A Room for Everyone

I've spent the past two days - much of it, anyway - working on the room assignments.

I had done the initial room assignments based on what we *thought* would be popular, with high numbers of students, and using the largest rooms for those teachers/topics, then assigning the rest into the smaller rooms based on how many I thought would be interested.

Turns out I was right for some, wrong for others.

Not to mention I found out yesterday - after spending nearly three hours on the task - that one of the larger rooms I had been counting on was no longer available.

The good news is that one of the rooms that I thought was smaller was actually larger than I thought it was.

By the time I found that out I had mush for brains, decided that sinus congestion, fatigue and trying to sort out a complex scheduling situation were not compatible and declared myself done for a Monday.

This morning I still have sinus congestion but had at least slept a reasonable amount, and started again.  Being fresher, I was able to see my way through the morass of information and two hours later I have an updated room schedule.

A couple of the classes might be a bit full, but hopefully not uncomfortably so.  And we're all friends, right?  We're all adults and we know how to play well together, right? 

We did have to cancel a few things due to low enrollment but those people affected have been switched to other seminars/workshops.  And there is one last opportunity to change things during check in.

Several workshops/seminars are full, but many still have room for more, should anyone suddenly find themselves able to attend. 

Our web mistress will be updating the website shortly with the cancellations.  We have had a few more vendors join us for the Market Hall, we have around $5000 worth of awards for people registered for the conference entering either the exhibits and/or fashion show.

Instructors are booking their travel and I will be letting the hotel know when to expect the arrival of those staying at the Coast Hotel.  (Locals will be sleeping in their own beds.)

We are officially 6 weeks (SIX WEEKS!) away from the conference.  Working on this for five years means a kind of surreal sense that it is still a long ways away - but it's not.

I will be spending a lot of time at the desktop generating lists - materials we are to provide, audio visual we are to provide, class lists, room listings for each building so registrants can find the room they are looking for (with floor plan so they know where the room actually is), so on and so forth.

I will also be writing up the fashion show commentary, arranging for the numbers for the models to carry and the printed program.

Through all of these details, I keep thinking about how organizing a conference is similar to designing a textile.  Lots of details.  Lots of considerations.  Lots of confusion.  Lots of complexity.  At times feeling like it will never work out.  But often times, how stepping away from the problem will bring clarity, and then?   Next thing you know, it's done.

I think there are lots of reasons that making textiles is so frequently used as a metaphor for life.  Look how many 'fairy' tales there are with spinning and weaving are profiled - Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin, The Swan Princes, and many, many more.

Regrets...

photo taken at the Ancient Forest 

...I've had a few...

I have several friends dealing with serious health issues while I keep being dragged down by some sort of virus I caught two weeks ago.

This morning I finally feel like I might have come through the worst, but feeling stuffed up, drippy nose, mild sinus headache, tired, achy, has left me with little energy to weave.  So I haven't touched the loom in far too long.

On the other hand, spring seems to be arriving and with it, another milestone...six weeks until the conference begins.

I am sorry I won't be heading out to Cape Breton for teaching, but with conference work ramping up, I'm also kind of relieved I won't be away for three weeks.  Or even one, if the class in Tenino had gone ahead. 

Sometimes the universe really does know what is 'best'...

Homework from Olds students came in a flurry in April and I hear there are a few more boxes to come in May.  I always tell students to aim for January, but they likely won't meet that.  I asked them to not send homework in May, but, here we are, the end of April with more to come.

All of that is to say, I find myself struggling to find the energy to do much of anything while in the back of my mind I know one friend is in hospice and her journey will soon end.  Conference details eat up whatever mental functionality I might have.  The loom calls to me and I ignore it.  I'm so close to finishing that warp, with the new one crunched, ready to go on.  Four more towels to finish - and I am going to continue to ignore it today and maybe tomorrow, too.

In May I also go get my blood checked to see how my cancer is doing, so the emotional roller coaster carries on.  Mostly I can ignore it, and really I don't expect to hear that I need to decide on treatment - yet.  But I've been so sick, it also makes me wonder about the cancer...

Some of the student work has been exceptional, which gives me hope for the future of the craft and lifts my spirits.  Gloria Steinem has said something about passing the torch - I paraphrase - no, I'm not passing the torch, I'm lighting more torches because the only way to improve things is by shining a bigger light, so I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much, and lighting up more.  I feel very much like Ms Steinem right now, hoping to light more torches.

I have reached the slogging through details part of conference organization.  I'm going to deal with a few things I need to do for myself, clear the dining room table, concentrate on the nit-picky job of reviewing room assignments, then start working on what each instructor needs in those rooms.

It's not the kind of thing I enjoy doing, but I'm just enough of a control freak that I will do it to make sure the teachers have what they need to do their jobs.

So I will be making lists, checking them twice (thrice, as many times as necessary).  At least this cold has ebbed enough I can find a couple of neurons to rub together.

But I am also at the 'what on earth was I thinking when I agreed to organize a conference' stage of conference planning.

So, yes, I have a few regrets...

Stars and Roses

It is a source of continual amazement to me how things interconnect in weaving.

One of the things that students study in level two of the Olds program is overshot and one aspect of that weave structure is how the central motif of so many overshot designs are called 'stars'.  More fascinatingly, how 'stars' can be turned into 'roses'.

Now I'm not a big fan of weaving with two shuttles so I never did do much overshot over the years.  But as part of my master certificate from the Guild of Canadian Weavers I had to learn how overshot worked, and do the star to rose conversion.

It can be difficult to tell them apart, but once seen, cannot be unseen.

In the above draft, I was playing around with a traditional draft from Pat Hilts work on the old weaving draft book about Gebrochene twills.

Over the past few years I have been using overshot motifs as the starting place for weaving tea towels, converting the four shaft motifs of several popular overshot threadings into twill blocks.  I have 16 shafts, so I can do that.  It was, in fact, this very book that showed me the link - it has the 'Wandering Vine" or "Snail's Trails and Cat's Paws" motif rendered in a twill block version.

Ah-ha! I said to myself.  If it can be done with that motif, it can be done with any four shaft overshot motif.

Paging through the book late the other night, I spotted the above threading showing both star and rose motif in the same cloth.  I thought it would look great on the 2/16 cotton warp with the singles linen weft I need to use up, so fiddled with it and came up with the above version.

If you can't see the two different motifs, then I direct you to look at the top right hand corner where the border turns into the motif.  The star sits first, then the rose and then they alternate across from right to left, ending with a rose.

The stars all connect along the twill line.  The roses are rounded and look like a flower.  (A pansy to me, but also a wild rose.)

Most of the 'work' that I did with this threading was to determine the number of repeats I wanted, fit the borders in to 'frame' the body of the towel, fiddle with the tie up. I don't claim this as original work, but inspired by or based on, the work of Marx Ziegler as presented by Patricia Hilts in Ars Textrina, volume fourteen, 1990.

Injury

People don't realize just how physical weaving can be.  This morning I read about another weaver being told of muscle tears.

Repetitive motions can cause injury.  If someone weaves like the above mentioned weaver or me, the risk of injury increases as we age.  I have been forced by my overall health to start slowing down.  Having a drug that caused muscle pain and weakness just made it even more obvious that I needed to dial back the effort and hours at the loom.

With my music/dance/sport background, I came to weaving understanding my own body and able to self coach myself into 'better' more ergonomic movements.  But no matter how ergonomic those motions, keep doing them - usually in the face of a looming deadline (sorry/not sorry about the pun) - and the weaver risks setting up inflammation.  If the weaver continues to weave, they risk injury, such as muscle tears.  So why do we keep on?  Because we have always previously been able to keep going with little to no effect other than feeling a bit more tired, a bit more achy for the long hours at the loom.

When I advise people to wear some sort of protection on their feet beyond socks, I get a chorus of "NO!  I have to feel the treadles!"  Or variations thereof.  In that case I tell people, don't weave for long periods of time or you can set up inflammation in your feet and recovering from inflammation in the foot is particularly hard because we still need to walk.

So today I step up onto (one of) my soapbox(es).

Sit in the 'waterfall' position.  Hips higher than knees.  Sit forward, perched on the edge of the bench, on your sitz bones, not on your tailbone.  Engage your core muscles to protect your lower back.  Sit straight, not rounded through the upper back.  Sit high enough that when you are in the waterfall position your elbows clear the breast beam.  If you don't you will hunch your shoulders and then the shoulder girdle and neck muscles can spasm.  And believe me, that is no fun at all.

Soft tissue injury can take weeks to heal.  If you want to keep weaving, take rest breaks.  Do stretches.  See a deep tissue massage therapist to help release any muscle spasms.  Pace yourself.

Steps off soapbox...

Chart courtesy of a website that provide free educational materials.

Sunday's Child

Monday's child is fair of face
Tuesday's child is full of grace
Wednesday's child is full of woe
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is happy and wise, and good and gay.^[1]

I was born on a  Sunday and learned the above rhyme as a child.

While I very much doubt that the rhyme really has any predictive attributes, I have always aspired to be that Sunday's Child.

When I'm sick, however, all of that goes out the window.

It started with my voice going 'funny', then coughing, then nose running, accompanied with low grade sinus headaches and lethargy.

One of my life lessons has routinely been 'acceptance with grace'.  I think I'm getting the 'acceptance' thing.  Still working on the 'grace'.

What do those words mean to me?

Acceptance is acknowledging that I am sick and not functioning very well at the minute and it is time to step down from my expectations of doing even the little that I had managed to recapture after a year of adverse drug effects.

'Grace' to me means not whining about it.

Not doing too well on that front.

I am so close to finishing the 50 yard warp - like maybe 5 yards (four towels?) left to do.  I had planned on being able to cut that warp off the loom today.  But it isn't going to happen.

Instead of kicking the metaphorical tires of my energy levels, I am going to try to work on things that don't require a lot of physical energy, which means hemming towels and fringe twisting.

And let the conference work simmer until I get more responses from the people I emailed over the weekend.  

(Just deleted a whiny sentence.  Still working on that 'grace' thing...)

About that Elephant

colour gamp with earth tones - colour gamps don't have to be rainbow - just sayin'

Well, Life Happens, sometimes more co-operatively than...others...

I have caught a cold.  So far it isn't too bad and I've been able to keep going.

Today I have sent official letters for American presenters to show when they cross the border.  I have let them know their numbers and given them email contact info for the students in their workshops.

One person who is doing a hand's on two part seminar needed her student email contacts too, so those also got sent out.

Eventually I got dressed (yes, all of that was done in my jammies!) and got to the loom to weave one towel.

That meant a late lunch, some procrastination, then back to the loom for a second towel.  It is now 'official' - two more navy towels will finish off the rest of the navy linen (except for some dribs and drabs).

Back to the desktop and dealing with 10 people who had some of their choices cancelled because there just were not enough people signed up for them to run.  We really hated to cancel, kept hoping for a few more to register but had to finally bite the bullet and make some hard decisions.

It's now 4 pm here and I am 'stick a fork in me, I'm done' state.  Time to go cast on another shawl (I finished knitting the one I have been working on last night) and then maybe do some hemming.  Because the current warp will be coming off the loom soon and I've barely touched the first dozen towels that Doug pressed two weeks ago.

What can I say.  I've been a wee bit busy.

OH, yeah - just about forgot - after we confirmed with Janet Dawson her workshop Gamptastic! was a 'go', we had a cancellation.  Since some local guild members had offered to supply a few looms for her workshop, if you are a weaver and didn't want to drag a loom to Prince George?  We can probably fit you up with one.  It will even be dressed.  All you have to do is arrive with your favourite shuttle. 

Jargon

Every craft, every endeavour that we do as humans, has 'jargon' attached to it.  Since weaving (and spinning, and knitting, and, and, and) all require specialized tools, knowing what these tools are called and the names of the processes involved in the craft makes communication more specific.

It's really really hard to ask a question when all you have are 'the pointy thing' or the 'lever thing' to refer to when asking a question.

So for anyone wanting to learn how to weave, I generally suggest that they get a book out of the library and go through the glossary to learn what all the words of the language of weaving mean.

In the back of The Intentional Weaver, I included a list of books I have found useful over the years along with some websites.

I'm not saying you can't learn how to weave unless you know the language, I'm just saying that to ease communication it might be a good idea to learn some of the language.

You don't even need to know it all before starting, but it will help to learn if you know what the books or the presenter is meaning when they use words like 'reed', 'beater', 'fell line', 'pick' and so on.

It also helps to know how to spell those words.  Especially things like 'treadle', 'heddle', 'brake'.  And my favourite... 'dyeing'.  (I've got a story about 'dying' and 'dyeing' - maybe I'll tell it one day.)

'Dressing the loom' to me means the entire process of getting the warp into the loom - from rough sleying or spreading it in a reed or raddle to winding on to threading, sleying and tying it to the front of the loom.

Others take a narrower definition and only consider the beaming to be 'dressing'.

Some of the older books, especially those from England, will have the English terms, not the more modern ones.  So you might see 'batten' instead of 'beater' or 'heald' instead of 'heddle'.  But once you know the 'American' version, the 'English' words taken in context should make sense.

If you are one of my students I will offer the words and supply a definition to put the word into context.  Then I expect you to make an effort to learn the words.