Craft

A Eureka Moment

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130328 Weaving (1)

 

Last night’s weaving was a revelation to me.  I’ve been doing a sampler in Summer and Winter and because I put on a 3 yard warp I decided I would weave a couple of runners with different treadling to help it all sink in. I have to admit I am such a novice weaver that until last night I had a slight grasp of what I was doing but truly didn’t really understand the structure.  Last Sunday Pam held a class on drafting and we also had to do our own draw downs on graph paper.  I am amazed at how hard I have to think to make the design part work.  I’m sure that after I do this a while it will be easier.  The class was excellent and I came away with a much better understanding of structure – how the warp and weft work together to make the desired pattern.

A couple of weeks ago I was weaving the beginning of this pattern, I had done about 2 repeats then left it for my next session.  When I got there last night it took about 15 minutes to just figure out where I’d left off.  I didn’t have a real draft of what to weave so I struggled to get going and REALLY struggled when the pattern had to change.  After weaving and unweaving I finally decided I would look (really look) at what I was weaving and what I wanted it to do and write my own draft – at least the treadle part.  I figured out each change by raising different sheds to see what they’d do and wrote it down with whatever repeats I thought would work.  Eureka!  I wove the next full repeat and it worked exactly the way I wanted it too.  This is EXCELLENT – heh, heh.

As I was weaving along I had to take a couple of photos – because I love the way it looks – I could just photograph it all day long.  I also wanted you to see that the back of the piece is the exact opposite as far as color and pattern.  Weaving is very cool.  I was also thankful that all I had was four treadles – with anymore I may never have figured it out.

130328 Weaving (2)

On Process and Product

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IMAG0449

 

The little afghan in the photograph I crocheted in 1972.  I was part of a group of women who were all crocheting at the time.  It is small, delicate and I love the way the colors played together.  A baby blanket for any gender.  The funny thing about this is I think it is the ONLY thing I have ever crocheted (at least to completion).  I liked making this because the motifs were easy and mindless, that’s everything I love about some crafts.  I love the feel of fiber in my hands, being drawn through my fingers.  Whenever I begin a knitting project now the one thing that makes a difference in how often I pick it up is the texture of the fiber.  A friend(?) once told me I was like Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men because I loved the feel of soft things, of fur and fiber (and I played with my hair obsessively at the time).  To this day I think about that remark and feel like I may have a better understanding of Lennie’s phyche than many people – not necessarily a good thing.

I do a lot of things with my hands.  It’s my way of thinking, relaxing, calming down when I’m stressed, working through problems.  I love making beautiful things. My projects have become much more complicated as I age.  I’m not one of those people that could knit the same sweater more than once.  The little crocheted afghan will never be replicated, I made it, it’s done, it’s over.  I’d have to say that probably 70% of the projects I finish I give away.  They are often made with someone in mind and if said project lives up to my perfectionist standards off it goes.   That crocheted blanket was made with someone in mind but the window was missed in giving it to him.  It’s amazing to me that I still had it since I’d moved so many times from 1972 on.  Different lives, different places, different people, just the flow of time.

I recently reconnected with the intended recipient of that blanket and gave it to him.  I thought that since I had been carrying it around with me so many years I would miss it when it was gone.  You know, it was a relief when it left my hands into his.  I felt a little foolish in a small way giving a 41 year old man something I’d made before he was born but it also felt like it had made its way home.

Robyn Spady in this months Handwoven magazine writes that “we make our own legacies when we pass along the items we create.”  I really think that’s true.  I have a legacy of things created by my mother, grandmother and great grandmothers.  They all mean something to me when I look closely at them and imagine their hands working the stitches.  I have their creations and know that for them it really was the process as well.  In the back of my mind I hope the recipients of my work will someday treasure them as much as I have the things left to me.  Maybe it will inspire them to create something of their own and pass it on.

Dyeing for Dragons

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DyeIt always amazes me how one craft leads to another, then to another.  A few months ago I wrote about a dragon rug that I wanted to hook.  The design has been enlarged, next I will transfer it to the backing.  The problem with this project (and the fact that I am kind of a control freak) is the only way I can hook this the way I envision it is to dye my own wool.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing because it’s something I’ve had a passing interest in.  This project just gave me the push to do it.

I’m not unrealistic in thinking that somehow this will magically be an easy thing to do but really the whole thing seems like a lot of fun to me.  Mixing colors, measuring, the accuracy of it all – I love that sort of thing so it will just add another dimension to my crafting abilities.  You can never know how to do too many things, right?

Yesterday I mixed up my basic colors, this coming weekend (or before) I will start with a simple recipe so I can get a feel for what it does – then it’s off to the races!

The dragon rug I envision is so much more than hand dyed wool – it’s hooked with sparkle and surface design and topped with a hand blown glass eye.  Visualizing this project has been more fun than any I’ve done in a while.  I want to do Mer’s drawing justice.

121202 Rug (3)I wonder if she visualized this in color as she drew it?

Weaving Wednesday 3

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130312 Green Summer and Winter

 

Still working on my Summer and Winter sampler/experiment.  I’m beginning to understand the structure and how to do a draw down so I know how to make a design I want.  Even though I have it graphed out it always comes as a bit of a surprise when I actually weave it.  I’ll probably weave a couple of feet of this design and then change to different treadling to see how I can switch it up yet keep the basic design intact.  It’s so beautiful and amazing to see it emerge as you weave.

Weaving Wednesday 2

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130305 Weaving

 

Last night I finished weaving my X’s and O’s after fixing a threading issue that was messing up the X’s.  With my OCD with perfection it HAD to be done!  I moved on to using 3 shuttles to do columns, two with complimentary colors and the cotton tabby.  It was a little confusing at first but once I got into a rhythm of what to do with the shuttles that weren’t being thrown it was fine.  I had some issues with my selvages but I think it was because I was concentrating on the pattern.  Too much was going on at the same time!

Not shown was a mistake I made that turned into the most wonderful tweed like pattern.  I only did it for about an inch when we realized I was reading the draft totally wrong.  Now I think I want to weave something with that mistake alone.

I finished the class with Atwater Bronson lace.  It’s very easy to treadle BUT I beat everything to death so the lace part didn’t actually show very well.  I’ll have to work on loosening up.  Pam said I won’t be weaving gauze any time soon.  Ha!

Folding Cranes

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Cranes

 

My new year’s resolution for 2012 was to fold 1,000 cranes.  I once met a kid, a little girl about 10 that had folded 1,000 cranes.  She was amazing, my kind of girl.  She loved crafting of every kind and totally got it.  Her brain worked like mine.  I only spent a couple of weekends with her because her father worked at the same facility I did at the time.  I wanted to take her home and transfer all of the crafting knowledge I had and watch her run with it.  Didn’t happen.  Oh, well.

Back to the cranes.  I figured if a 10 year old had folded 1,000 cranes I could do it and it was really a cheap little project.  By February of  2012 I had folded over 600 cranes.  The project was derailed when my father had a stroke and I spent a few months getting him (and me) settled into a different life.  Last week I found a box with these cranes in it and the remaining paper.  I took it to the table and started to fold.  It’s amazing that after months away from paper folding my hands remembered exactly what to do.  I find doing this to be very meditative.  It is calming and I can think about things as my hands are doing their work.  I think that really is the point of folding cranes, the meditation, even though the idea is to bring good luck to the house that has them.

So I decided to move my 2012 resolution to the  bucket list.  This way there is pressure to finish them but not within a certain amount of time (well, there is a finite amount of time).  The thing is I can see myself folding another thousand once these are done.

Weaving Wednesday 1

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Weaving (1)

 

Last night I started weaving on the warp I had set up last week.  The pattern is called Summer and Winter and has probably as many variations as I can dream up.  I began with a blue wool yarn weft with the yarn about the same weight at the cotton warp.  It is woven with two shuttles, one with the wool, the other the same cotton as the warp.  This allows you to use the wool as the design element and the cotton holds it all together.  After weaving with the blue I switched to a worsted weight yarn with more dramatic results.  I think this is because the thicker yarn fills in over the cotton making the patterns much more visible.

 

Weaving (2)

 

Of course it wasn’t until I got to this point that I realized my mistake in warping the loom.  I could have continued to weave the brick pattern (the first done in red) and would never have seen it.  Well, now, looking at the photograph, I can see it but once I got to the trellis type pattern it was blatantly obvious.

 

Weaving (3)

 

You can see how the diamonds aren’t connected on the left hand side.  This was caused by ONE thread being in the wrong harness.  Having a bit of an OCD with perfection all I could think was “damn, I’m going to have to look at that for another 2 1/2 yards!”.  My instructor, Pam Engberg, told me we could fix it and showed me how to tie a string heddle and moved my warp thread.  FIXED!

Weaving is one of those things that I’m sure I could do by using someone’s written instructions or using YouTube but when you get into trouble it’s a whole different story.  Pam has been weaving for many, many years and knows the tricks of the trade.  If I was by myself I would have continued weaving with it wrong (weeping all the way).

I think with any craft it is always good to take a class with someone who knows what they are doing.   A good instructor sees your strengths, understands your weaknesses and gives you the tools you need to work on your own.  Pam is teaching me the tricks of the trade.  She is excited about me learning to weave and I’m more than willing to learn it.  Win, win.

Chrome

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Kodachrome gradient

 

I was watching a news show this morning and as they faded to advertising they were playing Kodachrome in the background.  We talk about the soundtrack of our lives and this is one of those songs.  It was released in 1973 by Paul Simon.  Three years later I went to photography school, not because of the song. At the time we played that song to death.

“Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s
A sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”

This started me thinking (another rabbit hole) about my history with film.  I think Ektachrome was the first color film I exposed in school, probably after months of working with b&w.  The line went if you could shoot chrome you could shoot anything.  You had to pay attention to exposure.  Not long out of school I worked at a small lab processing Ektachrome and color negative films as well as black and white.  I have to say that even though I was the only lab tech there and after running hundreds of rolls of film and printing thousands of b&w prints I never lost my love of the darkroom.  It was quiet and meditative.  For me there was always magic in a darkroom – even knowing how it all worked, it was still magic.

It’s been many, many years since I’ve been in a darkroom.  I often lament the fact that my daughters will never experience processing their own film and making their own prints.  They are the digital generation.  I must admit if I am honest with myself that so much of the frustration of being a photographer was relieved by the digital age.  How many times did I return prints to a lab to be reprinted because they were too magenta or cropped improperly?  Now you have complete control over every image.  If you have something printed and it doesn’t look the way you expected it to then you have no one to blame but yourself.  How many proof albums did I put together and then take apart for brides to create their wedding albums?  Does anyone even have a wedding album anymore?  Now they have it playing with the dissolve and music as their screen saver on their computer.  That’s not a bad thing.  It used to take anywhere from 6 months to a year to get a couple their finished album, hours of work on the part of the photographer.

Maybe that’s what I’m really lamenting, the loss of the long process from beginning to end.  The light meter, the framing, the deliberate shot.  Not knowing what you have on that roll of color film until a week or more after it was exposed.  Now that I think of it it’s a wonder that half of the photographers I know didn’t die an early death due to the stress in their lives.  Shooting 300 shots at a wedding with equipment malfunctions requiring some pretty creative exposures. Using your flash manually (can you even do that anymore?) knowing the distance by eye and setting your exposure instantly. Then waiting to see if you get that phone call from the lab saying “Uhm, you have 3 rolls (90 shots for me) underexposed and not printable.”  That’ll wreck your day, week, month.  I had the good fortune to have what few horror stories I can tell happen on someone else’s dime.  It was his crappy equipment and he had to clean up the mess.  You had such an intimate knowledge of your equipment and your film, you knew what you could do with it and when you were pushing the envelope.

Today my go to camera is often my phone.  I am still a deliberate photographer.  I compose every shot.  I don’t load hundreds of photographs onto my computer with edit in mind.  I don’t think you should have to do that.  I think you should see that shot in your mind and strive for it.  Of course there is still the edit of that one shot but now I have complete control and that too happens in an instant.  I will never be making little cardboard vignettes or tools with wire to print that special print again.  Although I have to say when it took me hours to make that perfect b&w print it meant so much more to me.

 

Summer and Winter

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summer and winter sampler warp

 

I like to post a photograph each time I have a weaving class.  I do it for me so I have a record.  I did receive a lot of comments on this the other day and thought I’d give just a little more information.  This is going to me a sampler for a draft called Summer and Winter.  I’m doing a sampler so I can better understand the structure of this weave.  My teacher tells me we are going to beat this pattern to death so with three yards on the warp I should have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on by the time I take it off of the loom.  While I’m weaving it I will be thinking of what kind of project I want to make with this pattern when the sampler is finished.

I was going to post some photographs of this woven from other sources but I think I will just post week to week with its progress and what is happening with it.  I’m such a novice weaver that I have a lot of “aha” moments in all aspects of these projects.  I’ve also found that I dream about aspects that I don’t understand and solve problems in my sleep.  I find weaving to be mentally challenging.  The warp and the weft all come together to make a pattern but I sometimes have difficulty visualizing it. There’s a lot of math involved initially so if your math is off so is everything else.

I think my instructor sometimes gives me more credit for knowing what’s going on than I deserve.  Last week she was explaining how this was all going to work and I could NOT wrap my head around what was going on.  She drew it out on graph paper with me and talked about how many “units” went into it so we could figure out what kind of warp to wind.  I just agreed and did what she told me to do.  It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I knew what she was talking about.  It’s nice to know that my brain can actually figure this stuff out.  I see it as exercise.  People that take up musical instruments or learn a foreign language as they get older are supposedly more likely to fend off dementia.  I’d put this in that category as well, I have to really work my brain while I’m awake and sleeping to get this to work.

Most of the women in my class come to weave things, they follow the pattern until what they want to make is finished.  I’m not dismissing that capability because you have to know a lot to make that all come together.  I am one of those people that has to know why things work the way they do.  I believe once you know the why you can do anything within the medium.  Yup, I’ll keep telling myself that and continue to dream about the mechanics of weaving.