Sherri Woodard Coffey

While working on the never-ending fish, I watched an old episode of Perry Mason. Imagine! I heard the word tapestry, and boy, did my ears perk up! The link will reveal the synopsis.

Weaving

I use two ends while weaving, so an additional goal is to lay those yarn pairs in parallel to each other. I’d like to see if it actually makes a difference in the way the tapestry looks. I already know it slows down the process for me.  The weaving went really well today, at last.

Labels

I experimented with printing labels on fabric last night. It worked pretty well, except that the fabric is too thin. If I use the labels, I will have to put an extra piece of muslin behind the printed label. I used Word and printed out a whole page of different labels.

Joann’s has the labels in two locations. In the t-shirt department they have rolls of cotton twill and poplin, and silk habotai.  In the quilting notions, they have sheets of that are in a container just like the labels in an office supply store. The labels I printed will need to be cut up and hemmed before using. I planned on a 3.5” x 4” finished size.

Tomorrow

I think I’ve finalized the next ikat design, stretched it out for a cartoon, and will have it ready for enlargement at Kinko’s. I may want to look at it with fresh eyes for a couple of days before doing the enlargement, just in case familiarity does not breed fondness. Have to buy a gift for a baby shower also. That’s #1 on the priority list. Shower is Saturday. Yikes!

Fiber-wrapped tree at Pahuk

Finally! I think I’ve got the upper fins of this fish marked in the right places. When you only weave in bits and pieces, it’s like learning all over again every weaving time. Tomorrow should go quite well, I think.  After this, I may use up some hand-dyed rug yarn that was given to me and weave a plain weave piece while I prepare the yarn for a new ikat piece.  Of course, I could just clean up the studio, right?

Another installation from the Beamis. These are large cardboard cones…interesting. Same links as Tuesday’s post.

Just as I was starting to weave this morning, the dentist office called and said they’d had a cancellation. So, of course, I showered and went to the dentist. Not a fun experience. Had someone’s hands in my mouth for about an hour. I already knew it, but not it’s confirmed—I will need a crown on this tooth. And more bad news. The tooth beside the broken one has a crack. I never had a cavity until after my first child was born. What’s up with that?

And since I was already out and had spent over an hour at the dentist office, I had a long overdue visit with my parents and a late lunch with a friend. Then on to the grocery store. I really need to spend some quality time with this fish on the loom!

Tomorrow I will be getting up early, having my coffee, and head to the studio. In the afternoon I will help a new weaver that I am mentoring with setting up her first floor loom. Actually she already has it up, we’re just going to work on tie-ups and fine-tuning the loom. We will be going through all the spinning wheels and other equipment that I mentioned in a previous post.

More Omaha

Wall of phone books—the white pages. The second picture is a close-up.

Below is a phone booth made of yellow pages bricks.

These pictures are from the Beamis Center in Omaha. The installation is by Matthew Dehaemer. You can read about it here. There is a bird’s eye view of the whole installation.  Small phone centers are set up where students are calling everyone in the Omaha phone book with the quote of the day.

This is the same center where Mary Zicafoose completed a residency in 2008. You can read about that here by scrolling towards the bottom of the page. There is also a podcast interview.

Yesterday

Yesterday I did my two hours weaving which is somewhat frustrating at this point because I’m having a hard time keeping up with where I am in the design. Got the huge cartoon out and re-marked everything, hopefully in the right places.

I also did some design work, which involved much math. If I want a spiral to be a certain size after ikat wrapping and weaving, how much do I stretch out the spiral? And, in addition, I’m going to take it to Kinko’s to be enlarged, the dimensions have to work for both width and length. Think I finally got it worked out, but will let it “soak” for a while before making the plunge at Kinko’s.

We went to see Star Trek in the afternoon. I had heard it was a good movie, but knew going in that space movies are not my favorite. I was squirming in my seat and looking at my watch frequently. And the theater was COLD!

Today I will call the dentist about an appointment for the broken tooth. Fun stuff!

I shouldn’t have, but I took the day off. Now I will be playing catch-up all next week. Can’t seem to get enough sleep…

I have been getting pictures ready for a disk to send to my fellow ikat-ers. I really didn’t take many pictures, but this is one of a wonderful old file drawer system that was being thrown out. It’s in a store called Souq (no, I don’t know how it’s pronounced). I asked about the cabinet and was told that the owner of the store rescued it from the street, all she had to do was pay someone to haul it for her. The store is in the Old Market section of Omaha, a wonderful old redbrick warehouse district with brick streets. Souq has all kinds of imports, cute tie-dyed shirts, embroidered shawls, really cute straw hats, etc. Reminds me of the hippie days.

Tomorrow 2 1/2 hours weaving, stuff around the house and maybe a movie in the afternoon.

Wild Phlox (I think) growing along the roads and in pastures in Nebraska and Kansas

I’m tracking my weaving and got in 2 hours today, along with errands, preparing dinner, and breaking a tooth. Wouldn’t you know it—a broken tooth on Friday afternoon right before a long holiday weekend. No pain, and I hope it stays that way until I can get to a dentist on Tuesday.

The plan for tomorrow is more weaving and the usual have-to-do stuff. Next week I will go through the pictures on the “real” camera (as opposed to phone camera) and see what’s worth keeping. I’m also mulling over what my next ikat project might be. Seems that when a goal is set, circumstances conspire to sidetrack one’s efforts. Dentist! Arrgh!

Sunset on the Platte (Pahuk)

I just drove to Nebraska for a 3-day workshop with Mary Zicafoose. The workshop was great, and I will post more about it later. But now, I am committing to getting in 15 hours weaving time per week. Makes me want to retract that statement just putting it in black and white! I will really start on that goal next week, but for the rest of this week I am trying to get in what would be the required time based on the days left in this week. What with Main Street Arts Festival, and the drive to Nebraska, too many days go by without weaving. Going days w/o weaving means too many mistakes and too much unweaving. There are many things rolling around in my head as I weave, which will also probably be future blog posts. Of course, there other studio time commitments besides weaving (designing, business), and then there are the regular house, yard, friends, and family commitments, so we’ll see.

Later…

Here are pictures of the same statue side by side. The left is with my cell phone, which has a highly rated camera and the one on the right is with my camera. Today is not as cloudy as yesterday, and the sun was actually shining a bit as I took the picture with my camera. I’ll have to the same experiment again with pictures made on the same day under the same conditions. The whole statue seems to have a crisper look in the camera picture.

Just happened to notice this statue as I was leaving a store today. Put my stuff in the car and went back with my cell phone camera. Wished for a “real” camera. My camera takes better pictures, naturally.  Might be worth a little experiment someday.

Completely gratuitous pictures of rugs from a market in Peru

Yesterday I went with my new friend and mentee to check out a couple of looms for her to buy.  The owner of these looms died in 2005, and the children were getting to the point of selling her house, so the the looms needed to go. One of the looms was a Handcrafts Studio Loom, 46 in. 8- harness, made in Tarzana, California. The other was a Schacht table loom on a stand with treadles. There was also a LeClerc table loom, and two upright Navajo-style looms, plus boxes and boxes of books. As this weaver/spinner taught spinning, there were also many spinning wheels, which we did not even attempt to look at and saved for another day. I brought home the books as a donation to our guild, Amy took the bought the large loom, the Schacht, the upright looms, bench, etc. She can hardly wait to get these up and running in her new studio. The large loom will have to wait until after her trip home to California this week. It is upstairs so will require dismantling and the pick-’em-up truck to get home. We were both really excited about this adventure.

Also yesterday, while weaving, I got up to check something, moved the wrong way, and pulled my back. I could hardly get up the stairs to look at the looms yesterday. I couldn’t believe I did this. I don’t have back problems!  Today I spent with a heating pad, reading and napping. The good news is that the back is better, which is good thing since I need to get up early and do the regular maintenance on the car. That plus the regular grocery day probably precludes weaving for tomorrow, but Thursday …