No valet? No problem

I'm dressing the guild loom with a tea towel warp using a couple of vinegar bottles to provide tension during beaming. :)
Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

Admin Work is Also Work

This afternoon I've just invested about 2 hours in uploading information on the Diversified Plain Weave scarves to my Art Fire store, then creating a 'collection'.

http://LauraFry.artfire.com

Collections are a new sales tool Art Fire recently introduced and until now I haven't had sufficient inventory to create one. You need a minimum of 12 items plus 4 more items to fill in when the collection items sell.

I was going to wait until after I got home from One of a Kind before I did this, but decided that if I'm going to take advantage of Christmas buying, I'd better do it now and just put my Art Fire store on vacation mode while we are in Vancouver.

And while intellectually I know that doing this sort of work is still work, it always feels like I haven't really accomplished anything.

But when you are trying to sell your textiles as part of your income, the fact of the matter is that your job isn't finished until you've sold them.

After two hours of peering at the computer and fighting with a dying camera battery and websites that freeze up in the middle of trying to enter data little wonder I have a headache and that all I really want to do is go have a nap. We won't discuss the 4 hours of sleep I got last night, no doubt contributing to that urge. :}

The Neverending Warp

with broken end repair threads hanging from the back of the loom.....

This is beginning to feel like the Neverending Warp! Of course it is the third 40 yard warp in DPW all black, so perhaps I'm justified in feeling this way. But it seems like very time I start a new scarf I think to myself "This one and one more and this warp will be done."

Well, I've thought that 3 times, now, and there is still warp left!

I have my references and materials to begin work on The Project but since Deadlines Are My Friend, I've sternly told myself that before I can begin on The Project I must
(must!) finish this warp! The reason I need to finish is two-fold - I want some of these scarves for One of a Kind Vancouver in 10 days and some of these scarves are gifts for a few of my everyday heroes.

Stacey Harvey-Brown http://3.ly/Wg9z blogged about hidden talent and heroes today which set me thinking about the heroes in my life and how grateful I am they are with me. I don't always let these people know how much they mean to me so it was a wonderful opportunity to use this warp to make some of them personalized scarves.

Waiting for a few days before beginning The Project was also a good idea because I've let some of the organizational aspects of doing The Project simmer in the back of my mind and have come up with some solutions - which ought to make The Project move along a little more smoothly. It's also helped to flesh it out and given me a clearer view of my objective. Always A Good Thing!

With One of a Kind coming up so quickly I'll likely leave both looms naked until I return. By then I will know whether or not I should put another 40 yard DPW warp on the AVL as the well from which I draw my inspiration appears to be a little low at the moment and it would also be nice to see if any of these scarves sell to make it worth my while to do another run of them. :}

So let me finish up this rather rambling post by encouraging everyone to let their everyday heroes know how much you value them. This time of year, it seems like a natural thing to take a few minutes to show your appreciation of their example and presence in your life.

Magic: 37

Getting Ready for January

in with the new, out with the old......maybe....

I really love the grey carry on case. It has travelled with me for literally thousands of miles, to Europe several times and all over the continent for nearly 20 years. :)

But all those miles have taken a toll on it and although you can't see it, it's got a big hole on the other side where Doug did his best to patch it. But - just like it's owner - it's getting old(er) and a bit tattered around the edges!

And there is one thing I don't actually luv about it - it has no wheels. There have been way too many times as I rushed through one huge airport or another with a tight transfer that I really, truly wished it had wheels!

After 40 years of marriage Doug and I tend to find something fairly pricey that we have been lusting in our heart after and name it our Christmas gift. This year Doug chose a tool storage chest he'd been eyeing for a while and which he thought was on sale for half price. Turns out it was the cheaper version that was on sale, which he discovered after he'd already got permission from me to get it for his Christmas present. Feeling magnanimous I told him to get the one he really wanted anyway.

Which gave me permission to be a bit spendy on my own gift! ;) Right? I mean it's only fair?

Well, the carry on case I really and truly lusted over is the new version of the grey suitcase I'm about to retire, but it was hugely spendy and I just could not justify spending nearly $400 on something that is literally going to get kicked around the continent. So I settled for the cheaper one pictured above.

But I don't think I'm going to toss the grey one out yet. I don't always travel by plane, after all. :)

Baby Steps?

the cover of Magic in the Water....






one of the project pages from Magic....



Does anyone not know what Magic in the Water is? It's a 2 inch ring binder filled with information on what wet finishing is and how to do it. The 'meat' of the book is the project pages where you see the completed project in a full colour photo (taken by Joe Coca, the official photographer for Handwoven), the draft used with suggestions for fewer shafts if many have been used, an explanation of how the cloth was wet finished with not just the finished state sample but the loom state as well. Samples cover cotton, linen, wool (both woolen and worsted), alpaca, mohair, Tencel, silk. Techniques include things like brushing up a nap, how to do on-loom twisted fringes for woolen blankets/scarves, one way of how to do a four sided fringe for cotton, warp sizings etc.

If weavers learn through examining fabrics woven by other handweavers (or industry), then there is much to muse over in Magic.

I've just decided with the holiday season upon us I would do a special offering - order Magic by the end of the year and get a free hand woven tea towel as a special gift from me to you (or go ahead and re-gift, I won't mind!) http://LauraFry.artfire.com

With my intention to reduce the amount of stuff I have, I thought this would be a perfect way to make a baby step in the right direction. Find new homes for some of the last copies of Magic, and give people a present which will also help to clear some of the inventory from my storage room.

So please, even if you have your own copy of Magic - spread the word?

Wishing everyone the best for the coming holiday season.....

Organized

my 2011 calendar....

I really wish I were better organized than I am, but (you saw that 'but' coming a mile away, didn't you?)........but I'm not.

People who are not organized always have a million reasons why not. I think we spend more time thinking up excuses than it would take to simply get organized! But the fact remains that I live - and work - with a level of clutter that many people would find hard to deal with. Heck, even I find it hard to deal with!

Having 3 years worth of health issues to distract my attention really hasn't helped, either. There have been days (weeks, truth be told) that I just couldn't face the reality that I probably belong on an episode of Hoarding.

It doesn't help that I live with a DH whose level of tolerance for mess is even higher than mine, but that's just one more excuse.

With some forward movement on the health front, plus the start of a new major project, I've done some thinking about what needs to happen for me to get a grip on my disorganized life.

The first thing I need to do is to stop doing so many things. Between production weaving (and trying to sell the fruit of my looms - sorry about the pun - just couldn't resist), retailing yarns and fibres, publishing teaching aids (books, cd's), writing said teaching aids, teaching - all of which require copious reference materials, space to store yarns, products, etc., etc. plus my 'hobby' activities (knitting, spinning, bobbin lace, reading, jigsaw puzzles) - well, you get the picture. And all of this being done out of a fairly modest home.

DH also wants to retire as soon as possible - right now that's about 16 months from now IF the Canadian government in their wisdom doesn't push the minimum age to collect full pension to 67 - which means I want to pare my business expenses as much as possible before then. Which means letting the steam press and annex go. I don't know if we'll be able to sell the boiler that drives the press, but I'm pretty certain the press (made of cast iron mostly) will simply get delivered to the scrap yard and sold for whatever the metal is worth. Hopefully for enough to cover the cost of delivering it to the scrap yard.

But there's all that stuff stored there, too - yarns, books, left over samples from Magic, looms (two of which should really find a new home) etc. And then there's all the booth display apparatus that has to live somewhere.

So in order to make this happen, I need to finish skeining off the rest of the yarn that needs to be 'not white' and get as much of it dyed as possible in December after One of a Kind - which means I really need to get skeining NOW!

I need to sell the rest of Magic (down to 40 copies, plus the abridged copies which number around 60), Weave a V (haven't even recovered the cost of publishing that yet), decide to throw out the rest of the samples from Magic just to free up that space, sell as much of the retail yarns as possible (Fibres West March 18/19, and HWSDA conference in Calgary in June) and think hard about getting out of yarn sales. Getting out of fibre sales is a given - they are far too bulky and way too little profit in them.

As for teaching - I have one shelving rack with my binders holding the handouts (which get reviewed and edited every time I teach them), plus all the yarns I have specially for teaching those topics above and beyond the yarns for production, the numerous buckets of samples for each topic and which I have toyed with tossing out on more than one occasion. But if I'm not going to be in high production (and given this economy, will selling hand wovens really be economical?) then should I focus more on the teaching instead?

Then there's writing. Although I would love to write and be published, it would be best if I could get paid for that. There is only one major publication that pays for articles and there's no guarantee of getting a project accepted there and the once a year (or two years) I've had an article published isn't enough to pay the electric bill to run the computer.

So what do I actually wind up cutting out? Since the chances of winning the lottery in Canada are about 1 in 14 million, I guess that's even worse odds?

Currently reading The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper

Results

a fan of scarves showing my selvedges....click on the image for an enlargement


People quite often exclaim over the straightness of my selvedges. They want to know my secret, or assume that I must have some trick up my sleeve for getting ruler straight selvedges (most of the time, depending {there's that word again} on weave structure and yarn).

The secret to getting straight selvedges is no secret at all. Or at least, I've not kept how I do what I do a secret. I've been active on the internet since 1994 (anyone remember bulletin boards and usenet groups?) telling people what I do and how I do it. (Check the labels here or my You Tube channel for video clips.)

The 'secret' to getting good selvedges is learning the physical skills that need to be utilized and using 'good' tools/processes.

What those tools are will depend on the individual - their physical size, their personal hand/eye co-ordination, their equipment.

But to gain proficiency at something like weaving or any other skilled craft, the practioner must understand the essential theory behind what they are doing, be analytical about how they are doing it, and practice, practice, practice with a self-awareness of what they are doing, gauging the success of their results and tweaking their processes, sometimes changing their tools for ones that will work better for them.

Instead they rely on what I call 'magical thinking' - if I use this trick or this tool I will magically get good selveges without my having to do anything else.

Getting good selvedges requires a succession of steps, any one of which if not done well, will lead to poor selvedges.

First you must beam the warp well and under tension. The longer and wider your warps, the more crucial this step becomes. If your warp is 'cigar-shaped' on the back beam, you will have problems with your selvedges. (Unless you build that shape properly so that the outside threads don't slide off causing them to be shorter than the middle ends.)

A short narrow warp simply doesn't have the length and breadth to show poor beaming techniques because it's all too soon done. So a weaver who has consistently woven short (less than 5 yards) and/or narrow (less than 15 inches wide) warps who decides to put on a longer/wider warp will suddenly run into problems that s/he has never experienced before and cannot figure out what went wrong. They've been weaving for years and never had the problem before, after all!

A weaver should know how to hold and throw the shuttle efficiently. I know, I know, many people aren't interested in being efficient. What these people don't realize is that holding and throwing the shuttle efficiently simply means that you are doing this process in a way that will lead to good selvedges and a good consistent beat. In other words, they will get a better quality cloth.

Some people don't even know that there is an efficient way of holding and throwing the shuttle. I so often see shuttles being thrown (or should I say shoved) 'backwards' or even upside down. When I mention this to the weaver I generally get a blank look and a response of "I didn't know there was a 'right' way to hold the shuttle."

Again, if the weaver is only weaving on a narrow warp, how s/he holds the shuttle doesn't matter as much as when they try to weave a wider warp.

I watched a sheep to shawl demo one time where the weaver held the shuttle 'overhand' which meant she could not get the shuttle from one selvedge to the other as it could only travel 3/4's of the way across the web which meant that she was reaching into the shed to retrieve it. The net result of this? The handspun alpaca warp was stretching at the selvedge and I could see that the selvedge was starting to pull apart from the repeated stretching and abrasion due to fishing the shuttle out of each shed.

Over and over again I read/hear people being advised to leave sufficient slack on the weft. This is absolutely true - as far as it goes.

But over and over again I see weavers leave a nice lovely angle on their weft pick and then as they beat they pull the hand holding their shuttle towards their body which effectively shortens the weft pick and results in excessive draw in. And they get frustrated because they don't realize what they are doing and continue to do the same thing. Or they make longer and longer 'bubbles' in their weft which results in loops forming at the selvedge which in turn results in loose selveges ends and then..........poor selvedges.

Since I have begun having private students come to learn how to weave I have been delighted that they all appear to be 'natural' weavers achieving good selvedges on their very first sampler. It occured to me during a recent bout of insomnia that perhaps in addition to being naturally adept they are also benefitting from my tutoring. They are learning from the get-go how I hold and throw the shuttle and they are very quickly achieving selvedges that are generally consistent and pretty straight right away.

Ultimately if a weaver is happy with their results there is no need for them to change what they are doing. If they are not happy with their results, perhaps a good analytical look at how other weavers achieve their results will get them closer to the results they desire.

For a complete look at what I do and how I do it, CD Weaver III pretty much sums up everything I do except for how I now sley the reed. Since I've posted extensively on that technique (learned from Syne Mitchell who learned it from Peggy Ostercamp) I don't feel the need to upgrade the cd for that technique.

My advice? Get Peggy's new book and look at how she does what she does. Or buy CD Weaver III and try out a few of the things I do and see how they sit with you.

Christmas is coming - ask Santa for either of these resources and be open to trying something different if you aren't happy with your results.

(CD Weaver III is $60 on my website - if you order before Dec. 6 I'll include the sample packet set for free - this combination is $75.00 plus shipping on my Art Fire store.)