Too Many Hats

The beginning of staging for the conference

All of my life I have worn too many hats.  This year has been no different except that I took on way too many hats given my current state of health.  But five years ago I was in pretty good health (I thought).  I was in remission from cancer and cardiac seemed to be well in hand.

So to tackle co-chairing another 'major' conference seemed like it would be easy-peasy.

Life has a way of tossing curve balls and I got hit with both barrels (apologies for the mixed metaphor).  By-pass surgery in 2015, the return of the cancer last year.

My energy levels are much lower than I'm used to having so I'm struggling to get everything done that I want to do let alone what needs to be done.

In addition to general conference organization there is the vendor booth and teaching of four seminars.

Fortunately Doug is a very real support and participant in doing shows so he is doing most of the lifting in terms of the vendor booth.  And I mean that literally.  There are boxes of books, set out on the living room floor - the beginning of the collection (or staging) for the booth.

Ignore the bin - it's the contents of my desk I cleared off and have not, lo these many months later, had the inclination to sort through and toss or keep (if keep, where?????)

So I don and remove hats frequently throughout the day.  This morning I'm getting the comp copies ready to give to those people who substantially helped with The Intentional Weaver.  Since several of them will be at the conference I decided to a) save the postage and b) hand them over personally.  Maybe I'll get a hug.  :)

And no, I'm not doing the conference all by myself.  This weekend I forwarded some files to a friend who is a great administrator and loves spreadsheets and organizing data.  She will take care of the exhibit paperwork, labels and awards, act as 'secretary' when Mary and I do the jurying.

A member of the committee will print out the numbers for the models to carry in the fashion show as well as her duties of treasurer, and a guild member has been very helpful with getting the fashion show booklet printed.

Other committee members have been spending many hours on their areas of responsibility.

My biggest issue is that I no longer have the energy I used to have.

Of course I'm also still trying to weave for the craft fair season, do the marking for the Olds classes - there are two who are VERY late and will simply have to wait until after the conference is over.  They will be marked before Fibre Week so they have gone ahead and registered for their next level.  I have every confidence they will both pass.

Then there is getting ready to teach level one again at Olds in July (and possibly Yadkin Art Centre in NC August, if they get enough students for level one and two to go ahead.)  And I can't find my sample book so I can place my order for the yarn needed for the students.  :(  It isn't in the file drawer where it is supposed to live so I can only assume it's buried somewhere in the studio.  (weaving gods help me!)

The past month has made it abundantly clear that Things Need to Change.  I turn 69 this year.  I know people who retired at 55 to do the things they wanted to do.  When you have had the job you wanted and you love it and want to keep doing it, it doesn't make much sense to 'retire'.  On the other hand, when it becomes increasingly difficult to do everything you want to do, it is time to make some changes in what it is you actually want to do so that you can do them!

So some decisions have been made since the new year.  It seems like monthly I make a few more.  I keep chipping away at the things I do not have the time and energy for and try to hang on to the things that I feel I need to keep doing.

I need to preserve whatever energy I have for the things that mean the most to me.

I find myself going back to the original 'plan' I had when I first began weaving.  Production weave for 25 years, then teach.  Well, as it happens I did both at once.  Time to let go of the production weaving and focus on the teaching and learning.

Also time to face the fact that I am 69, in not great health.  Time to think about what happens in 10 or 15(?) years, especially in the face of so many people I know dying, at relatively 'young' ages.  Time to think about needing to have assisted care.  My gigantic AVL will never be appropriate in assisted care, but another loom might.  So I have decided to purchase a Megado with electronic interface because if I'm going to dig more deeply into the formation of cloth I will want more than four shafts and an electronic dobby will help with complex treadlings.

The AVL has served me well.  But it is showing signs that it also needs to be retired.  I will continue to limp along with it for a few more warps but expect it to be sold off for parts when the time comes.  It's too big and too worn for me to even think about selling it and it will have to go away for the new loom when it arrives, sometime in the new year.

The industrial steam press and the industrial pirn winder will go to the scrap yard.  The metal in them might pay for the truck-with-crane that will be needed to move the press out of the annex and onto the truck bed.

The annex will be given up, in no small measure because the rent has been increased - again, which means I need to squeeze everything there back into here.

I plan on doing the Art Market craft fair one last time and make that my last big out of town show.  I will continue doing the two shows here I've done for the past - in one case 4 decades - while I still have sufficient inventory to make them worthwhile doing.

Mentoring will become more and more important to me and I hope to continue teaching the Olds program in some fashion.  It gives me great joy and satisfaction to see the light come on in student eyes and see them go on to keep the craft alive and fresh with good solid information being passed on.

I am going to try to remember that my goal is to hang some hats up and leave them there, rather than wear them.

Wish me luck!!!

Prepping and Proto-typing

box full of pirns ready for weaving tomorrow

proto-type warp for Durham NC workshop

Today was slow but steady progress - the loom got threaded, sleyed and tied on, ready to weave.  By the time I got pirns wound it was too late to start so that will happen tomorrow.

I scored a box of colcolastic yarn this week.  I've been looking for a supply for a while so it was great to receive the box so I can add it into my workshop.  The really nice thing about the colcolastic is that it is lycra with cotton and it comes in colours unlike the wool/lycra I've been using.  It's also strong enough to be used for warp without too much trouble,  While I did use the wool/lycra as warp myself, it was a singles yarn so I didn't like to put it into the warp for workshops.

bamboo 12 and wool/lycra in the warp

So, while the pirn winder chugged out pretty much perfect pirns, I wound a warp to test drive for the workshop in March.  It's ready to be rough sleyed and put into the loom.  Again - tomorrow.

Currently reading Three Day City by Margaret Maron

Thinking Ahead

So, here is a much younger me with my Whitin winder.  One of the things I want to talk about during the general session address in Quebec is the equipment I have invested in over the years.  This winder is the cat's meow in terms of winding pirns.

I bought it from Allen Fannin in about 1986.  I remember telling him I wanted 100 pirns with it and he laughed and said  "more like a 1000, Fry".

It cost as much to have it shipped from New York as it did to purchase it, but it was worth the price.  We actually decided to buy two heads although I've only ever used the one - the other is there for spare parts if nothing else.

So long as you keep pirns in the carousel and yarn for it to wind from, it will continue to dutifully wind and doff nearly perfect pirns.  And all with a minimum of supervision.  I'm just in the photo to give scale to the machine.  My left hand is resting on the carousel that holds the pirns, you should be able to see a pirn being wound and which will get doffed and fall down a chute below the red 'tab' you can see in the foreground.  Click photo to biggify.

The one feature the machine does not have is the tail cutter, so after the collection box is filled with pirns, I generally cut the tails off and stack the pirns neatly in another small box which then gets taken to the loom.

I don't usually use the AVL shuttles and pirns which I have to wind by hand unless I'm using something like rayon chenille or a really heavy wool which doesn't wind in the Whitin winder without major adjustments.  In the years that I've had the winder I've accumulated something like 1700+ hours of winding time on it.  But that time has meant good, well wound pirns, and generally allowed me to work on other things while the machine just keeps reliably chugging along.

Flying Shuttles

Two types of flying shuttle



Industrial pirn winder

Whenever my warps are wider than 30" I turn to my trusty flying shuttles.

When Allen Fannin was alive he often salvaged equipment from mills that were either upgrading or shutting down. Thus the Whitin pirn winder came my way, along with half a dozen shuttles and about 1000 pirns that had been used in a fancy goods mill. I bought two heads, thinking I would set each up for different grists of yarn, but then decided that one suited the majority of my needs and we have just left the second head to use for parts if so needed. So far there is in excess of 1700 hours of winding time on the winder. (We track time used for servicing.)

The industrial fly shuttles are larger and heavier than the shuttles supplied with the AVL loom.

To compare - 41 cm vs 38 cm and 448 grams vs 352 grams.

When weaving the full width (60") on the loom, the lighter weight shuttles will sometimes lose momentum and not make it all the way across to seat themselves properly in the shuttle box. I'm sure they are fine on a narrower loom, but.....I only use the loom's shuttles when I have to use something unusually thick or textured - otherwise my first choice is always the heavier industrial shuttle.

Some people wonder if the heavier weight becomes a problem. Not with the fly shuttle. In fact, I found I had to exert much more effort with the lighter shuttles in order to get them from one side of the loom to the other than with the heavier ones.

And I just love the industrial winder. As long as I've set the tension properly and keep the carousel filled with pirns, it will chug along quite nicely thank you very much, winding perfectly filled pirns. Yes, I occasionally have a problem, but not anywhere near as often as when I have to hand wind pirns. For example, I didn't leave quite enough room at the tip of the pirns when I set the winder up yesterday and one of the pirns sluffed some of the yarn off the tip today. I gave myself a good talking to for being so careless. :^)

Studio Assistance and Going Slow

As you know, I'm all about working as efficiently as possible. To that end I have invested in equipment that helps me work faster.



This is my pirn winder. I love using weft yarns that allow me to wind pirns this way! So long as there are pirns in the carousel it will keep winding, doffing the full pirn and loading the next from the carousel until the weft package is empty. The full pirns slide down a chute below into a box placed there to catch them.

That means that I can be doing other things while the winder is chugging away. This morning I wove one square while the winder was preparing the pirns for the next one. The huge advantage to this winder is that it pretty much winds perfect pirns every time and I don't need to be standing over it while it's doing it! :D

On the other hand, sometimes you just need to go slower.
So it was with the new block design. I had woven one whole square and started on the next when I noticed that the 16th thread from the left hand selvedge had stopped weaving. Don't know why - it wasn't mis-threaded and it wasn't crossed in the reed. It just stopped weaving into the cloth!

I had been toying with adding the temple because the cloth was beating in at about 23 instead of 24 ppi which meant that every once in a while I'd either have to beat a few extra times, or manually advance by hand. So when I saw the miscreant, I started the green square over again (I'd only woven about 12") and added the temple.

The cloth is now beating in at 24, and the wayward thread is also weaving in. So I'm grinning and bearing it, advancing the temple every 20 picks.

In this photo you can see the padded bicycle gloves I wear while weaving with the fly shuttle. You can also see the controls for the fly shuttle boxes sitting on the top of the beater. I have four fly shuttle boxes, and they were getting a bit on the heavy side to change manually so since I already had air to the loom anyway, I challenged Doug to come up with a system to use air to lift and lower the boxes.

Even though many people doubted he could do it, he did, and it works quite well.

The controls to throw the fly shuttle are activated with my left foot, and the control to open the shed is activated with my right foot.