What to Do with Leftovers

Quiet and focused…

My mom always calls and asks when she doesn’t get a copy of my blog in the mail, if she missed something. My 92 year old mom, who taught me to love fibers, sewing and garment construction, has no internet access, no cell phone, nothing electronic. By choice. If you want to talk to her, you call. So I dutifully make a paper copy each time I blog, and send it to her in the mail. The old fashioned way. She always calls when she gets it and tells me how much she loved reading it, over and over, and how lovely the pictures are, and we always have a good chat about it.

I of course haven’t blogged in a couple weeks, so she was wondering.

Truth is, I’m hyper focused. I always have good intentions that in the spring, I’ll start making stuff for my guild sale, and actually I did somewhat this year, with the 18 yards of mohair, netting me seven mohair blankets, a run of hand dyed scarves, and some mats woven with water iris leaves from my garden. But still, just a few weeks before the sale, I found myself once again, locked in the sewing studio, churning out whatever I could with whatever leftovers I found. And I am always stunned at how many, or how much scrap I have tucked away. That’s one of the benefits of weaving yardage. Once you make the garment, you have lots of smaller hunks of fabric to just play with. I have a whole guild lecture I do on what to do with leftovers, and of course there is my digital monograph of the same name…

I did craft fairs, for 10 years. By 1990, I was done and swore I’d never sell my work again. But the guild show and sale, is somehow different. It is actually fun for me to make a bunch of zippered bags…

…tote bags…

…greeting cards…

…and something new I tried this year, really fun to make, from a Simplicity pattern, #2450, I made a half dozen of these mug buckets, adapting the pattern to handwoven fabric, because actually, this is a fund raiser for the guild.

Ultimately what doesn’t sell of the 132 items I tagged, (don’t be too impressed, 40 of them are greeting cards) will either be donated to causes I support, for their fund raisers, or as gifts, not that I go many places that require hostess gifts… but I do have friends…

The guild sale is a great place to move-on stuff that can be loved in other people’s homes. I just have fun making it all.

So everything is tagged, we are using bar code tags now, and I’ve written and printed a custom hang tag with the story behind each piece, and what garment the leftover came from. That was a lot of work, but fun for me to go back through the archives. And I even learned in a class during Spinning and Weaving Week with the HGA, how to print my own sew-in labels, because no two are alike. And I know by law I have to have the percentage of fiber content, and country of origin of the fiber, but that information isn’t possible to know. I use too many different unknown yarns, and this is from leftovers and that’s as best I can offer. I didn’t have any poplin inkjet treated fabric, but I had a number of packages of 10mm silk habotai, which honestly is better for wearables, since it won’t be pokey and itchy. The Daryl Lancaster labels are from a stack I had left from the 1980’s. They still work. Did I mention I am a pro at sewing in labels? From my days working in a high end exclusive department store during college, we took out manufacturers labels and sewed in our own. In between customers, I was the best at sewing in labels. And I still do it volunteering in the costume shop at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ.

If you live anywhere near the north Jersey region, the Jockey Hollow Annual Show & Sale will be at Brookside Community Center in Mendham on November 5th and 6th, 2022. Please check www.jockeyhollowweavers.org for more information.

A productive week in limbo…

So far, I have not been called in for petit jury duty, I call every couple days to see my status, and I will call again tonight, but because I blocked out this time just in case, I created an almost mini get away to my sewing room, in the basement, to just play. I did little else, which was sort of a treat. (I even slept in the guest room to pretend I was on vacation, which really confused the animals.) So it has been a really productive week, if you measure productivity by how much stuff you made. Which I tend to do, and always feel accomplished with a nice stack of my efforts.

I did spend a stupid amount of time trouble shooting a Back-up Service for my 900+ blog posts. There were suddenly a number of errors, which caused the service to not be able to back things up, but going back and forth doing screen shots and copies of logs, between my tech support, the back up service tech support and my hosting company caused me untold grief, have I ever mentioned I hate technology, and lost studio time. Yet, when things finally work, and I had something to do with the resolution, I’m inordinately proud of myself. I still hate technology, but I wouldn’t be able to leave a digital legacy without it, and so I carry on as best I can.

Meanwhile. My garden was odd this year. Lack of rain, and intense heat, I have a good deal of leafy greens to eat, but almost no peppers, beans, basil, and almost no large tomatoes, which is odd because this time last year I was making quarts of tomato sauce and pesto for the freezer. But for the first time in years, the cherry tomato plants took over the garden. I almost never get cherry tomatoes. So I dutifully dried a couple of trays in the oven, and popped them in the freezer for bursts of flavor throughout the winter.

And remember those Water Iris Leaf Mats I wove a couple blog posts ago? So there are a few left from last season’s batch, and I’ve been wrestling with whether or not to harvest this year’s. Meanwhile, my daughter Brianna has been fooling around with what to do with the prolific amount of Smart Water bottles she has saved, because all sorts of trash is treasure to a creative person. She made this adorable basket, actually a whole series from sea grass and a stripped Smart Water Bottle (she has a tool for that) last year. I immediately bought one.

She came to me the other night, after asking how to reconstitute the Water Iris leaves, and popped this on the table.

I’m blown away by what she comes up with. So that adorable basket was what prompted my handyman to harvest all the Water Iris Leaves in the yard and lay them on the patio table. I gathered them into bundles with zip ties and hung them under the gazebo for temporary storage, and they will ultimately move to a shed to dry over the winter.

Meanwhile, on vacation in the basement, I hemmed the dishtowels I cut from the loom the week before.

And I washed and cut apart the five scarves from the warp I made last winter with a broken shoulder. That felt really good. These are called “A Winter’s Tale”.

I cut out and sewed the little summer shirt from the Turned Overshot warp. Originally I had front waist darts, but I didn’t like how they competed with the overshot stripe. So I took them out.

And I started rooting through leftovers and scraps and played around. First I took some of the test samples from my Eco Printing experiments last year, and cut some into a zippered bag.

I was so happy with it, I did three more, using a suede microfiber skirt, which no longer fit me, as the base, and a cut up lavender silk skirt from a weaver’s estate sale as the lining.

I gave a lecture to a couple of guilds, one in Austin, TX, and one in GA, on what to do with leftovers. Every time I give this lecture I get inspired to go make something.

So I dove into my bin of thrums, leftover warp waste, of which I have a lot, mostly hand dyed yarns and ribbons, and grabbed a piece of micro-suede that I bought from a friend, fused onto fusible fleece, and started to assemble those thrums as a collage. I tossed them on, and covered each panel with Sulky Solvy.

Then I used a twin needle and a quilt bar and started to create a window pane effect to keep the thrums controlled.

Once I had all four panels completed, and washed to dissolve the Sulky Solvy, I started to assemble the bag.

Add this one to my collection, this is really fun.

And remember awhile back I played around with tying those same warp thrums together into what’s called Zanshi, a Japanese technique of wasting nothing. I wove those balls of tied together warp thrums into a fabric, which I hadn’t done anything with up until now.

So I cut out bag panels and made a tote out of those as well.

It has been a really productive week, but I fear that will come to an end. I really don’t like having my life a giant question mark, but ask anyone who goes through a tragedy, health issue, natural disaster, whatever, this is what being an adult is, and trying to stay focused and in the moment. I work best when I’m busy, and it keeps my mind from going into overdrive. Of course I fear that I’ll get called in the last day of my two weeks of jury duty, and be put on a case that could last weeks, because it is federal, but I can’t think that far ahead, and just do whatever I need to do today. I think another zip bag from the leftover scarp warp from the Winter’s Tale scarves…

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…