Tag: Website Success Monograph

My Rocking Chair

All the stress of the past year is slowly melting away.  I made it through all my teaching commitments, and if I end up with the flu, I can actually stay in bed and get well.  So far, the flu has stayed away from our house, but it is everywhere, and I’m just lying low and hoping to fly under the proverbial radar…

I spent the day tackling my to do list, besides working my way through a very dirty house, I always liked cleaning real meaningful dirt, I sent out a proposal, for a weekly sewing class next spring at the Newark Museum, and I started playing around with the design for a new website for the Frances Irwin Handweavers.  I promised them their website first.  I don’t have vast archives of photos to chose from, since I’ve only been a member for a couple of years, but Sally has a computer full, and she is traveling at the moment.  So I sketched out the layout, and played around with a “look” for the pages, and I’ll wait now for feedback from her and for her return and access to the photo archives.  Each time I do this, I get another bald spot from ripping out my hair, but I learn so much…

rockingRocker2InkleRockerLast night, I actually “got off work early”.  I know that sounds like such a normal thing, but it isn’t when you are self employed and your studio is in your home.  There is no huge push at the moment, just time to be creative, and rest.  The spring will come too soon and I’ll be on a plane again.  I don’t get caught up in the holiday madness, this is my down time and I’m not making my life crazy because our culture dictates it.  So I stopped working, put together some leftovers for dinner, and then cleaned the upstairs bathroom.  Then I curled up in my newly reupholstered rocker and sat by the fire in the woodstove, putting my feet up on the footstool Bri made in woodshop, and wove more inkle trim.  I blew through another two yards of trim, glued it to the rocker, and with six yards finished, I only have another two yards to go, and I warped up the little inkle loom for the remainder.  I’m so happy with how the rocker turned out, and I think my mother in law would be proud.  If you didn’t catch that blog, the rocker was a wedding present from my mother in law to my husband and me 31 years ago.  The upholstery wore out, and I found the fabric to reupholster it with on my travels last May, to Portland.

I spent today playing with my eShop on the website.  I have had “updating the shop” on my to do list for months, I finished the Website Success Monograph back in the early summer, and never got around to adding it to the site.  My goal was to ultimately put all of the work I took to the guild sale, that didn’t sell, up on a new page on the site, and I procrastinated on that long enough.  I spent the day figuring out how to add a page, update the product line, change around some of the monograph combination’s, all of it frustrating but ultimately successful.  It takes awhile to add one of the garments to the site, processing photos, and linking it to my website for further viewing, but I won’t reduce my huge body of work in my overburdened closet if I don’t at least put the work out there.  So I think there are six items up there for sale, and I’ll add to it every couple of days.

TiesThatBindI delivered the piece for the Blank Canvas event at the Visual Art Center today, usually I’m skidding in at the last minute, so a day before the deadline is actually a treat for me.  I’m happy with the piece, it was fun to make, and I really need to play more often.  🙂

Meanwhile, I’m looking at all of my empty looms and the brain is just churning along, and I’m thinking that one of these days, I’m going to get out the warping mill and just start winding white warps so I can do a week or so of just painting.  Looking ahead, the HGA yardage exhibit deadline is sometime in January.  And I’d like to get another colorful scarf warp on the small 8 shaft, and since that has a second warp beam, I’m thinking I’d like to try to do some doup leno in addition to the supplemental warp, for additional texture.  That’s a technique I haven’t played with for many many years.  And on the four shaft small floor loom, I’m even thinking of setting up for an additional two overshot placemats for my daughter and me, since we each ended up with only seven mats each in the guild exchange last spring.  I’m not holding out hope that the delinquent two will ever show up.

So now I have some time to be creative, and do all the computer things that have been on my list, get the two guild websites designed and built, add my huge body of work to the website eShop, and before the end of the year, I want to obtain a copy of InDesign, Adobe’s publishing software, and learn to use that.  Always something new to learn and create, and invent…

Off to watch the finale for Project Runway…

Comb binding mania!

I am bleary eyed…  All I’ve done for the last couple of days is laundry (smelly clothes from a week at girl scout camp) and print monographs and handouts for the Michigan conference, which is August 5-9.  This is the conference where I have a 12 hour turn around, I arrive home from Colorado late evening next Monday night, and leave Tuesday morning for a direct flight to Grand Rapids Michigan.  But that’s all happening on the 4-5 of August.  Right now we are still in July, so my mantra for the day is, “Don’t project…”

crock2The crock pot is doing its thing, I’ve done shades of bronze, olive, rose, and teal, and today we are cooking a canary yellow.  I’m enjoying this explosion of color, and I can’t wait until fall when I can really play with this wool.  I’m hoping to be inspired hanging around with all the felters for a few days in late August at the Felters Fling. I’ll be teaching a jacket making workshop, and one of my goals here is to make my own “Daryl Jacket” from my own felt…binding_handouts

So, I’ve gone through about $6-700 dollars in toner, and printed reams of paper.  The monographs are handoutsstacked, and the handouts are so big, I’ve forgotten just how big this particular handout is, that I need more 1/2″ comb bind spines.  My wonderful shopper husband is out at Staples as I write.  So I decided to take a break and blog, because I am really bored just punching chads from all this paper with the binding machine…  (Would that I could listen to a book on tape, but alas, I do have to pay attention here, I’ve punched handouts backwards and talk about awkward when you hand someone their handout and oops!)

coverI have so enjoyed reworking my design journal from the last nine years, that I’ve almost finished.  I created a cover from a collage I didn’t end up using for my website home page, but it worked well here.  I only have six projects left to redo, I’ve completed 18 of the projects, each with a two page spread.  I’ve had to dig around in the attic to find scraps of companion fabrics, when I failed to include them originally.  This notebook had mostly the weaving notes, not much was entered once the fabric was finished and I turned the fabric into a garment many years later.  So I’m reconstructing all that, which is an organizational blast, and gluing everything in place.  I took more detailed photos of two of the  projects, in case dear reader, you are interested…

This project was called Softened Edges, and was an 8 shaft deflected double weave from rayon.  I chose a pattern for a jacket that could be reversible since the fabric was two sided.  I used felled seams and bound the edges with a lovely wine colored jacquard silk.

The second project was done on a dare.  I attended the ANWG weavers conference in Pendleton Oregon back in 2003. pg1a pg1bIt was my first time at that conference, and I had been asked to give the keynote address.  It was a wonderful experience, and Pendleton is very charming, and plucked right out of the Oregon trail.  The Pendleton Mill tour ranks up there with my top fiber experiences.  They welcomed the conference attendees, and as a thank you for coming gift, we all got bales of the Pendleton blanket selvedges they cut off after fulling, before they bind the blankets.  These were huge bales, and I talked them into shipping mine home after purchasing a lot of wonderful things from their outlet store.  Some of the local weavers, sick to death of the Pendleton worms, sent theirs home with me as well…

pg2bpg2aSo the dare was to come up with some piece of clothing, since that’s what I do best, made out of the worms.  I ended up weaving a Theo Moorman inlay, where the backing was a wool combination of things in my stash  and the inlay threads a 20/2 rayon, also in my stash.  I wove in the worms, on the surface of the plain weave background, held down by the tie-down threads.  I planned the colors carefully, matching up like “worms” from my bales.  I loved the effect of the color changes, (calling the finished coat “Butterfly“), and ended up constructing the coat by cutting the worm fabric on the crosswise grain.  Since the fabric was too fat and lofty to seam in the traditional way, I cut off the seam website_success1allowances, and used a wool jersey to bind all the edges, connecting the seams together with the jersey.  It is one of the techniques I detail in my Seams and Edge Finishes Monograph.

So back I go for more endless punching of chads…  My husband has returned from Staples. All of these have to be shipped on Tuesday.  I am currently printing the last of the monographs, which is the newest one in the collection, Website Success.  I will offer it for sale on my website, once I give the presentation to those that signed up at the Michigan Conference.  I want to be able to tweak any thing that isn’t completely clear, and I won’t really know that until I give it to a room full of mixed levels of computer experience.  Stay tuned…