Speaking of friends!

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

What a great weekend I had.  I am spacing out the blog postings so I can keep it interesting.

Sunday, the 27th I got a call from my friend Dana (my tapestry student).  She completed my friend KraftyMax's camera bag.  Do keep in mind that neither of us had any real idea of how to go about making a camera bag.  I live 3 hrs. from Max so all I had were measurements.  Thank goodness I didn't really trust them and my weaving skills are exact.  I actually wove the pieces quite a bit larger than they needed to be.In my head I was allowing for waste.

We did run into a few snags.  Max didn't really want a strap on the bag.  Her idea was that when the bag is closed the camera strap will act as a strap for the bag. Hmmmm....In order to accomplish this we had to make sure the bottom was rigid, so we inserted plastic canvas.  Then Dana decided that she would put ribs of the plastic in the corners...then we also found that the top collapsed and had to insert plastic there also.  Do keep in mind we were trying to create a cube.  As for me, I wanted the top to fold over onto the front side in a triangle so I can make some sort of closure.  Maybe even a tassel

that twists around a button...still thinking on that one.

So, if you recall a few weeks ago I completed her double weave camera strap with her business logo woven into it.  Now the actual cube has been made and will be delivered to me sometime this week.  Then I will develop the closure and ship it out.  I can't wait for her to see it.  This just behind the success of Gail's backstrap.  

This morning I feel many things.  I feel as though I have made some very good new friends, even the ones in cyberville who's faces I have not and may never see.  I also feel as though I make a good 'team' player with some of them (That would be you Dana).  I feel as though I have been blessed with a talent that allows me to show them how I feel about them also!  (Have you seen the rug I made Ms. Carol for her kitchen, or even Dana's one skein project bag?)  I feel satisfied today, something that eludes me often in my life since I was forced to move to Georgia.  Like a contributing member of society.

Here are pictures of the bag so far.  I will later show you how it looks with the strap and a closure.  I love Max's color choices.

What I've been up to!

I guess the one thing I haven't been up to is posting on my blog, and for that my friends I do apologize.  

I went into something of an uninspired state of mine after all of the weaving before the holidays.  This is not the first time this has happened to me either.  I often start next years holiday presents in January.  This past year I did not.  So as a result I had alot left to do before Christmas.  Plus, as you know, I was learning new techniques on my little Mini Wave loom.  I made spectacular leaps and bounds with it even if I do say so myself.  But after Christmas I fizzled out.

I did recently start some new projects though and so I thought I needed to give yo an update of sorts.  I really wanted to have the choice of whether or not I had to have horizontal stripes in the background of my weaving's.  This lead me to alot of research, the result of which would be to learn to do double weave pick up.  Definitely not a beginner technique.  I don't consider myself a beginner at this point, but certainly not an expert.  But I dove right in.

You have seen pictures of the first couple small pieces, and then came the black/red and white piece.  After the 4 practices in plain double weave I decided to try for a design element.  No problem right...wrong.  I chose my colors, if you have been following along you know I went with the brown/gold/copper mist and silver.  I figured I would figure out the design as I usually do, make it up as I go along.  Wrong again.

I made an 11 foot warp and the thing was beautimous!  However, it was also done with those tiny little #10 threads.  What a disaster, these old lady eyes just couldn't cut it.  The warp was sixty threads or so wide.  That means that since there were 2 colors in each heddle one side of one shed had 120 threads.  This soon became beyond tedious.  I ended up with twisted threads and I don't even want to think about how many times I tried to do a design and had to un weave.  

This technique is kind of like basket weave the way the rows line up.  Every other row they move to one side.  When you do simple warp floats they go from being picked up in row one, floated over row two and then back into the weave on row three.  As a result these line up perfectly one above the other.  But that is because it is every other row.  On Double weave this is not so.  I had an extremely hard time wrapping my head around this.  Eventually I gave in and decided to use one of Laverne Waddington's charts from her blog.  It worked!  YEAH!  wrong...It was so tiny that on an 11 ft. warp I would have been weaving for the next year.  

So I rolled past that part and started again.  Self, I said, Just do plain double weave and let this beautiful thread speak for it self.  I need a new belt anyway.  Wrong yet AGAIN!  As Laverne warns you have to be very careful of spiraling of the threads one around the other.  So when I rolled up the woven part I flipped it over to see the back side and make sure I was on the right track. I discovered THREE dark brown flecks on the copper mist side.  They were all  spaced through out the piece.  Basically to fix them I would have to un-weave the entire piece...AGAIN!  NOOOOOOOO....I cut that sucker off and threw all 9 feet that were left in the garbage.

Then I did the happy dance.  

You have to understand that since I have no full time job, wasting yarn is not something I take lightly.  I despise waste.  Especially when I had to send to FL to get the yarn in the first place.  This little town has nothing to offer in the way of art supplies of any kind.

But still, I DID THE HAPPY DANCE.  LOL  I felt like I was let out of jail and I don't care even today about the waste.  

On to bigger and better things.  

Wait till you see what I did today! 

Friday is a 'Play (think weave) day'!

I am looking forward to Friday.  I will be going to my friend Dana's house for a 'play day'.  Actually, she purchased my Kromski Harp Rigid Heddle a couple of months ago, (that is how I purchased my Mini Wave), and I committed to teaching her how to operate it.

So we have a date.  I am going to go to her house and we are going to weave.  I even got to pick out the menu.  We live in farm country, and she has some vine ripe home canned tomatoes.  Sooooooo, I asked for homemade tomato soup and grill cheese sandwiches.  Simple, but fresh food and good company to do my favorite thing.  Weave.  I will also have good company.  Can't wait.

It seems that I am indeed starting to have some sort of life, all be it a small one, here in Moultrie, GA.  Guess I just have to make the best of  the situation and it is getting easier every day. 

Currently on the loom!

So I got another long warp on.  This one is 9 1/2 ft. long.  It is done in celery green and Christmas green striped background for the pick up technique.  It is done in 100% mercerized cotton #10, very fine.  It measures 2 1/4 inches wide. This one is 72 threads across and I have a 60 thread design area.   Now I just have to do decide what I want to do for the design work.  I am finding that I am not overly fond of these greens.  Since I have no job I am trying to make the best use of what I have on hand. I started, as you can see, to do the 3d effect, but I find that the colors are not vivid enough to give me the pop that I want.  Might turn out that I simply 'wing it' again.  Some people call them samplers.

I find that when people use the term 'sampler', it somehow takes on a negative connotation.   I like it though.  It is like eye candy to me.  You have to keep looking at it to fully see all that the designs have to offer.  Each viewing brings you something new, sort of a surprise.  I like that. 

I also took the pictures in such a way that you could see how I have myself set up!  The loom sits on a teak or maybe mahogany piano stool that I got off e-bay a few years back.  Some silly person had sprayed it silver, so I stripped it and used it to sit on in front of my loom.  That loom is now history, but it is the freestanding one that I built myself.  Anyway, I have a wooden tray with burn accents on it clamped to the stool.  Just a spin and I can raise or lower my loom.  Works beautifully!  If you look closely you can see that most of the accessories are hand made by me.  My swords, shuttles and such.  

So far I have not been able to max out the little Gilmore Mini Wave.  I am still getting used to working with a warp board.  Eventually I want to do a 4 inch wide piece. 

Yesterday

Yesterday I couldn't leave the house to distribute flyers due to car problems. 

So I decided I needed a new pic for the flyer itself.  You see the very first one I gave out, the lady as me 'what is a spindle'.  I found that strange myself, because even before I became involved with the fiber arts I knew that a spindle was somehow used to spin yarn.

Since it is one of the workshops I will be offering, I felt that I needed to place some spindles in the pic with the loom just in case others needed to see it to know what it was.

This being the case I figured it should indeed have something spun (yarn) on it.  This being Georgia and cotton season just upon us, I figured Cotton was a good thing to start with.  Especially since I happen to have a whole trunk of it.  Also, I have 3 different kinds of spindle so I figured I should show at least 2.  Sooooo, I got out my fiber and spun all day with spindles.  Haven't used one in a few years, so I kind of had to start at the beginning all over again.  Of course I find it faster to use my spinning wheel, but they don't have spinning wheels for me to use at the school so this is not conducive to the workshops. 

I also needed to dig out the spindles and fiber because when I do go downtown to hand out more of my cards and flyers, I am going to take some fiber and a spindle and sit in the little town square and spin.  Hopefully this will draw some attention and help me market myself.  The looms are a little too heavy to carry around.

The new pic with looms and spindles will be on the flyer but I will post them here for you to see also.

Today I volunteered to help with some sort of fund raiser at the Art Center for a couple of hours.  Gotta go for now everyone.  Hope I am not boring everyone to tears. 

What's new around here!

Yesterday I went into the big metro area of Moultrie, Ga!  LOL  Actually, I did go downtown.  They have a little town square area that is quite charming.  Carol let me out downtown and I went door to door handing out flyers for my art workshops at the Art Center.

I am amazed at how receptive all of the shops were.  I was only about half way around the square when I ran out of sheets and cards.  Where I am from this would usually not be allowed.  I have heard people say they "don't want their store cluttered up" and such comments as that.  But I was not told no by anyone I approached.  I was told that they all try to support each other and to especially support the Art Center. 

It really is a large art center for such a small town.  I hope this word of mouth personal touch is going to help me pull in students.  When most people hear that you weave, they immediately picture a big floor loom in their head.  Not many who are not involved in the fiber arts realize that there are all kinds of different methods for weaving and the fabric structures that they will produce. 

When I started out at this I decided that if the primitives cultures, like American Indians for example, could walk out into the desert and create a loom and a weaving  with just what they could find for laying around for supplies.  Then I most certainly should be able to develop a loom with the help of the local hardware store.

I have seen looms priced at exorbitant amounts of money!  Mine cost around $20.00 to build.  The Bolivian, Peruvian, Hopi and many other peoples use back strap looms which are simply a bunch of sticks held together by the warps to weave on.  Their body is even involved as part of the loom.  How ingenious!

So, on my flyer, I actually put a picture of my loom with a weaving on it.  You can actually see the "Home Depot" logo on my stick shed, it is a paint stick for a 5 gal. bucket of paint.  The wood was bought off of the cull card at the same hardware store.  The legs are scrap wood I found on a construction site and asked one of the men to cut it (he had the saw in his hands anyway), and then I came home and drilled holes to put the threaded rods through.  Those rods and the nuts and washer, and a screen door spring for spacing the threads are basicly the only expense.  I even made my own swords out of lattice wood from the hardware store.  I have had them for about 12 years and they have a beautiful golden patina from so many weavings and of course from my hands.  This picture is how I open the conversations about my workshops.  I make sure to let me know that we can build them a loom just like it for well under $20.00.  

As for the spinning class, I was asked what a spindle is?  It never occurred to me that people wouldn't know what it was!!!  So I guess I am going to have to add my spindles to the picture!  I made those myself also, less than $5.00.  Then they can even use yarn that they created themselves in the weaving class.

I wore on of my Peyote bead cuffs and it was a "HUGE" success!  I think that class will actually have people in it!  

I might even teach pink straw basketry.  Even though I am new to that particular art form, it also drew alot of attention.

I am going to revamp my flyers, and then I am off to do the rest of the square, probably today.  Class starts in less than 2 weeks and I need students.  (As an instructor I am indeed self employed.)  Tomorrow, I will help with a fund raiser by selling lunches at the Middle School next door to the Art Center.

I also warped up both of my tapestry looms last night!  So when I get home today I can sit right down to weaving.  I went from nothing to do for weeks waiting out that biopsy to full blast in a matter of day.  I am grateful to be healthy and getting back into my life.

I leave you with some pictures of this loom and hope that you all have a wonderful day!

Shuttles to hold your yarn!

                                           
                                             Close up of the screen door spring on the top!

                                                                    Close up of the loom!

                                                                   Weaving in progress!

 

The weather was very nice here yesterday, not as deadly hot as usual.  It rained all night and today it is even cooler!  SO I  NEED TO GET OFF THE COMPUTER! and get going.