Intro Video for S.A.W Graphic Novel Class

As part of the Sequential Arts Workshop (S.A.W) online Graphic Novel class, we’ve been asked to make short videos introducing us and our projects. I thought you might find it amusing. 

It also explains the storyline behind Vampire Ex-Boyfriend and what I hope to accomplish with the project. (So, you know, SPOILERS)

It’s 3:34 minutes long.

CNCH 2012 Goodness

Needle ThreaderThis past weekend I traveled down to Oakland to teach at the Conference of Northern California Handweavers. It was a fun time. I hadn’t been immersed in the fiber world in a while and it was good to be back.

I was there to teach two classes, “Beginning Rigid Heddle Weaving” and “e-Textiles”.

It’s always a blast teaching beginning weaving, because there’s this “ah-ha!” moment that happens when people get how weaving works, and as one student put it, “I can’t believe I finished an entire scarf in a whole day!”  (I’m guessing she was a knitter.) There were a few hiccups during the class, like the moment I realized we didn’t have warping pegs for everyone–we got creative and threw chairs on top of tables–I wish I’d taken a picture of that. There were a few cantankerous looms, but we got them sorted.

I skipped what I heard was a great Saturday night presentation to finish prepping for the eTextile class the next day.  Work and life had been extra busy leading up to the conference, so there were things I needed to get done.  Darn my work ethic!  I would have like to see Peggy Osterkamp talk, she’s one of my fiber gurus; I’ve learned a tremendous amount from her books and had the honor of meeting her person, too.

The eTextile class the next day was a guilty pleasure for me.  It’s hard to get 12 people together in a room who like blinky-glowy things as much as I do, so it always tickles me when I teach an eTextile class and get to spend a whole day with such folks. Class went well, the extra prep time I put in meant more Arduino Lilypad samples and demos than I’d had in previous classes.  The students whipped through the sampler, got into programming in a big way, and we had extra time at the end to go into a tour of some of the great eTextile projects and websites.

I had so much fun, that I’m currently putting together a September weekend workshop in which students will learn eTextiles basics and then go on to modify a garment to create a work of wearable electronic art.  If you’re interested in this or future eTextile workshops, you can sign up to receive eTextile workshop information.

Another highlight of the conference was getting to spend time with the other instructors. My roommate was the lovely and effervescent Jacey Boggs. As you know if you’ve taken a class from her or watched her video, she’s fun and lively.  She’s also very, very smart.  I see her working as force for good in the fiber world for a long time to come. I wish I hadn’t had to be so heads-down prepping for the eTextiles class, there were so many interesting things we could have talked about.

I was good in the vendor hall. Falling down only a couple of times in front of the Just Our Yarn booth (Hand-painted 140/2 silk!) and Lunatic Fringe (Silk tram!  On vintage bakelite bobbins!). I steeled myself against the many charms of the Gilmore booth’s  Mini Wave loom. It’s so cute!  And I actually do have a legitimate need to weave shoelaces that are 110 inches or longer now. But it wouldn’t have fit in my suitcase (I took a card, one may yet follow me home.)

Meals with other instructors is one of the great things about teaching at conferences.  There’s so much to share, and other teachers are so inspiring. This conference I got to meet Sara Lamb and Stephanie Gaustad for the first time, and chat a bit with Judith MacKenzie and John Mullarkey.  On the way back from the conference I flew out with basketry teacher Judy Zugish, who was a delightful companion as we waited in the airport.

My only regret about CNCH is that I wish I’d taken more pictures.  I tend to get so focused on making sure the classes run well and students have a good time, that I forget to take pictures.  The only took two: a clever hand-made needle threader a student brought to the eTextile class (I am so going to make myself some of these for class) and Jacey Boggs’ spinning wheel after I signed it (there’s a longer story that’s hers to tell, but the gist is she’s having students sign her wheel and as a past student I qualified–I’m in green, about 7 o’clock.)

Signing Jacey's Wheel

Randy Darwall & Brian Murphy Workshop

Recently I had the good fortune to get into a workshop with Randy Darwall. It was so popular, that I had ended up on the waiting list and didn’t find out until two days before that I’d get in. The format of the workshop is a round-robin critique of people’s work, with an eye to helping them take the next step artistically.

Getting in at the last moment was both exciting and challenging.  When I’d first heard of the workshop, I thought that the project to take for review would be the Birthday Blanket. It’s the most ambitious piece I’ve done color-wise, and I have to confess that I thought it would be a fun way to take everyone who’d contributed to the project with me (or at least their yarn.)

With only two days to go, I threaded the loom and sleyed the reed.  There’s no motivation like a looming deadline.  A trek to Weaving Works supplied a variety of likely wefts to test-drive. If you’ll recall, the thought behind the birthday blanket is that everyone would send me a warp that represents them, and I would pick a weft that represents me.  Apparently, I am either a brown rayon chenille, a burgundy rayon boucle, or eggplant-colored wool.

blanket project sleyed

I wove up the test piece, and had tension problems right away. Some threads just wouldn’t lift right in the cloth and long ugly floats were developing in the cloth. Oh great, I thought, it starts now. With all the different fibers there’s a lot of variation in the stretchiness of the warp. One thing that might happen with this warp is that as it goes on, some threads will become slack while others remain tight. It’s this element of risk that’s kept me too afraid to tackle this project for over a year.

But then a miracle occurred, I looked down into the shafts of my AVL and saw that one frame had gone crooked (which can happen easily with this loom because of the way the shafts are suspended and then held together with metal rods.) I fixed that issue, and all my tension problems went away. It was a good moment.

The next problem was that what I thought was a plain-weave draft (yes, I am weaving plain weave on 16 shafts) actually was only the header of a more complicated twill. So in the middle of nice fabric, there’s about 4-5 picks of weft-faced twill.

I fixed that and started weaving a rich, multicolored fabric that just delights me. The weaving tension was good, the colors mesmerizing, and the meaning of bringing so many people’s threads together so meaningful.

I cut the sample off the loom the night before the workshop and ran up to my husband, “You’ve got to see what I just made!” He looked down at it, rather blearily because it was past his bedtime. “Um, cloth?” This my dears is why you should hold your fiber friends close, only they will get that it’s never just cloth. (To be fair to Eric, he probably feels that I fail to appreciate video games sufficiently.)

blanket fabric

On the loom, I liked the rayon chenille section best, the eggplant wool second, and the rayon boucle not much at all (it was too thin and made for sleazy cloth.)

Of course, you can’t tell what you’ve got fabric-wise until you wash it. After washing the fabric gained texture, all those differential shrinkages coming into play. The color also shifted a bit as the relationship of warp and weft change slightly. The post-washing favorites were eggplant-colored wool (it just felt like blanket to me), and then the rayon chenille, and the rayon boucle did not improve.

Eric and Kai voted for the brown rayon chenille, with Kai even making the comment, “But Mama, that color is you.” It was such a sweet comment that I’m reconsidering brown, but in wool this time.

So I took my ripply, multi-colored cloth to the workshop. I sat next to weavers who’d been weaving for decades, who’d brought their most successful projects with this test sample, full of weaving errors, three different wefts, lumpy and bumpy, and constructed from threads I hadn’t even consciously selected.

Randy Darwall with swatch

What did Randy Darwall say about the blanket swatch?  I’ll tell you next post, I’m blogging over my lunch break and out of time for today.