and I selected the pattern “Dog Tracks” which was from an 18th century weave structure class I took with Barbara Miller in 2000 at Convergence Cincinnati.  I liked the name since Bri works on Saturdays at a local kennel and her clothing looks a lot like muddy dog tracks when she comes home at night.

So those that have been following my blog since lancaster_dogtracksside1January, know I’ve posted a running score, and for the most part, we were steadily neck and neck, I’d weave a mat, and Bri would weave a mat, until Bri got so busy with a major school competitive event (that involved a lot of glitter) that she fell behind.  She was about 10″ from the end of the last placemat, and the warp beam broke again.  I was able to fix it, and Bri finally finished the last mat on Saturday morning, but discovered a mistake about 5 inches back and had to get to the High School for the final production of this all consuming event, so like the kind mother that I am, and wanting to get this bloody thing finished so I could weave all the samples that went along with the drafts for the placemats, I unwove the 5 inches, corrected the mistake,  and finished the mat.  I spent the day today, weaving about fifteen 5″ x 5″ samples, and printing all the drafts for the samples, which will go along with the mat.  The point of an exchange is to have lots of different patterns, having just the finished mats would never satisfy your average weaver, we have to know how it was done.  So there will be a notebook of all the patterns along with all the finished mats.  Each participant will have, if all goes well, 8 different overshot design placemats, all in their pattern color.  Bri chose purple, and I chose a lovely soft celadon green.

knotstexsolvEvery weaver loves to see the knots coming up over the back of the warp beam, this means you’re almost there.  After 12 yards of fine cotton warp, and almost six months of time and gentle prodding of a now 16 year old, this was a welcome sight.  There are two photographs here, the next swing of the beater after I shot the image on the left, the apron rod which holds the knots at the end of the warp, broke clean off the cords holding it to the loom.  The problems I’ve had with this poor loom….  So I turned the loom around, sat down on the floor, my favorite position with this loom, and changed the apron cords to Texsolv, which I’m really hoping will hold for awhile.  Most weavers know about Texsolv, and it is available on rolls through most weaving suppliers.  Not cheap, but it does the job from treadle tie cords to apron cords and heddles better than anything else on the market.

placematsThis is such a cool shot!  I am so excited.  Winding off six months of work to really step back and look at it gives me such satisfaction for a job well done.

I spent the next couple hours, stitching carefully between the mats and cuttingpaperwork them apart, and doing all the paperwork and samples for the drafts (Photo right).   So now we have a huge stack of placemats ready to take to the meeting on Wednesday night.  The next two days will be a whirlwind of getting things done before my mini vacation.  Yep, I’m heading out west!

Continental has a promotion allowing me to fly for double Elite qualifying miles, a great bonus when you are trying to maintain Elite status.  So I decided to hop on a plane on Thursday and head to the other side of the country, specifically Seattle, just for a weekend, to hang with my special fiber buddy Robyn Spady.  We are planning a weekend of fiber adventures, wine, and friendship.  And I get bonus miles too!  Such a deal…

And for Something Completely Different…

Well, I accomplished a lot today, none of the things I was actually suppose to do,  I got distracted…

I did get the scholarship applications judged, that was a tough one, all the students were equally qualified.  I’m glad I wasn’t the only judge.  And I did spent a few hours getting all the work caught up for my guild programs for next year.  But that was yesterday.  You see, last Friday night, my church had a service auction, and I donated one of the scarves I made in Barbara Herbster’s class the week before,scarves and to my great surprise, there was some furious bidding, and the scarf actually sold for $135.  I talked to the woman who bought it afterward and she told me she was prepared to go to $200.  So thanks Barbara, for a beautiful warp, but it really got me thinking…  And thinking…. And thinking…

Sidebar:  I did craft fairs from 1979 – 1989.  I’ve been there, and done that.  I have such a distaste for the whole affair, total burn out.  I enjoyed the people, and the lifestyle, for awhile, but making stuff, lots of stuff, to sell, putting a price tag on creativity, trying to figure out the market, spending every weekend of your life sitting in your booth selling your soul, well, let’s just say that I swore, no matter what happened in the future, I’d never, ever do a craft fair again….  And I also said, I’d never, ever, ever sell my work again, put a price tag on it, and some of that is sort of understandable because what I do best is clothing, and once I make a garment now, I’m largely done with it, and it is nearly impossible to reproduce what I make, even if someone where to pay me handsomely for it.  Making handwoven clothing in production is no picnic, which is what I did for 10 years, I bought huge amounts of yarn wholesale, put on no less than 30 yards at a time, (weaving  it off in one day),  spent huge amounts of money on booth fees, spent ridiculous hours making stuff to sell, filling orders, running a business, and everything else that goes along with that lifestyle.  I had no life.

However, I was so enchanted with the scarves I made in Barbara’s class, mostly because she opened up a new way to look at color and blending, and using small amounts of whatever is on  the shelf to make it work, which Barbara really does do best, and I got to thinking, really thinking…

sandstone_cutoutSo I basically got the jacket cut out, because it was laying across my floor and I couldn’t walk in my studio until I got it cut out and off the floor.  I got all the tailor’s tacks in, and played around with interfacing.  I also experimented with seam finishes and couchingtopstitching.  I tried couching with a novelty warp yarn, and it really does define the seams.  And I’m hoping it is pretty flexible.

But the whole time, I’m thinking, thinking…

So, I finally gave up, and started poking around the studio, pulling yarns and skeins, and cones, and bits of stuff, because you really don’t need much here, to put on a warp for another round of scarves.yarn Oh boy was this fun…

So I stared at the pile for awhile, and played around with a draft, and wrapped a card to see if I could get a clue how this would look.  Barbara just grabs yarn and starts winding.  I’m not nearly that confident, but I can see how after awhile, this would be a great way to warp, and I can see doing this for yardage…

I had a number of variegated yarns, and some novelties, but the wrapone thing I didn’t have was any of the flat tape yarns that Barbara used for the supplemental warp.  I didn’t want to duplicate the scarf I did in Barbara’s class, after all, that was her design, but I liked the idea of having supplemental warps in some key places, and I actually found a small swatch of a knitted tape, which I carefully unknitted tapeand washed, and then painstakingly pressed to get it to return to its flattened state.  I had about 14 yards, which would work for this warp.

I’m also intrigued by the possibility of combining doup leno with this technique, to provide even more surface texture, but I’ll experiment with that down the road…  At this point, it is about getting something on the loom…

So, I grabbed my AVL warping wheel, I figured this would be a avl_wheelperfect use for it, because I’d be unloading it onto a sectional beam.  So I could wind the warps as I had them on the card, and then every two inches, dump the warp under tension right onto the warp beam.  I love this tool, it is a shame it is so expensive.  I bought mine at a long ago Convergence when AVL first introduced it, at about half the price it is now.  I remember waiting 9 months for it to come…

beamingOnce I finished winding two inches, I carried the wheel over to the loom, and slipped the end of the 9 yard warp over the back beam and hitched it to the cord for the section I  wanted to wind on the warp beam.beaming_2

I love this tool!

So, I have 2″ beamed in my 6″ scarf warp, and this will ultimately give me four scarves, and if I like them I can

  1. give them away
  2. add all four of them to my wardrobe
  3. sew all four together into a bigger cloth and make a garment out of them
  4. have a big ‘show and tell’ at my guild
  5. give them away
  6. donate them all to my church
  7. I’m running out of ideas
  8. OK, I could actually sell them.

My guild, the Jockey Hollow Weavers,  has a fabulous sale in November.  So far I haven’t participated because, gee, I refuse to sell my work.  So, depending on how these turn out, I just might actually have something to sell this placemats1year.  Stay tuned…

Meanwhile, the placemat exchange is coming down to the wire…

Score:  Mom 7, Bri 6

Bri came into the studio tonight, and sat down and did another mat.  The front beam is groaning under the weight of the 13 mats, it is a pretty small loom, and this is the one where the warp beam cracked, so I’m crossing my finger that the front beam holds as well.  After Bri finished her mat, she had about a half hour to kill while she was waiting to leave for the High School, the spring band/choral concert was tonight.  So she grabbed my camera, and shot some pictures of her latest obsession, finger braiding.  She is making all kinds of bracelets from floss, which she keeps in a box and whenever she gets bored, the box comes out and the braiding begins.  I had to share some of the patterns she has done, these adorn her wrists at the moment, and she had to photograph them on her wrists since she can’t get them off.

bri-fingerweavingbri-fingerweaving2So there you have it, a productive day for the two of us, and one of the best High School concerts I’ve ever attended.  I didn’t work on anything I was suppose to, but you know what?  I had fun…

One more note:

I did spend a couple hours this morning alpha testing the new Weavolution site.  It isn’t up for viewing yet, but this should be an awesome web connection for handweavers of all levels and disciplines, Tien Chiu is one of the principal designers for it, and coincidently her blog is one of my favorite must reads.  She talks about the site on her blog today, and the team was mentioned in the last Weavecast Podcast.  One of the features I’m playing with on this new site, is the ability to post a project, and the draft and all the specs.  I got to thinking how I should be doing that with the pieces I’ve designed and executed since I started this blog.  I’ve been thinking about that anyway, extracting all the entries for a particular piece into one document, with the draft and yarn sources, and providing it as a PDF in the extras section of my website.  But for now, I spent some time playing with the Weavolution site, some of the early bugs are getting fixed, as we find them, but it is yet another opportunity to spend your days reading about weaving and getting inspired to get something on that loom, or if you haven’t joined the ranks of handweavers in this country, this will surely inspire you.  I’ll keep you posted when Weavolution is finally launched…