Residency #2

I have been doing my second residency of the summer for a different group and in a different location from the first one. This one (and the next one) are for my weaving group and they are being held at the Charlotte Street Art Centre. It is a beautiful old building that used to be a school. The school was closed down many years ago and there it sat. Until a group of people decided that it would make a great art center. Fast forward ten years, countless hours of meeting to convince the right people, fundraising up the yingyang, and untold hours of volunteer labour, and we now have an Art Centre. The Fredericton Designer Weavers' secretary just happened to be one of those fundraising/volunteering people and when we were looking for a location to hold residencies this summer, she suggested the CSAC as a possible location. Sounded good to us.


Here is the loom that was provided for the residency. We have it set up on the landing of one of the staircases. This place was built in the late 1800's and space and heating were obviously not a problem. This landing is larger than my bedroom. The ceilings are high , the wood work, fancy. As I said, it is a beautiful old building.

The loom is 45 " wide and I was thrilled at the prospect of weaving something that was wider than 17". So I put three dyed shawls on that are 24 ".


Here is a view going up the rest of the staircase. There is a show that is hung right now and these are a few of the pieces. Upstairs are a couple of classrooms and the violin studio. Downstairs are a few studios, the CSAC office, a dance studio, Film coop and a few other groups that I don't know . And in the basement is The Underground Cafe. Totally appealing to students and those of like minds. Big comfy, well worn couches. Large tables. A computer hooked up to the internet. And a totally vegan menu. As in soya cream in your coffee. I haven't been brave enough to ask for coffee yet. I just stick to the organic ginger ale.

So, back to the residency. Remember last time I said that I talked to a bunch of people? Well, so far, this time , I have talked to five. Ten if you count Karen and Jan, two other weavers, a friend of Karen's and her two girls. And of the five, four work at the center. So that leaves me with 1. One person that actually came to ask questions and see what I was doing. So if the point of the residency was to expose people to weaving, then it is a bust. But on the plus side, I have gotten a lot of weaving done. I have two of the three shawls woven off and will get the third one off this afternoon.

I have to come up with another project for my next residency. I am thinking about throw blankets with some of my hand spun in them. Or maybe dyed blankets. Or maybe one of the warps that I made up and dyed last week. Who knows?

Sexy

Aren't they just sexy? The bright red colour, the wide, blocky shoulders. Mmmmmm. These are crimson hot peppers that we grew last year. When they are ripe, they are picked, washed, bagged, and thrown in the freezer. Here they are just starting to thaw and the frost that settled because of the high humidity is starting to melt. Then, throughout the winter, we make fresh hot sauce. This recipe was given to Bill by a colleague of his many years ago. It keeps in the fridge for several months.

Vijai's Hot Sauce

1 lb fresh hot peppers (any variety)
4-6 cloves of garlic
1 medium onion
1 tbsp salt
2 tbsp oil
white vinegar as required for thickness

Blend all in a food processor until smooth. Keep refrigerated.


That's it. Pretty simple, eh? And oh so yummy. The heat level, of course, depends on the heat of the peppers. We have made this out of a variety of peppers and the best ones are always the ones that have a touch of sweetness. Sometimes, if the peppers were particularly hot, we would replace some of the hot peppers with an equal amount of sweet red pepper. We put it on eggs, in spaghetti sauce, and my particular favorite, on extra old cheddar.

Guest Artist

The guest artist is non other than my 11 year old daughter. All of these were created by her. She had the opportunity to spend a few days with a felting friend, Denise, while Denise was doing an artist in residence stint. Denise makes absolutely beautiful felted creations and Mira really learned a lot while she was with her. Denise does mainly wet felting, which is something that I know only a little about. I never realized how little until I saw what Denise was doing. Denise showed her how to felt over a balloon and gave basic instructions on flower making. These were the results.



Next came the seahorse. Mira made a pattern, cut him out, stitched him up, and beaded him. He is 7" tall. Pretty impressive if you ask me.



Did anyone out there see "Finding Nemo"? Do you remember the Angler Fish at the bottom of the ocean? This was actually one that she made after Denise gave her a 30 second tutorial on wet felting one day a few weeks ago. He was made in white fleece and I dyed him red at her request. Other than that, she goes into her room, or the bathroom if it involves water, and comes out with things like this! She is about 10"x6.5". We know that it is a she because the he's are very small. Angler Fish females can get up to about 4 feet. The males, once they come across a female, actually fuse themselves to her and act like a parasite. But seeing as they are only an inch or two, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to her. And she is lucky enough to get a permanent male to fertilize her eggs. Some females actually have several males attached to them. I bet that is more than you ever wanted to know about Angler Fish.



And lastly is her Dragon Snake. She worked on him for weeks. He is made out of Fimo, which for those of you who don't know, is a polymer clay that comes in many different colours and hardens when baked in the oven. All of the spots of colour were all individually rolled balls that were then squashed flat and then applied to the snake body to make the scales. Some of the colours were mixed by her if she could not find a particular shade that she wanted. I didn't even turn the oven on. She did the whole thing. He is 5"x3.5".

So, people, what do you think? I am sure that Mira will enjoy reading your comments, so say something, okay?

Residency update

Thanks to every one for being patient with me. Life just seems to get so busy for me in the summer . The kids are out of school and with my residencies and workshop schedule, it seems that the days are flying by.

So here is the old solders barracks. Above are government offices and bellow are a variety of craft shops and some storage for Fredericton tourism.

And at one end is the FAA Artist in residency headquarters.

I am in this week with a local oil painter, Stephen May.


We have some space to display our work and are able to sell, should there be a willing buyer.




I have a warping mill (borrowed from my lovely upstairs neighbour Kora) and my wonderful loom.








The main goal of the Artist in Residency series is to expose people to art and the artistic process. So I have the warping mill to show them how a warp is made. I have my dyes and have been dyeing warps. I have my loom to show them weaving. And I have any number of finished product for them to ohh and ahh over. I have my few temari balls and also a bunch of fabric origami cranes and antelope. The artist in residency series covers a wide range of arts. There are painters and felt artists, knitters and weavers, potters and book artists (writing, publishing, and binding). As well as a few others that I don't know about (I don't have a copy of the brochure). It is a great thing. There is quite a bit of foot traffic during the "tourist months". It is part of our "job" to talk to people and educate them in what ever it is that we are doing. Which is one of the reasons that I have all of the steps of the weaving process illustrated. This is the fourth summer that I have been doing this and find that some people are very interested and ask questions and others almost run away when I start to talk. I have learned to gauge who to chatter at and who to just smile at. I don't mind my work being interrupted because more often than not, I just keep working. Not to mention, with all of my kids, I am used to being interrupted.

So far this week I have, woven two scarves, made four warps, dyes three warps, sold a scarf, wound a warp on the loom and threaded it. And talked to between 100 and 150 people. And of that number, given in depth detail to about 20.


Friday is my last day for this residency, and then on Wednesday, I start on my second residency. During that one,I will be only weaving. And then we all go on vacation to the lake!!!!!!

It will be good!

Jack Sparrow????

Who is this strange man who appeared in my yard the other evening?

None other than the reincarnation of Jack Sparrow! Matt, who lives above us, stopped by the other evening with an odd request. At least that was how he phrased it. He was playing a benefit show and had been informed that the he was to dress up as Jack Sparrow of Pirates of the Caribbean fame. He was wondering if he could dip into our dress-up trunk. He found a vest, and Liz's gal lent him a pirate shirt. A few touches from his closet and a heavy hand with the makeup courtesy of Kora and Jack appeared in the yard.



And what is a Captain without his crew? Motley crew they are. But all had a good time and Matt even won an award for his costume!

As for me, I have started my residency and so far have gotten a lot done. I forgot the camera, so I have no picts yet, but please check back again soon to see a visual diary of the whole thing. Who knows? Maybe people will want to come visit.

I'll be back soon.

Loom puke revisited

I have fringed two of the scarves and washed one. This is the washed one in all its glory. I am rather pleased with it although it is the one that I liked least while I was weaving it.



And I also had a bit of time to dye some wool. I am quite happy with the results. Tomorrow is suppose to be another beautiful day and I hope to get some more dyed

And there is this one skein of cotton on which I used fiber reactive dyes that I had left over from dyeing my last warp.

I start my residency on Sunday and I can hardly wait. I am going to make up a few warps and dye them this week. Hopefully enough to see me through until Christmas.

Purses

Here is a pict of Liz's bright idea as a way to display our purses. Joe thought to add the trim which gives it a nice frame and stabilizes the works. This handy dandy unit gets the purses off the table and up to eye level. In the alleyway, there are hooks on the wall. I'm not quite sure way, but we are only too happy to make use of them. This has always been an alley leading to the entrance of a bar. The name and clientele have changed many times over the years, but it has been a bar for as long as I can remember. Maybe the bouncers from one of the bars put up the hooks so that he could hang the drunken rowdies on the wall as a deterrent for other drunks. Kind of like heads on pikes in the good ol' days of knights and castles. Makes for an interesting mental picture.

We had a pretty good weekend at my house. Canada day was spent relaxing and tipping back a few cold ones. Sunday was a wet one and most of the day was spent inside, or running errands on my part. The evening brought clearing and Kora and I dyed part of her warp. Monday, the official day off for Bill, we had beautiful weather and finished dyeing the rest of Kora's warp. I dyed a few skeins myself and made up a warp. The rest of the afternoon was about sitting and talking and sipping on Gin & Tonics. Oh, my yum.

I hope that everyone had a good holiday weekend.

Colour Corrected

Here is a better colour representation of the new scarves. Thanks to Bill for photoshopping my pictures. I had a pretty good day yesterday at the market. A lot of people really liked the new scarves. Small wonder. They are rather fabulous if I do say so myself. I also finished weaving scarf # 2, and got a bit of a start on #3. These are the stripy ones that my loom threw up. They will be coming off the loom soon and be well on their way to being completed. I need to get another warp made and dyed and on the loom before the end of the week so I hope that the rain goes away soon and stays away for a few days so I can get a few things done that need to be done outside. But it's not looking good. Lots of clouds and showers forecasted for the rest of the week. But then again, yesterday was suppose to be thundershowers in the afternoon and we didn't see any rain until last night. And of course today. At least the peas will be happy and fat!

Saturday Blue Skys

Happy Canada Day!


Here are my blue sky just outside my front door, slightly to the left. I'm off to market.

New scarves

These new scarves are merino warp and a silk weft and they are soft and drape beautifully. I am so pleased with them. Mira was my reluctant model. I told her that she didn't have to show her face so she took me at my word. The colours are a little washed out. Some day I will RTFM and learn how to use the fool camera. Until then just think darker, richer thoughts.

Would you look at that!

WOW!


Silk Silk And More Silk! Each ball is 4oz+ and has 500 yards+ on it. Sigh. And there is another 2 pounds the same as the light stuff up in the corner, for dyeing. I also got a pound of silk and wool blend about the same colour. And about 8 pounds of light coloured wool. I am set with silks for a while. But I will never be able to buy like this again. The place where I got this from is going out of business and had an excellent sale. And because they dealt mostly in mill ends, their prices were pretty good any way. Good bye Bill and Carole. You're going to be missed by all of us yarn-a-holics.

On the bright side, more dyeing ahead!

Note to Leigh, The sticks and header is only to spread my warp. The tensioning is all done while I wind on. This warp is a mix of silk and rayon that each have different stretch, so the results should be interesting.

My loom threw up

Or at least that is what it looks like.


I won't go into the gory details but things got a wee bit tangled. But being of sound mind (ha) and body (snicker) and actually enjoying the challenge of untangling a mass of yarn (mental), everything was sorted and de-tangled and wound and tied on.






Here are may latest merino offerings. They are not washed and thus a little stiff. And yes, the one on the left is not finished being fringed. But I took pictures while I had a camera so I hope that you can forgive me that.

And I realized that although I fondle them and sniff the silk almost daily, I never shared with you my birthday gift from the odd ball



Two, count em, TWO skeins of sari silk in mostly reds with a hint of just about every other colour known to man and a beautiful fat juicy skein of a rayon silk blend (yeah, I'm sniffing it, get over it. It's just something that I do) that I am going to make into a lace scarf just for me. Once it's dyed. And once I get over my fear of lace. Pathetic I know. And it's not so much a fear as....lack of time. Yeah, that's it. Right. Lack of time. Really. Cynthia said that I should only sit down and try to knit lace if I had a block of uninterrupted time. That doesn't happen in my house. And in the summer it gets even worse. No one has a set bedtime like during the school year (Barb will be horrified) and occasionally WW3 breaks out in the house. Today,I chucked the boys in the back yard for the remainder of the afternoon with instructions to fill the pool for their little sister. Soon it became WW3 with water. At least no one was bleeding and there was screams of glee as they soaked each other. I think that the flower garden got some water too. Bonus.

And on the theme of garden and bonus, we went out to the garden today to pick PEAS!!! weed weeds (too many of them) and water (so that it would rain). The kids picked the peas and we came home with about 4 or 5 pounds. I have no idea how many of them that the kids ate. Maybe another 4 or 5 pounds. We won't talk about the number of pounds of weeds.

ARRRGGGGHHH!!!! All my silks came yesterday. 8 pounds of them. I need to unbag them all before the pictures are taken. Look back tomorrow.

Now was that a cliffhanger or what.

Warp done

Three and a half hours later and I have a new warp to dye. This one is yet again more merino that is 24 inches wide and three shawls long. It will be dyed purples and blues with a hint of green. It shall be lovely. I will it so! Right now it still looks like the other warps that I have made of the blue/green/burgundy merino. Except fatter. 573 ends. Kora from upstairs wants to learn how to dye warps and so apparently we are doing an inpromptu dye class sometime next week. Hopefully I will have a camera to record the whole event. I have yet to tell her that the fee is to be a pint of gin. And of course some tonic water. I'm sure that it won't be a problem. Wink wink!

There is a crap load of yarn on each of those merino bobbins. There must be close to 2000 yards. I still have a lot left, but it seems to be going quickly. Thanks again Jay for hosting his craft challenge all those many months ago and getting me going on this merino. It has opened my eyes to many possibilities. Fugly colours are now my friends.

And a big thanks to Uncle Sandy, who gently suggested to the powers that be that Bill, myself, and the kids be allowed to spend some time this summer as a family at grandma and grandpa's cottage at the lake. As Bill said, It will be nice to be able to relax and not have to worry about schedules. I think that it will be nice to be able to stay up as late as you want or go to bed early if you wish. Not that I don't like Grandma and Grandpa. They are wonderful in laws. It's just that we do things a bit different and it is sometimes a bit hard to get 4 kids to conform for days at a time.

Shit! Lake means bathing suit and I still have those same 10 pounds that I have been trying to get rid of since about April. It would be a whole lot easier to get rid of the fool things if food and drink didn't taste so good. I keep trying to convince myself to get up in the morning and go biking before everyone else is awake and THAT would be a whole lot easier if the bed wasn't so comfortable. What's a gal to do? Waddling is NOT an option.

I almost forgot, Happy Birthday Brother of Mine. 34 is it? So young.

Warp update

The warp is finally dyed and dry despite the high humidity over the past few days. And I thought that after the first dyeing that it looked kind of ugly. When I had taken my dyeing class a few years ago, I was told that the dye activator that you need to use when dyeing with fiber reactive dyes will last a long time so you can keep it. I guess that they didn't mean 10 months because after using it and seeing the washed out colours that it produced I mixed up some new stuff and dyed some weft skeins which took the colour beautifully. Another lesson learned the hard way that I can share with you. This is a picture of it before redying. So I took the silk portion of the warp and vat dyed it a darker blue with acid dyes. I like acid dyes so much better than fiber reactive. It's the run off that I really hate with fiber reactive. Although at one time, someone told me that they had a way of dyeing FR without the massive amounts of runoff. But before I could pin her down to show/tell me, she moved away to the wilds of Nova Scotia. If anybody out there has any idea of the method that she was talking about, could you point me in the right direction. I really like some rayon yarns and I like how they look dyed. Thanks.
So I am combining my paler rayon portion with my bluer silk portion and I have another warp of almost the same length that I dyed black last year that I will mix in there too.

My merino scarves are off the loom and two of them are BEAUTIFUL! Pictures pending. The third has some tension issues that I may be able to fix. If not, I may chop it up and sew something with it. I knew that I should have cut it off and retied after the second scarf, but apparently I needed to learn that lesson again. Someday, maybe I'll be able to learn a lesson one time and have the fool thing stick in my porous little brain. But then again, "the change" is just around the corner and from all reports, ones memory deteriorates as the process takes hold. Great. Something to look forward to. My faulty memory getting worse.

I have my first residency (FAA) coming up in two weeks. and then a week after that, I have a second (maybe) residency sponsored by my weaving group and then the following weekend is the highland games where I am suppose to do some sort of a demonstration and then my last residency with my weaving group and then Uncle Sandy comes home and we will spend some time at the lake. My summer in a nut shell. I hope to get a lot of weaving done this summer and have lots of product for Christmas. Merino scarves don't sell all that well in July. Although I have had lots of ohhhs and ahhhs about my shawl.

And I almost forgot about my PEAS! I was at the garden for a few minutes yesterday and the first peas are a couple of days away from being ready to pick! Unfortunately, the weeds are going great guns along with the mosquitos. We have had such cool wet weather that the tomatoes and peppers and basil are not doing so great. They need heat and sun. Two things that have been sadly lacking here in Fredericton.

Cats!

This is my cat. When I first got her, almost 14 years ago, I named her Hagel. Which is a Norse rune meaning a disruption in ones life. She actually settled in quite nicely with me and my roommates of that summer. We lived on the third floor of an apartment building and so for the first two + months, she was an indoor cat. That September, I moved in with a friend on a ground floor of an old house and we had a door leading right outside. Since then, she has been an outdoor cat. I still remember the first time that she went out in the snow. After every step that she took, she would pick up her paw and shake the snow off, only to have to put her foot back down. At that house, my roommate had a cat of about the same age. After a week of hissing and staking out their respective territories, they settled down and were often seen grooming and sleeping with each other. I wish that I had been able to take Mad-lyn with us when we left, but I was unable. Since then we have lived with and around a variety of cats. Some of whom she has gotten along quite well with, others, well, we won't talk about them. Except for James.



This is James. He lives upstairs. He lives with Chance, who was unavailable for comment, and their humans, Matt and Kora. They have recently been given their shots and allowed in to the great outdoors. Chance often wanders into our house and can be found lounging in a variety of places. He and the Bug get along fine. Hagel earned her nick name Bug when I was pregnant with my first child and we had hundreds of lace wing type bugs that were around the apartment. She loved to snatch and eat the things. LOVED it! She's not much of a mouser or birder (thank heavens) but she certainly is a good bugger!
In any case Bug is 14 years old. James,I think is about 5 or 6. She is a little cat. About 7 pounds. People often mistake her for a younger cat. James is bigger. James is a bully. As Matt says to him, "You can't go beating up little old ladies!" James doesn't seem to care. HE tries to wander in to our place, and we hear about it. Cat fight in the back shed or the front hall. Like with kids, I think that it would be nice if they could just get along.


Poor old Bug. She's getting grey whiskers and there are a few grey hairs showing up in sleek black coat. Kind of like me.

Oh, right! For those of you who care, My Stuff on Etsy has been added to my Links list. Check it out. More stuff is on the way. As soon as I finish dyeing and weaving. Speaking of which, I have to go. I have so much to do!

All about flowers

I'd apologise for the heavy flower content of my blog lately if I was truly sorry, but I'm not! The flower season here is so short that I just have to gush about them when I have them around.


My lovely peony. I had to cut some of the blooms because they are so big and heavy that they drooped. Ah well. So now I have a big fat bouquet of them on my kitchen table. They are so fat they look like pompoms! I just love them!





And in case you couldn't tell, I have a thing for irises. My whole iris bed needs to be dug up and divided this year and rethought. I have then scattered around other flowers, some of which I will keep, some I will chuck, and some I will give away to a friend who bought a house last year. The white is a Japanese Iris and the yellow is a water iris. Or so I was told when given a hunk of plant a number of years ago.

No weaving took place yesterday. I went for a nice long walk and did some things that didn't get done on the weekend because I was, well, weaving. One scarf is woven and the second is about half way. I want to get them done and off soon so that I can see their loveliness! No walking scheduled for today because there are thundershowers in the future. And it is looking rather dark outside. I'll have to go cut some more peonies before the rains hit. They just don't survive torrential rains well. Shucks.

Market Saturday

My warp is on and oh, my! It's pretty! The colours shown here don't (as usual) do it justice. The colours are such a mix of rich purples, dark blues, and flashes of red. Not to mention the cute little toes to the right.

Here are some market pictures from Liz's and my market adventure this weekend. We were outside for the first time this week. Quite a different feel from being inside. Now that I know how the sun falls in the alley, I will chose a different place to set up from now on. I ended up sitting in the sun from about 11:00 on. As much as I love the heat, I can't stand sitting in the sun.
We have the clock at the entrance.

You can just see Liz and Kate near the back of this photo.


My stuff all spread out. We have been brainstorming about a better way to display the scarves.


My cranes and antelopes.


Kids playing around.


We had musical entertainment in the form of a very talented group that goes by the name of Vetch. 2/3 of whom live upstairs from us. Right next to the guitar player (our neighbour Kora) you see a rather short vocalist. That would be my boy Liam praticing.... well.... what can only be described as fart noises. Over a loud speaker. Thanks to Joe who took this picture and let me in on what my boy was doing. I was at the other end of the alley and was not paying attention. Bill was taking pictures. Did I mention that we have great neighbours?

As an aside, Blogger was telling me that I had spelled Neighbour wrong, and being a rather poor speller, I did what I usually do and called up google to check my spelling, You know what I mean. You spell something wrong and it politely asks you "Did you mean...." and give you, what 99.9% of the time, is the right spelling of the word that I am looking for. In any case, under Neighbour, which I had spelled correctly BTW( the problem was the extra "u" that Canadians tend to add to some words), was this article about a bad neighbour. It is a series of pictures from an apartment that was next to the writer of the article. Have an empty stomach before you look at these. It is hard to believe that some people live like this. Ick