The Dynamics of Craft

showing the end of the towel including the hem area (at the top)

I think this is my favourite of the wefts I've used up until now.  Although the weft is actually natural, it looks very bright against the beiges of the warp and puts me in mind of icing sugar on baked goods.  :)

One of the blogs I follow is The Textile Blog.  Today John posted a very thoughtful post called The Dynamics of Craft.  I found it quite interesting.

It is something that people who want to sell their work ought to read and consider, I think. 

What do we offer the marketplace that is different or unique from industrially produced goods?  Industry produces everything we might require, and then some.  I remember reading somewhere that in it's heyday, the British wool (worsted) industry produced enough cloth for every man in England to buy 3 new suits a year.  Talk about market saturation!

So what makes what we make worth someone's while to purchase?  My tea towels are no better or worse than much of what is readily available in the shops in most any medium to large town.  What makes my towels diffferent is my design sensibilities - how I have chosen the yarns and the colours and put them together and the size I choose to make them.  I'm not copying someone else's design, I'm making up my own.

My approach to design falls within my personal preferences.  Do I prefer symmetry?  Assmymetry?  Do I prefer blues rather than greens?  Do I prefer cotton and linen rather than some other fibre?  I have acquired a stash of yarns (a palette, if you will)  - yarns that I like in colours that appeal to me.  I tend to work from this stash so my textiles will have a certain similarity - a style, some would call it - that makes my textiles pretty recognizable if you are familiar with what I make.

Just like Yves St. Laurent or Coco Chanel had a distinctive 'style', so do most creative people. 

From time to time we challenge ourselves to push the boundaries of what we usually do.  That is generally when we have our 'failures' - in the vein of "Well, I won't do that again" type of failure.  But learning what doesn't work is just as valuable as learning what does work.  Sometimes even more valuable.  Because in the end if we don't have a failure or two, are we really pushing the boundaries or are we actually continuing to stay in our 'safe' zone?

Market saturation is one spur to trying new and different things - a new item, new colours, new yarns.  But we have to be willing to 'fail' in order to succeed.

Next Big Project

next Fox Fibre towel

 

I think the towels on this warp are turning out quite nicely.  They will make excellent hostess gifts next year when I travel to teach.  They will also eventually be listed on my Art Fire Store as soon as they are wet finished, hemmed and pressed - which will take a while.  I'm just about at the half way mark on this warp with quite a bit of weaving left to do - it's a 40 yard warp.  :)

In the meantime I am getting over my cold and finally my brain and energy seem to be returning.

One of the things I have had to do is take serious stock of where I am at in my life and what direction I would like to go in terms of weaving/teaching/writing.  I'm now 61 years old with no pension plan other than to continue to weave.  No lottery wins for me!  (Of course one is supposed to actually buy a lottery ticket in order to win!)  :}

A number of people have urged me to produce more sample packets so I have been giving this very close consideration and have decided that if I scale back and do a much more modest presentation than Magic in the Water that it is feasible.

Right now plans include 10 projects with before and after samples.  This will mean 10 (approximately) 16 yard long warps to weave, cut up and wet finish the actual samples plus the prototype project warps.  The samples will come as loose pages (no binder) which will help save on shipping and production costs and the print run will be 150 maximum.  Printing will be done by a laser copier, not an off set press which will further reduce the expense of production.  Samples would be stapled to card stock as we did for Magic.  Yes, all projects will have project notes and be for either 4 or 8 shaft looms.

My deadline to have this ready would be by Convergence next year.  Ball park pricing is between $50 and $60 for the package plus shipping.  If you are at all interested you can vote on the poll at the top of the page (or email me laura at laurafry dot com if you want to be on my pre-publication contact list and I'll let you know when it is ready for sale). 

If this first publication is well received I have plans for 3 additional publications.

Currently reading Leave the Grave Green by Deborah Crombie

Is Weaving Hard?

click to biggify - 25% green Fox Fibre weft

I never tell my students that weaving is hard.  Rather I tell them that the creation of cloth is a complex process and if they take the time to learn the steps in that process and the language of the technology, they too can learn how to weave.

Weaving is a physical activity as well as a mental one.  There are also many levels of committment to the craft.  Once one learns the steps in dressing the loom they can spend the rest of their weaving life following 'recipes' and never learn how to choose yarns, colours and patterns on their own.  There are plenty of projects available in magazines and on the internet to choose from.

Or they can take the time to learn how colour works in weaving and choose effective colour combinations.  They can learn the characteristics of the various yarns available in order to create their own unique fabrics.  They can learn how weave structures work in order to create designs specifically for their purpose.

All of these aspects of weaving can be learned - but not overnight.  Weaving is not a craft that can be mastered without effort, without the time and energy required to absorb all the knowledge that goes into the manufacture of materials from the fibre/yarn up, including appropriate methods of wet finishing.

Learning the physical skills of weaving takes time and effort as well.  People often comment to me that I make weaving look easy.  They sometimes email me after watching my You Tube Channel and say that after watching what I do they have found they have been able to improve their own weaving skills.  When students come to study with me, they generally improve their efficiency in terms of shuttle throwing - and their selvedges - the first day or two.  I also show them how I dress the loom.  Some of them find my methods help, but not always.  It all depends on each person's manual dexterity, their physical abilities, their equipment at home and so on. 

There is no secret to what I do.  It has taken a lifetime of concentrated study to get to the level of mastery that I have achieved.  To quote Jamie and Adam of Mythbusters, I'm what you might call an 'expert'.  The difference is that I encourage people to try what I do at home.

Back In The Saddle Again

another view of the Fox Fibre towels

I've woven enough that the cloth can now be seen at the bottom of the loom.  The design is a bit 'static' but nice enough.  I'll do four of these and then change treadling and colour to one of the paler shades of green.  What that new treadling will be I'm not sure yet.

We got hit with a snow 'storm' and received about 12" of snow.  My neighbour, knowing I wasn't feeling at the top of my form, shovelled my driveway for me.  I was able to get to town, mail the scarf and pick up the first of this month's quota of bills.  Oh joy. 

Finally dealt with the stack of paperwork on my desk, most of which related to the teaching I'm scheduled to do next March.

So far my little tour looks like this:

Triangle Weavers (Durham, NC) guild lecture A Good Yarn Friday March 2

Triangle Weavers workshop Magic in the Water part II Sat/Sun/Mon March 3-5

From there I'll head over to Sarasota, FL - just waiting on the contract from them with their choice of topics.  That will be Thur/Fri/Sat March 8-10

March 12-16 will be The Efficient Weaver at the John C. Campbell Folk School.  I heard today that there are 4 signed up already.  I think the maximum is 12 on that one.

March 17 will be a one day workshop at the Sutherland Weaving Studio in Asheville, NC, topic to be decided.

I've applied to teach A Good Yarn at the HWSDA conference in Alberta next year and hope to actually make it to the arts festival in Grand Forks in August.  I also have a couple of conference calls for teaching on my desk and I'm trying to decide if I'll apply and what I will offer to teach.  So I guess my paperwork isn't actually all caught up, after all.  :}

Currently reading The Complains by Ian Rankin (I actually started this before I left for Vancouver and left it behind instead of packing it!)

A Weaver's Weaver

The greenish shade in this cloth is actually more blue in real life - I just can't figure out how to adjust the colour in my new camera software.  :(

From time to time I will weave for another weaver.  Sometimes it is in trade for their services.  Sometimes they simply don't have the time to do the weaving themselves.  Sometimes they don't have the equipment to execute what they need to have done.

In this instance, it was time that was lacking so I offered to weave a sample for Trish of Indigo Moon using a new-to-her yarn of BFL (Blue Faced Leicester) super wash in a fingering weight (knitting term).  The yarn has 400 meters per 100 grams or 430 yards per 3.5 ounces (or just under 2000 yards per pound).

The yarn was engineered for knitting, is a four ply with a fairly tight twist so it's plenty strong enough for warp.  Since it is a knitting yarn it has a fair amount of stretch, but not so much that it is difficult to weave.  I did have to be careful letting off the tension or too much warp would come forward.

With two colours - Celestial Blue and Divine Purple - I used a Fibonacci sequence to design a stripe.  I used 15 epi (I have a 15 dent reed but this could also be woven on a rigid heddle loom using two 7.5 dpi heddles).  The picks per inch were around 10 in the loom under tension which relaxed to around 12 ppi afterwards.  I didn't so much beat as press the weft into place.

The warp was wound at 3 yards in length and I lashed on to save yarn, hemstitching at the beginning and end to make a short fringe.  I wove about 80 inches (under tension) which relaxed to 74" off the loom.  The warp was just a hair under 9 inches in width with 132 ends; 8 inches off loom.

After wet finishing (hot water, rinse, rinse, rinse to remove some excess blue dye), it was tossed into the dryer for a few minutes until just damp and given a hard press on low heat.

The measurements were now 70" long by 7.75 inches wide.

The weave structure is plain weave and the cloth has a little bit of crispness but a fairly smooth feel.  The cloth shows mild tracking which imo looks quite nice, giving the cloth a little visual texture.

The colours are not completely level so the cloth has an abrash appearance - the slight variation in the colour is not truly variegated as such.

I'll mail the scarf to Trish tomorrow so she'll soon have a woven sample for when she does shows, selling her yarns.

Currently reading Dare to Die by Carolyn Hart

Road Trip Adventures

There is nothing quite like travelling for business when you simply must be somewhere at a particular time - and running into 'adventures'.....

While I love being somewhere other than here to teach or learn or sell, sometimes the getting there is more than I can handle.

Planes are delayed - or don't leave at all - causing all sorts of havoc when I generally need 3 or 4 different planes to get me to where I'm going.

I've arrived late - extremely late - like at 2 am with a 7 am wake up call to teach at 9 am - and this on top of a 2 hour time zone difference.  I've arrived without luggage, meaning I had to give the guild program in my travelling clothes and no samples to illustrate the presentation.  I've even arrived at a completely different airport from the one I was scheduled to arrive at.  Without luggage.  Again.

When driving, Doug did one season where, after arriving in Vancouver every single road out of the Lower Mainland was either flooded or washed out and he didn't know until the morning of his departure if he could make it to Calgary.  He did - dodging washed out bridges and potholes.

One cruel February every single pass through the Canadian Rockies was closed due to avalanches and it was only on the morning of our departure that Hwy 16 was opened.    We nearly expired of hypothermia as the temperature dropped to something like -50F in the mountains and the heater in our poor little van simply could not cope.

I've gotten sick from inadvertent exposure to allergens and had to pull myself together to present a coherent lesson or man my booth at a craft fair with a nasty cough/cold when all I really wanted to do was crawl under a table and pull the tablecloth down over me.

And so it has happened with this trip.  While my booth was not right next door to booths with scented products, it was close enough that I began to have problems with my allergies - which eventually turned into a nasty cough and cold.  Since I wasn't alone on this trip I asked Doug if he would drive me home and do Calgary by himself.  Bless his heart, he agreed.

Instead of heading east to Calgary this morning, we turned north and headed home.  Doug drove through rain, sleet, a spatter of snow and blowing backwash from big trucks as well as some good driving and things were going well until...about 20 minutes north of Quesnel where we encountered a long line up of traffic, mostly large trucks.

Doug walked to the big truck behind us to find out if the driver had a cb radio and knew what was going on.  Apparently a vehicle had had a run in (literally) with a moose and the road would be closed for a couple of hours.  We discussed turning back to Quesnel, although there didn't seem to be much point as there isn't really a viable alternative to Hwy 97 - or at least one we were willing to attempt in the dark - with a tight deadline looming.

Fortunately the road was opened sooner than anticipated and we were home only a couple of hours later than planned.

But he will be leaving tomorrow morning heading for Calgary all by himself.  I am feeling very bad for ducking out on him - and once more not being at Art Market in person - but the thought of waiting on potential customers feeling like Typhoid Mary just didn't seem very attractive.  I think he'll do better without me hacking and coughing in the booth....

The CBC

To listen to the interview go to the CBC website scroll down to Saturday Nov. 12 and click on the black 'bar'.  Sheryl MacKay interviews two other craftspeople as well as me (my part starts at 8:10 or so).