debor049

We are having a bit of a quiet day so I’m fringe twisting.  Mary had a twisting tool so I didn’t have to bring mine.  I only brought four with me, but my hope is to Weave four more as part of demonstrating what I do.   Who knows, I might even get them twisted before I head home.  I have most of Friday afternoon and evening to work on them. :)

With a very tight connection at O’Hare, it wasn’t entirely unexpected that I missed my flight in spite of a mad dash from concourse E to C.   I may be getting too old for this much fun. :(

It feels like my 'normal' for the past 10 years is trying to weave down my stash.  So what's new about that? Well, my energy levels, for one thing.  One of the adverse effects of the cancer drug is to feel tired.  Even on the lowest possible dose I feel tired all day long and this summer has seen me struggling to overcome that feeling and carry on anyway. The good news is that the fatigue brain fog is gone, and now that I'm well into the new scarf design, the colour combination possibilities just keep coming.  I currently have six warps wound waiting to go into the loom and ideas for at least another dozen.  I just happen to be out of time right now to do much because I leave tomorrow for a two week trip. While I am very happy to get out of here and hopefully away from the smoke, it is with a pang as I leave these unwoven warps to await my return.  (Yes, I have packed one wound warp and yarn to wind another - because where I am going there are looms and one...

I read a blog by Jim Wright  for a number of reasons.  He's a writer and a political commentator, beholden to neither end of the political spectrum.  This morning his blog talked about information overload and how difficult it is to separate the wheat from the chaff. In context of my adding to the overburden of information, I started thinking about what I was hoping to accomplish by writing and (self) publishing another(!) book on weaving. I've told the story elsewhere about doing a demo during a level one Olds class and having a student ask me which book the information I provided could be found.  And realizing that none of the books I was familiar with contained all of the things I had talked about in one place.  And that it was time for me to sort through what I understand about weaving and write it down. This book isn't intended to be The Compleate Book of Weaving - others have done a more thorough examination of how cloth is constructed.  What I am hop...

Both of my looms have developed a patina on the beater top where I alternately use right and left hands to bring the beater forward and back. This loom was a rescue loom but I don't remember the patina being this obvious when I first brought her home, so the patina here likely reflects the many hours of weaving we have done together. This marking doesn't bother me.  I find it comforting, in a way.  A reflection of our journey together, making textiles.  Mostly tea towels, place mats, shawls, scarves.  Even a few rugs.  A partnership between tool and tool user. To me it reflects many hours spent together making cloth.  My happy place. The finish is wearing off on the left hand side a wee bit.  Probably because of my wedding band.  If it gets bad enough I may ask Doug to refinish the beater top.  But for now, it's just a mark of our work together.  Work that I hope will continue for many years to come.

This summer has been challenging for a long list of reasons.  We have been dealing with daily smoke, better or worse, for going on two weeks.  I rather suspect that the smoke is getting to everyone.  Nerves are getting frayed.  Children and people with lung issues (or allergy to smoke) are being urged to stay indoors.  So our altogether too short summer has been shortened even further because people can't do the usual summer activities - gardening, boating, fishing, just enjoying the sun while it's here. The smoke has created some pretty amazing effects in terms of the sky, from blood red suns to spectacular sun rises and sets.  But it is also eerie and unsettling.  Not to mention knowing our neighbours are being hit hard.  Evacuation orders are in effect and last I heard our town had 3000+ evacuees, some of whom have lost their homes, livelihoods, animals. Since I was already struggling with adverse drug effects and the toll of a very busy spring...

When my younger brother died, suddenly, much too young, at work, we were all stunned.  At the reception after the service, I managed to say a few words and ended with this: "I can think of no better example to follow than Don's. Be brave enough to dream big dreams. Be bold enough to work to make them come true. Live life with love and joy. And every day, try to be a better person." It recently occurred to me that those words could just as easily apply to me.  That perhaps, in some small way, I was an inspiration to him, just like so many of his friends told me that day.  They made a point of coming up to me to tell me how much Don respected me.  How much he looked up to me.  At the time I was puzzled as to why that might be.  Yes, I was his older sister, which led to some interesting and funny things while growing up.  But look up to me?  I shook my head. Ruth asked me about what day I wanted to aim for to hit publish on my book.  Don's birth...

If Facebook is an oracle it had a message for me today. First was an audition  where a young woman sang a song she wrote after losing her hearing, called "Try". Then Janis Ian posted about 're-wiring, not retiring'. I chewed them over for a while because I felt there was a valuable lesson in those two posts that I needed to pay attention to. The past few years have been one health issue after another.  Over the past couple of weeks I have had conversations with some friends about my lack of energy, my abundance of 'tired'.  How difficult I'm finding dealing with stress.  And that I am looking forward to 'retirement'.  But that's not actually true.  I am not at all looking forward to 'retiring' from what I love to do. All my life I have dreamt big dreams and worked to make them become reality.  At times I have had to re-tool my approach, adjust my expectations.  And I realized that this latest phase of my life is just another time of ad...

Earlier today I wove a couple of tea towels, but as much as I would like to get that warp finished, I am also getting concerned about my other craft fair inventory.  I'm very low on scarves, and since I have boxes and boxes of various kinds of rayon in my stash, I switched to winding warps. Now, when I say I have boxes and boxes, that doesn't mean I have a lot of choices for colour.  In fact I have depth of stock in a limited range of colours.  Since I'm wanting to have as large a range of options for customers to choose from, I'm winding warps just long enough for two scarves, changing the colour options in each warp. For some of the warps I will use two different wefts in order to increase the options even further. People come to a craft fair to get unique items, not see dozens of the same thing in the display, so even though I'm making the same quality of cloth, it's a good thing to have a wide range of colour combinations for them to choose from. Since stash...

Nine boxes.  I was thinking there were six.  Well, I am going to try to use some of this up.  But first I need to see what is actually in those boxes. This is yarn from the fashion designer I used to weave for.  She retired when she hit 65 and offered me her yarn to buy at a huge discount.  Since I was familiar with the yarns she used, I foolishly said yes. Of course I was recovering from by-pass surgery, beginning to feel 'normal' again, no problem, I can buy some of your stash!  And then I sent Doug back for more... Now, what to do with it?  Now that I'm three years older, dealing with adverse effects from the medication that is keeping me this side of the grass/snow.  Tired All The Damn Time. Since I'm low on scarf inventory, I've been proto-typing scarves.  They won't be *fabulous* but they will be classic.  And being rayon (mostly) they will have great drape, and not the silk price.  Although I did manage to use up some (most...

Magic in the Water Kerstin Fro:berg's Weave a V, which I published in English I am - and have known - a number of people who have written and published books, either via more traditional publishers or by self-publishing. Personally I have done the self-publishing route for a number of reasons.  For Magic, it was the logistics of getting a book with actual fabric samples into the hands of readers. Having been involved, either directly or indirectly, in getting books 'born', I can tell you that it isn't easy (if it was, everyone would do it) and it costs a lot.  There are the actual out of pocket expenses that are, for the most part, hidden. For Magic, it was pretty obvious that a fair chunk of change went into the materials for the samples.  But what wasn't perhaps so obvious was the number of hours of labour that went into it as well.  Not just the writing, and there was plenty of that, not just the cost of the yarn, and it wasn't cheap.  There was the designing...

Yes, I did indeed make a threading error, leaving out a repeat of a block.  Once seen, cannot be unseen.  But, on the other hand, the 'flaw' won't in anyway affect the ability of the tea towel to dry dishes, so I'm not fixing it. I am, on the other, other hand, dealing with another loom issue.  While the dobby head seems to be fixed, one of the shafts was not perfectly straight and because it was dipping downwards on one end, the warp ends on that shaft were not lifting as much as they should be doing and I realized well into towel number three (the first one after the dobby fix) that I was getting really (really!) long floats on the back side.  Which, in this case, is going to be the 'correct' side of the cloth. After complaining about the issue, Doug has effected a temporary 'fix'.  I'm too tired to weave now, plus it's time to make dinner, so it will wait until tomorrow to see if it is going to allow me to weave without stopping every fourth p...

So.  Here I go again.  For the 'last' time? I made the decision earlier in the year that I would not accept workshop bookings from guilds.  It had all just gotten to be...too much. Too much scrambling trying to find several groups in a regional area to keep travel costs lower.  Too much travel agent type work, trying to make sure I could get from place to place.  Without too many (unpaid) days between events.  Too much financing of said travel costs.  Too much inventory of yarn I don't normally use, but needed for the workshop topics.  Too many binders of drafts, which always, always, need to be edited specific to the workshop.  (This one every loom is a table loom so I had to go through and convert every single draft to liftplan.) Too much administrivia.  Too much. This workshop is in BC, so travel isn't horrible.  (It will still take all day to get there, because of going from one small airport to another small airport, via Vancou...

When it is feasible, I wind warps holding two threads. Winding two ends at a time means winding goes twice as quickly as winding one at a time.  I prefer a 2 x 2 cross, especially when the yarns are textured, as in this warp.  Textured yarns may tend to grab onto their neighbours and this can sometimes cause problems during beaming. This warp is two different yarns, both rayon, both 'wobbly', both textured, one more than the other. When winding a warp with a 2 x 2 cross, the ends must be kept together.  If the loop is separated, this will prevent the cross from being transferred. With this warp at 16 epi, wound two at a time, I am using a four dent reed putting four ends per dent.  If the warp was wider (this is a 'short' reed, plenty long enough for the 12" wide warp) and I had to use the longer 8 dent reed I would still put four ends per dent, but would then leave an empty one in order to achieve the spacing needed for the cloth. During threading I will be random...

...comes the clean up.  And the return to reality... In one way writing The Book was a trip down memory lane as we mined my sample collections for textiles to serve as illustrations for the weave structures I chose to write about.  Partly it was an exercise in a certain level of anguish - what to include, what to cut?  With the stated aim of not trying to write a 'how to weave' book but a 'how to weave better' book, I didn't really want to repeat everything Mary Black wrote about in her tome.  What I wanted to do was explain some of the whys that don't get discussed as well as some of the background information that isn't usually included in most 'learning to weave' presentations.  So my approach was to say "here is what I do - choose what might work for you". It was also a way to share my designing thought processes, which I did for one of the projects.  I didn't want to flog the horse (so to speak) but just share some of the back and ...

Early on in my career I had the opportunity to study for two weeks with Mary Andrews at the Banff Centre of Fine Art.  She was strong and independent, generous with her knowledge.  At the end of July she died at 102. Jane Stafford has written a moving tribute to Mary in her latest newsletter . It was while at Banff that I became intrigued with Bronson Lace (and huck and Swedish, but mostly Bronson).  When I got home from Banff I spent hours hand drawing drafts because personal computers were not readily available.  In fact I purchased my very first desktop by going into the computer shop with the system requirements for Fiberworks and purchased a system that would run it. But that came later. In the weeks following the class at Banff I took up Mary's challenge to really understand what was happening with the threads and how weave structures worked.  I continued to learn how to make designs in different structures.  I, like Jane, learned how the Fibonacci se...

Getting some of the book/inspirational projects finished this morning.  The above is a pinwheel design on four shafts, woven from Tencel (a type of rayon). Rayon in general is a very dense fibre which holds a lot of water.  As a result, when rayon is fully saturated it feels very stiff and not very appealing to the touch (in my opinion). However, when it is dry it is very flexible and feels very silk-like, mainly because it was engineered to be as much like silk as possible.  In fact it was originally called 'art silk' until more accurate labeling laws became a thing. This is a scanning electron microscopic view of rayon.  It's pretty smooth and pretty dense. This photo was taken with an 'ordinary' digital microscope at about 800 times magnification.  On the left is Tencel, the right is cotton. Both yarns are cellulose but being extruded rayon (Tencel) fibres can be very long while cotton fibres are much shorter.  Both are spun to the same number of yards p...

patina from hundreds of hours of weaving As I work on the final(?) edits for the book, it feels like picking my way through a minefield.  What to say?  What to leave out as being redundant (because this isn't the only book on weaving and there are plenty of other resources available).  How much information to share in terms of how I design my textiles?  Do people need to have All the Information or just enough to spring board their own creativity?  Do I really know things other people don't know?  (I doubt it.)  But!  I have put myself into the position of trying to write it down.  I have chosen to try to find my way through the hazards or writing a technical manual and find the words to pass on some of what I know to others. Writing this blog has been good practice for this.  I have posted - almost daily - for ten years (yes, really!) now.  The blog began as a way to document my recovery (I hoped) from a fairly serious health issue...

Once again weaving has administered a reality check - nope, still not perfect. After working on The Book for so many (cumulative) months, I am just about at the point where I am so *done* with it.  If it weren't for the fact Ruth is here, right now, polishing, polishing, polishing, it would be so very easy to just toss it all and say I just don wanna any more. But I am also so close I can taste it.  My ego has been taking a kicking though, as I look through my samples, weave more, discover that over and over again I am so far from 'perfect' it isn't even funny. A big part of me wants to write the 'perfect' book that everyone will find helpful, useful, a'classic' of the literature.  Another part of me knows very well that that is an insanely ridiculous thing to even think of. Of course all of this isn't helped by a loom that isn't behaving very well, introducing 'errors' into the cloth that are nearly impossible to see...until after wet fi...

In my initial thinking about how to illustrate The Book, I had naturally(?) assumed that all of the textiles ought to be brand spanking new.  To this end several friends stepped forward to contribute projects, winning my undying gratitude! But as I thought about the whole project I realized that I didn't have to make absolutely new examples for every single thing.  In fact, a single project wouldn't necessarily show some of the depth and breadth of the weave structures under examination. Ruth, able book midwife, agreed that mining my collection of textiles I use for teaching would be a fine thing to do. As I dug through my boxes and bins, it suddenly occurred to me that the perfect suite of samples already existed, in large part - the samples I did for the master weaver certificate. So much of what informs me as a weaver and a teacher is the work I did towards achieving the certificate.  The program is broad in its approach to understanding woven structure and in order to...