Blossom Merz: The Weaving Monk

Pearl's On Familiar Turf

2012-02-19T09:32:00.001-08:00

Today's post is quick because I'm at a show with long days and a lot of customer interaction. I'm whipped! But I found a WiFi hotspot so I thought I'd check in...

My van, named The Black Pearl, has been to this show every February for something like 15 years. The friend who sold her to me is a vendor here. Unlike Pearl, this is my first year as a vendor at this show.

Here's a quick snapshot of the vendor hall before setup yesterday morning. I'll take a matching one today. I don't if this is interesting to anyone else, but I think it's incredible how a hundred people can squeeze a beautiful marketplace through regular-sized doors and set it up in about two hours.

Next Batch Of Cloth Is On Deck: Subdued Blue

2012-02-17T06:03:00.001-08:00

I know it seems like the grey batch was just started, and that's true. But look how much we've woven already...

There are three of us weaving on it now and it takes several weeks to ply threads and wind a beam.

So, believe it or not, it's time to take inventory and prepare for weaving the next batch of cloth.

After pulling out all of the yarn, I can see that I do have just enough of the colors that I want to do this batch of cloth. The theme is "early morning sky and fog", lots of subdued blues and greys. It will feature a "double-fade", similar to the purple and the grey. This gives a light-colored stripe that flows across the chest when a cloak is thrown over one shoulder, which is the most popular way to wear this garment.

This color choice should lend itself to mixing with a wide variety of blues from navy to teal to turquoise, and greys from charcoal to smoke.

I do need to buy a little bit of yarn just to be sure that I don't run out when I'm weaving, but I certainly have enough of the main colors to get started winding as soon as I get back from my trip to California, where I am right now, by the way. More on that tomorrow...

New Method Of Communicating Weft Colors

2012-02-15T23:23:00.001-08:00

As this weaving production scales up, I find that it's necessary to understand the flow of cloth design and creation, for myself and for the others.

Here's the new system that I've come up with. It's a record of all the garment colors that we've created, and a plan for what we'll be doing in the coming weeks.

Each of those spots on the sample blanket represents a garment to weave. From a zoomed-back view, I can ensure that there's a good balance of all the different weft colors, making sure that there's good variety in the finished garments, ie. not too many in one particular range of shades.

Each horizontal line contains four garments, roughly in the order that I'd like to weave them. When each one is done, we cross it off so that the next weaver knows what's been done.

Garments in the middle of a stripe are pure or near-pure versions of that stripe's color. Those on the border are asking for a combination of those two colors. Toward the end of the batch, I'll want to create more combinations than can be represented this way, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

This system has come into being just in time. I'll be away at three shows over the next four weeks, and this system lets others weave while I'm gone.

Cloth Workflow

2012-02-15T07:01:00.001-08:00

With a few of us working in the studio now, managing the flow of cloth from threads to customers is becoming more important. Here are the steps to manage once the cloth is woven:

1. Finish. Stitch edges, wash, and dry.
2. Cut. This separates the individual garments from each other. Shawls and scarves are done at this point.
3. Sew. Cloaks and mobius scarves need to be sewn up before they're ready.
4. Waiting. At the end of each beam is a piece of cloth where one or two sections ran out. This can be sewn into shawls or scarves, but requires more problem-solving. As a result, there's a year's worth of it now. I moved it to the front so that I'd remember to do it.

And, finally, here's the final result: unglamorous tubs of merchandise ready to pack in the van and bring to shows.

Four ruanas that show some of the color variation in this beam: grey, green, brown, blue.

A stack of scarves: plain, fringed, and mobius:

Making Sleeves

2012-02-14T10:11:00.001-08:00

Once getting the light mounted, I needed to sew up those sleeves I designed last week. These will let me run wires along any of the horizontal roof poles while keeping the whole setup tidy-looking.

The first step is a method of cutting cloth thar's TERRIBLE if you're doing fine tailoring, but fine for something that's not meant to be looked at. I just tear it into strips the right width.

This method is great because it let me "cut" 14 yards of cloth in about two minutes, but bad for several reasons. It stretches the edge of the cloth ensuring that edges will not meet up evenly. It also leaves long threads on the edge which make sewing a challenge.

But once the edge is double-stitched and each sleeve is turned right-side out, none of that matters. Here's what it will look like, except that it will be 7-9 feet up in the air with much more interesting things to look at. And that's the point.

Sewing A Bedspread

2012-02-13T09:05:00.001-08:00

In preparation for my trip to California, I'm tying up one more loose project. A friend in San Francisco let me use his truck for my first cloth delivery and beam retrieval of my year and a half internship. In payment for using the truck and letting me take so long repaying him, I've offered to weave and sew him a custom bedspread.

I've put it off, partly because I want to be there in person to fit it, and partly because it's terrifying to work with such a large piece of cloth.

This friend likes color, and lots of it! He requested a bedspread that has as many colors as I could stand to put into it. I like cloth made from very similar colors, excruciatingly composed, so his request had me at a little bit of a loss. Here's the cloth that we wove for him.

You can see weft colors from yellow to purple, with everything in between and no similar stripes near each other. When the side panels are sewn on, the stripes will not match up at all, lending even more liveliness to the design. I think it's exactly what he will like. His other request was to make sure that any required seams are not further than 12" or so from the edge of the bed. He does not want to lie on seams.

In my design, I was able to get the seams to lie about 6" from the edges, definitely not in a place where one would lie without rolling off the bed. This will make the main surface of the bed a simple set of stripes with a contrasting set of stripes, matching each other, on each side.

You can see that I designed it to be "fitted", but that's not what I'm going to do, at least at first. I'll bring it down without the corners cut out and see how he likes it. If there is too much bulk on the corners, I'll bring it home and modify it.

Since we had woven just the right length, including seam allowances, the first task was to cut this piece of cloth in half. First, I folded it to find the middle, then employed my favorite trick to cut handwoven cloth in a straight line.

It's a simple trick, too. You pull a thread, starting at one edge and going to the other. At the far edge, you snip the thread that's pulling and pull it all the way out. Then, hang the cloth over a curtain rod and clamp it in place to keep it from sliding off. Climb between the two layers of cloth and the cut line is standing there, plain as day.

The next challenge was to get the two side panels attached to the main body of the cloth. I decided that the best way was to attach the two full-width pieces of cloth together before cutting one lengthwise.

See the 1 1/2" overlap? That will be used in a little while to give me a flat-felled seam. I want both sides of the bedspread to have finished seams, just like everything that I sew. No raw edges anywhere, thankyouverymuch!

After pinning every 8", I have to gather the whole thing, carry it to the studio, and place it on my lap to sew with as little manipulation as possible.

I use homemade beanbags as tailor's weights to keep the rest of the cloth from moving around on the sewing table while I work.

Only after that seam is done do I cut the side panel lengthwise. At any time until I make that cut, I can change my mind about what I'm doing and rip out the seam, no harm done. I don't expect to, obviously, but I like to give myself as much time as possible to catch mistakes before making irreversible actions like cutting 3 yards of cloth down the middle.

One of the choices I made in laying out this design was to butt the selvedges together in the flat-felled seams. I did this on purpose so that I could make those seams as thin as possible. Instead of my usual approach, to fold a good-sized flap into the seam, I chose to fold the wider edge of the flat-fell so that it's just catching about 1/2" from the selvedge. This makes the seam itself only two layers thick instead of three, and more comfortable for someone who's sensitive to laying on texture.

It meant pinning every 2" for 100" of length, but it was worth the extra work to get a beautiful finished seam.

After the panels were attached, the last step was to add the hem all the way around.

There was a choice to make about the corners. Conventional sewing wisdom says that I should miter the corner, snipping it off at a 45 degree angle that grazes the line where the folded hem would end. This reduces the bulk of the corners. I didn't do that. I decided that I wanted the extra weight.

See how many layers of cloth are going into that corner? Nine of them altogether.

This would not be OK for a garment, but it's fine for a bedspread. I carefully tuck the innermost layer that would be visible at the edge so that only two layers are visible there. See? It's a little thick, but not bad at all.

The last step was to topstitch all the way around the edge. I put in a fresh bobbin to make sure I could get all the way around without stopping.

Then it gets washed and dried to "settle" all the sewing, and here's the final result.

Nice Lights At Last

2012-02-11T21:34:00.001-08:00

Arcana stepped in to weave today, freeing me up to work on the new booth lighting. Last October I bought a nice-looking set of lights from Ikea on the way home from my most successful show of the year. Yeah, it was sort of an impulse purchase, but I knew I'd want them eventually. It has just taken longer than I expected to actually use them.

The first step was to rebuild the booth frame so that the overhang was the correct size, but mounted down where I could reach it. There are lots of short pieces left over from the cutting of the correctly-sized pieces. I just use them to cobble together a framework to hold up the overhang.

And here is the pile of parts from Ikea. Of course I had to rework some of them for use on a booth instead of a home.

First, I coated the metal rods in clear duct tape to provide an extra layer of electrical insulation. Then I added white duct tape to give me a measurement for the mounting of the wires and mask the piece of tubing that will be visible between them. Then I used my trusty zip-ties to attach the mounting hardware.

It was then just a simple matter of applying tension to the wires and attaching the fixtures. These fixtures look like the professional setup in high-end retail establishments, but they are made from very cheap plastic. This lets them ride on very cheap wires that aren't under very much tension.

But aren't they pretty and clean-looking?

This setup is meant to be permanently installed in a house with a junction box supplying the electricity. To make it work in a mobile setup, I wired it to a lamp cord and mounted the whole thing on a board. This board will be painted to match the booth and mounted on the outside of it, letting me treat this thing like any other lamp in term of how it's used: just plug it in and leave it be.

To pack it up, I just undo the turnbuckles, unhook the wires, and carefully pack the fixtures in a padded box.

Goodnight, lights! See you next week!

Replacing My Own Van Brakes

2012-02-11T08:39:00.001-08:00

For the last month or so one of my brakes has been squealing like mad. This usually means that the pads are getting worn down and need to be replaced. I had a choice. I could take it into the mechanic and pay him to fix it, losing at least a day in the process. I could also buy new pads and shoes and trust my friend who says that we can do it ourselves. "Oh, what the heck!", I decided, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained. At least I'll get to see how hard this is."

The front disc brakes were simple. I could do them myself in about 15 minutes each. There's really nothing that can could go anyplace other than where it belongs. The back brakes, drums, were a real nightmare.

Here's Wispr, with the Haynes repair manual, trying to remember the order in which pieces are removed to get the drum shoes off.

First of all, drum brakes require a special set of tools for removing springs and such. Thankfully, Wispr has a set of those tools. These are something I'll have to buy if I expect to do this again. It took us so long to get the shoes off and back on again that night came before we were done. We had to do it twice before we got all the parts in the right place. In the end, I made a terrible mistake by wanting to see the mechanism work before we put the drum on. I asked Wispr to pump the brakes and watched one of the hydraulic pistons overextend itself and squirt brake fluid out. This unseated the piston, and made me take the whole thing apart again. It took an hour on the web to figure out that I could clean and reseat that piston myself. By the time I finished it was pitch black and we had to put the tools away in case it rained overnight, which it did.

We got up this morning and it was still drizzling. I needed to have the van either fixed or not by tomorrow when I have an appointment to get a bid on some sewing work. I brought out the patio umbrella so we could get the work done even if it really rained.

After messing up and fixing the piston on one brake and removing and replacing the whole assembly three times, I was pretty confident that I could do the second brake fairly easily. I asked Wispr to run the camera so I could share the experience.

Here goes! Once the wheel is removed, the brake drum just slides right off.

See all those springs, cables and levers? They all to be removed, carefully remembering where they came from and in what order. The drums aren't solidly connected to anything. All these little parts let them move in the ways that they need to while basically floating around in there.

Those springs are under a LOT of tension, so I'm glad there's a tool to help get them safely off and back on.

Eventually, the shoes just pop off with only a couple more parts attaching them to each other.

And here's the cause of my troubles: at some point a small piece of metal got into the brake assembly and embedded itself in the shoe. Thankfully, the squealing alerted me and we caught it before it had worn into the drum. If I'd taken the upcoming California trip without replacing this shoe, I would almost certainly have needed to replace the whole drum when I returned. This is easy, but expensive.

Here are the new shoes and all of the little parts that will need to to go back to the right locations in the right order.

Yay! Thanks to Wispr's coaching, I did it! In this picture I look exactly like my dad, not just because I do look like him, but because of what I'm doing. For my whole childhood he tried to get me under cars, trucks and tractors with him. And now, 25 years later, I wish I had done it.

In the end, I have to say that with all the trouble I had with it, my time might have been better spent weaving a garment to sell and earn the money for a mechanic. This was great experience, but I'm still undecided whether I'll do it myself next time or hire it done. Thankfully, these new shoes should get me through a year or two before they need to be replaced again.

Sandstone Sample Blanket

2012-02-10T10:51:00.001-08:00

This is just a reminder for longterm blog readers who are used to me writing about what's happening right now... I'm in a production crunch and about five days behind in my blogging, so the stuff I'm writing about here all happened a few days ago. I just don't want you to think I'm being dishonest next week when I post photos of my booth and there are a bunch of grey garments.

Just a few hours after the sleying was finished, the beam, harnesses and reed were transferred to the production loom and ready to start weaving. The sandpaper beam means that I don't tie anything to start weaving.

I just stick the threads to the beam, about 12 threads in each little bunch, and carefully start weaving. It magically evens out before the cloth even reaches the sandpaper. You can see here that even the first few picks are weaving fine. The only thing to watch for is that the threads don't stay stuck to the beam and wrap around it. This makes a mess.

I've got a standard habit for starting a beam now. The first piece of weaving from each beam is a sample blanket. It has stripes of each major weft color that I think I'll use.

Once it's woven, I finish the edges, wash and dry it, and hang in the place of honor, above the bobbin winding station. It then serves as a guide for weft thread mixing for all of the garments woven on this warp. I take it as a point of pride, and a way to keep my interest, that I never use the same weft combination on any two garments. They are all slightly different. This is one reason why I need such good lighting in my booth - so that people can see the differences themselves.

This predominantly grey warp is the most versatile that I've ever wound. There is no weft color that I tested that I would not actually weave. In fact, I'm tempted to use even more extreme colors than usual, knowing that the grey warp will muddy them down to acceptable levels. As always, these extreme ideas will be tested on a scarf before I commit to a whole garment.

How I Avoid Threading and Sleying

2012-02-09T09:14:00.001-08:00

If you've been reading my blog this week, you've seen how much energy it is to properly thread and sley a 60" wide beam.

Today I'll tell you about how I avoid having to do this work very often. Really, I just need to thread and sley when I get a new loom. I don't see it happening again any time soon.

The secret is knots and being willing to disassemble the loom. First, notice how every section ends in a knot? Those knots will keep the sections straight and keep the threads from pulling through the heddles.

When I remove the last piece of cloth, I do it carefully and tie a knot in each section, in front of the reed, to keep the sleying intact.

And here's the trick that helps the most... I tape the harnesses to the rods so that they can't slip. The heddles are held in place by tension from the springs pulling down on the lower harness bars. When that tension is removed, the heddle ends like to slip past each other on the harnesses. This sort of tangles them and takes time to fix. I'd rather just avoid it altogether by using tape to maintain the tension when they're removed.

And here's the final result: a set of harnesses and a reed that can be removed from the loom in preparation for the arrival of the beam, harnesses, and reed from the setup loom. See those knots hanging down from the back of the heddles? Those are the knots from the end of the beam, the knots that I tie at the beginning of winding a section when I'm setting up the loom.

Each section has its own knot, and this is very important for the next thing that will happen with this harness and reed setup: I'll tie the next beam onto it. Making sure that there's one knot for every section will let me double-check that I wound the right number of threads for every section as I tie them on.

This method of working is the reason that I chose a simple pointed threading for my work. I haven't yet, but I can change the cloth dramatically just by changing the treadling. There are a lifetime of production-ready variations that can be woven without needing to rethread.

Two Looms

2012-02-08T09:22:00.001-08:00

Yes, this is an awkward angle, taken lying on the floor next to the loom dressed with purple. It's the best way I could convey the reality of two looms after the beam was done being woven. My regular "wide angle" approach would have only showed an empty beam. Yeah, I forgot to take this photo last week when both looms were in full swing. I was too busy winding the next beam on a tight deadline.

The point is that I have two looms up and running now! Last November I acquired a second production loom, which is a story in itself, with plans to turn it into my "setup" loom. This lets me design, wind, thread, and sley the next batch of cloth while someone else weaves the current one.

And, for the first time since I got it, it's doing just what it's supposed to. Winter is a slow time for sales, and for energy level to do production. As a result, the purple cloth was not done when I think it should have been, and it's going to be very tough to have grey cloth in time for my most hopeful show of this season, coming up in just over a week.

The second loom shaved about three weeks off the production time for this grey cloth since I didn't have to wait for the purple to be done before I set it up. Instead, the purple was finished on Friday, and the grey was moved over and ready to start weaving on Saturday.

I may not sound very excited because I'm distracted by the need to work every available hour to meet my production deadlines, but this is an incredibly huge achievement in the development of the business. The new loom and others in the collective to help weave on it will get every batch of cloth done in 6-7 weeks instead of 10.

Lighting Rig In The Studio

2012-02-07T08:35:00.001-08:00

Remember how I built that lighting rig last week? Well, it's being put to use in the studio before it has seen a show.

The new loom is set up with the front almost touching the wall. The HVAC ducts don't let me put the fluorescent fixture or clip lights where I'd like them. I did OK with the threading by clipping a light onto the beam that holds the harness pulleys, but that wasn't going to work for sleying.

Lighting rig to the rescue!

If this was MY house, I'd drill into the cinderblock and mount shelves all the way around the studio, giving me a place to set up palettes and clip lights. But we're only renting, and not for very long, either.

The solution was simple: I needed to hang a bar underneath the ductwork behind the loom, against the cinderblock wall. It took about 10 minutes to clamp together a frame that fit the space and met my needs.

It's tough to make out in these photos, but the ends have a 4' length on the bottom serving as a "kickstand" to keep the poles upright without leaning on the wall.

I care so much about the lighting for one big reason: accuracy is critical. I'm dealing with thousands of tiny threads grouped together in fiddly ways. I need them as close to me as possible and as brightly lit as I can have them. It's so much easier and more efficient to get this setup right the first time than it is to go back and fix mistakes.

Sanity Checks During Sleying

2012-02-06T08:51:00.001-08:00

Each process in the setup of the loom is a chance to check the accuracy of the previous process. During threading, I double-check that I wound the right number of threads in each section. During sleying, I check my threading by counting through my pattern as I count out the threads into their dents. With each thread, I have two numbers in my head, the harness number and the number of threads in the dent.

For example, the threading for one section is:
6,7,8,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1,2,3,4. That's 39 threads.
The sleying for a 15-dent reed is 1-1-2-1-1-2-1-1-1-2, repeated 3 times. 13x3=39.

So, to check the threading while sleying I count like this:
1,6 - 1,7 - 2,8-1 - 1,2 - 1,3 - 2,4-5 - 1,6 - 1,7 - 1,8 - 2,1-2

This takes some getting used to, but really cuts down on the time I spend fixing threading errors while I'm weaving the sample blanket.

After a section is sleyed, there's one last check - that the section really measures 2" in the reed.

See the empty third dent? This is a really easy mistake to catch. Usually it's a matter of too many 1's or two many 2's leading to the count being off.

I would much rather catch a sleying mistake now and resley one section than to get to the end of the reed and have too many threads or too many dents.

See? It's easy to tell that the section is right by just keeping the ruler on the track and checking every section as soon as it's done.

Threading Again

2012-02-05T10:16:00.001-08:00

For the first time in my (three?) years of blogging, I'm going to have to post things after they're done. Either that, or I'll have to write two or three posts today. So, here's what I was doing two days ago...

After tying on for more than a year, I'm having to exercise an old skill again - threading a beam.

It's laborious and error-prone, and that's why I do my best to avoid having to do it. These 1200-thread widths of cloth give many chances for errors.

But here's how I do it...

First each section to be threaded needs to be unwound from the beam, straightened out and taped to a place that I can reach from the bench.

Then, I move enough heddles for one section and tape that section to the left of them. I peel back the masking tape to carefully maintain the order of the threads from my winding.

I do that 30 times and voilá! All threaded and ready to sley.

What Do YOU Think?

2012-02-04T07:18:00.001-08:00

I've noticed some of my favorite blogs regularly answer questions from their readers. Maybe it's because my format is more storytelling than how-to, but people don't ask me that many questions. So I thought I'd initiate the conversation.

What do you want to read about?

Are there areas of my community life, weaving or business that you'd like to hear more about? Can I offer you a different perspective on your weaving or your crafts business? Are there things that I've posted cell phone pictures of that you'd like to see photographed more clearly?

If you don't mind people seeing who you are, you can leave a comment on this (or any other) post. Otherwise, send an email to blossom (at) blossommerz (dot) com and I'll answer your question anonymously.

Lighting Rig Sleeve Design

2012-02-03T08:58:00.001-08:00

I've finished the measurements for the sleeves that I'll use to hide my cables on the new lighting rig. This won't be important for all shows, but is very important for this next one since the rig will serve as my entire booth.

I'll be making them a bit longer than required so that there's extra to wrap around at the corners. Compared to cables ziptied onto the tubing, this has many advantages:
- quicker
- tidier
- less "industrial" looking

Of course, they'll be ziptied in a few spots as well, but the cables don't have to be gathered up and hidden on the back side of the tubes. Now I've got make something like 60' of this stuff and figure out how to get it on the rig when I'm putting it together, but before the lights have gone onto it.

Grey Cloth Design Is Done

2012-02-02T13:27:00.001-08:00

Here it is, ready to thread, sley and start weaving. I expect to weave and finish the sample blanket on Saturday, giving me just 10 days to weave and sew some garments before I leave for California. I'd better get to it!

Building A Lighting Rig

2012-01-31T17:55:00.001-08:00

Today's post is another photo essay. I got the parts for the new lighting rig/half booth for indoor venues with small spaces.

This is the design from last week. The pipe lengths are approximate. I knew that I might change them when I had a real, live rig in front of me. The only requirements are the 8x4 footprint and the 102 degree angle.

This is the box that arrived in the mail yesterday. These joints are sturdy, versatile, and cheap.

And this is a stack of 10' long 1" conduit waiting to be cut. There's the pipe cutter starting on the first one.

Since I didn't know what height I wanted it to be without seeing it full-scale in person, I put together the 8x4 rail first. It held up full-length pipes so I could get a feel for an appropriate back wall height.

There's no place here with 10' ceilings and level floor to let me build the rig this way so I paid a visit to the retreat center where I lived last year. It was nice to see the folks again and to work on this project in a warm, dry indoor space.

I'm glad I got to experience a full-scale mockup before making crucial cuts. An 8' back wall was waaaay too tall. I went for 7' instead.

Once I had that pipe cut, I put on the 102 degree joint and used duct tape to secure the next joint to the front upright. This let me take a direct measurement instead of needing to trust my geometry.

And then it turned out that a 4' overhang felt like too much. I went with 3' instead, using the scrap from my 7' back verticals.

At this point, my hands were killing me. I've cut lots of copper before, and quite a bit of 3/4" conduit, but 1" is a different beast. It's thick! Each cut took about 10 minutes and a lot of hard work. I decided that I would keep going until I saw the beginning of a blister. (Even my rubberized gloves weren't protecting me all the way.) In the worst case, I'd need to make a few cuts at home later. It was the measuring that needed a level floor and high ceiling.

Well, I got it done with only one small blister appearing at the end of the last cut.

And here are all of the pipes laid out:
2 - overhang sides
4 - side pieces, 2 on each side
2 - back verticals
2 - front verticals
4 - width pieces, 3 on the roof, 1 across the back

Here it is, all set up and ready to decorate! This is a fantastically versatile and durable rig that permanently solves the problem of how to suspend lights in front of the booth. The whole thing cost less than $150, including the canvas sleeves I'll be sewing up this week. If the better lighting helps me sell just one garment, it will have paid for itself.

Poor Memory and Productivity Tools

2012-01-28T09:16:00.001-08:00

I have a terrible memory. There I said it!

One of the reasons that I'm so good at weaving is that it requires prolonged and intense focus on minute details, especially the way that I do it. I'm really good at that.

The problem is that this intensity consumes my mind entirely. Lots of things get "put on hold" while I focus. I know that I'm not unique in this. I've got just got a pretty severe version of it.

Years ago I realized that I had a choice: make my life so simple that I can handle it easily or find assistance in tracking a complicated life. I chose the latter. Yeah, I want my life to be simple, but let me tell you that starting a business and a new spiritual community at the same time is anything but simple.

So I turned to productivity methodology and software to help me live a life that's as stress-free and balanced as possible. This post is about what I've been doing and a great tool that I've just discovered.

First up is Evernote. I've written about it before, but it is really saving me from wasted time just about every day. I subscribe to the $5/month plan that lets me store as much as I want. Everything goes in there: articles that touch me, research notes, recipes, show recommendations, and more. Then, whenever I want to refer to that resource again I can just search Evernote, even if I'm not connected to the internet, and even if that webpage is long gone.

Along with Evernote, I use two programs that enhance that experience: AwesomeNote and EgretList.

AwesomeNote lets me access and create some of my notes quickly and easily. I use it like stickies, a scratchpad, or the back of an envelope. And all of these notes become searchable in Evernote. I use it to make notes about color gradations, yarn orders, recipes, and more. And when I'm done with a note, I just delete it from AwesomeNote, knowing that I can always retrieve it again from Evernote if I need it.

EgretList simplifies the work of doing shows by letting me have simple checklists. I don't use it like a todo manager. I only use it in the days around a show to handle four things: To Do Before The Show, To Pack, To Buy On The Way, To Do After The Show. And here's where Evernote magic comes in. When I'm preparing for a show, I go into Evernote, make a copy of the four lists from the last show, uncheck the checkboxes, and sync. Poof! I've got a step-by-step checklist in my pocket to make sure that I do and bring everything I'll need for the show, even if I'm dog-tired and unable to remember my own first name. If I add something new to the process, say a new carpet or a new booth banner, I add them to the lists so that I'll remember those things for the next show.

Next up is Daylite. This is the cream-of-the-crop of project management systems in my opinion. It's far more powerful than how I use it - designed to manage teams of people working on projects together with everyone having access to all of the data all of the time.

I use Daylite for longterm planning. Every show that I've done or considered lands in Daylite with all of the notes about it: referrers, application deadlines, show dates, other vendors that do that show, and every email that I've swapped with the organizers. (Daylite integrates with Apple Mail and automatically copies emails into Daylite, linked with the appropriate records.) To set up my show schedule for the year, I entered application deadlines and show dates for potential shows into four calendars: Tentative, Applied, Accepted, and Standby. The Accepted calendar is automatically synced to a Google calendar that you can see on my WEBSITE

The power of Daylite comes in the connectedness of the data. Every show (Organization) is linked to its organizers and referrers (Contacts) and linked to any year that I did or considered that show (Project). Let's say I'm looking at my list of shows from last year and I want to know if I'm considering a particular show this year. It goes like this:
Shows 2011 -> Jacksonville. Does it have a link to Shows 2012? If not, then open the note entitled "Skip 2012" or "Standby 2012" that I created for each show I was not considering and remind myself why I'm not doing that show. One click and 10 seconds of reading.

I've tried using Daylite for all of my todo list needs, but found that using it is just too much overhead for everyday items. It doesn't have the features that let me slice and dice my todo lists for maximum productivity.

The last piece of the productivity puzzle has just snapped into place for me: OmniFocus.

Before I go into it, I want to talk a little bit about the productivity methodology that I use: David Allen's "Getting Things Done", often abbreviated to GTD. The tagline for his book is "The Art of Stress-Free Productivity".

I think that there is one take-home lesson from the methodology: you must get ALL todo list items out of your head and sorted into contextual lists. The rest of the methodology gives a rigorous set of tools for what to do once they're out of your head.

Todo items take up brain space, add to stress, and rarely come to the front of your mind at the right time. Memory is contextual - you remember that you need tartar sauce when you're making fish, not necessarily when you've stopped at the store to pick up milk on the way home from work. And, while you're there, it's extremely unlikely that you'll also remember things from vastly different parts of your life like picking up a pen refill cartridge (office), grabbing a bottle of fuel injector cleaner (car maintenance), and picking up a birthday card for mom (social reminders). Most people need to make a grocery list to remember all that stuff. The GTD methodology makes grocery lists for every major context in your life.

By creating context-aware lists, you can see at a glance what you could be doing at any given time. Context is more than just location. It can also be things like "Email", while you're dealing with email, "Husband", the next time you see your husband, etc.

GTD is a thorough system that encompasses everything from one-day projects to life goals, helping you to define all of your goals, create actionable items and move those items and their goals toward completion. Like I've said before, "Action is Magic!" Define and perform the actions and the goals take care of themselves.

The piece that I've been missing in my personal productivity is an unobtrusive, full-featured GTD program that runs from the iPod that's always on my belt, with or without an internet connection.

I think I've found it with OmniFocus. Yes, it's expensive, $20 for an iPhone app in a world where most of them are $1. But it's so good that I couldn't justify trudging along with a cheaper and less capable system.

The first feature that caught my attention is the Forecast View. It shows in one glance how many tasks are behind schedule, how many there are today and each day for the next week. It lets me put in a little extra work now if I see a tough day coming up or go to that day and spread some of the non-essential tasks forward a little more. However I choose to handle it, the program gives me the information that I need to take control of the situation and get my work done.

Here's the Home Screen. From here, I can see where the tasks lie.

Flagged items MUST be done today. They are time-sensitive and can't be put off any longer.

The Inbox is special. It's the first place that items land when you just need to get them out of your head. It takes 10 seconds to pull out the device, enter an inbox item and get back to whatever I was doing. At my next review session I open it up and assign a project, context and, if possible, a due date to each one. As you can see from the 12 items in my inbox, I'm still in "dump" mode, getting everything from my head into the inbox without worrying about where it goes.

The Map view is another exciting feature. Some contexts can have an associated location. When items are marked with that context, they will show up on the map.

If I had an iPhone instead of just an iPod, I could set it up to alert me when I entered a location that has outstanding action items. Walk into the grocery store and your whole shopping list pops up automatically. Pretty cool, but not essential.

One important thing to remember is that contexts are separate from projects. The map shows all items from all projects that can be done in a given location. This is a HUGE improvement over the way our brains usually work, where the needs of the most recent or pressing project trump everything else and we forget all the other things that would take little time to do in a given location.

And then there are the projects themselves. OmniFocus supports nested projects, ie. Business:Vendors, Business:Customers, etc. At each level, you can see all items from all projects contained in that level.

The OmniFocus software is so well thought out that it seems magical. No matter what I want to know about my tasks, there is a way to see it with just a couple of clicks. Here are a few examples:

- Give me a sorted list of everything that I need to do in town, whether it's due or not. Click Contexts, Grants Pass, All Available Items. It gives me a list of all locations in Grants Pass, followed by the items that need to be done in each location. It becomes a foolproof list of places to stop and things to do because I sorted my Grants Pass contexts based on my usual driving route. I just march down the list mindlessly doing things and checking them off.
- Let me do or reschedule all past due items. Click Forecast, Past Due. Walk through them, rescheduling or doing them.
- Put inbox items into the appropriate context and project. Click Inbox. Walk through them, assigning context and project with a few clicks each.

So now that I've got the best tool for the job it's time to start using it consistently. I'm just coming out of my Winter malaise so there's a ton of stuff to get caught up on. One of the first sets of tasks on the list is to review David Allen's "Getting Things Done" and refresh my memory of the whole methodology. Thankfully, last time I read it I took notes in Evernote. This time I can review one chapter of my notes a day and reread any sections of the book that I don't remember well. So yes, I've now made a project in OmniFocus to review one chapter a day until it's done.

Another Booth Configuration

2012-01-25T09:52:00.001-08:00

After much hemming and hawing, I've decided to invest in another booth expense - a lighting rig. Well, really, it's just a pipe-and-joint frame that will give me a place to attach lights to shine on the front of the booth.

At most of my indoor shows this year, I've lamented that I could not properly light the side of the booth that customers see first - the front. At one show in November and at the next one, the booth size was strange: 8'x4'. This just gives me room to set up my racks, but does not give me any way to suspend lighting, until now...

I decided to go with a classic solution: pipe and joints. This is the way people built booths in the days before popups. It's like a life-size erector set - slide the joints onto the pipe, tighten a little bolt, and you're good to go.

There are several features to this design:
- There is a horizontal lighting bar suspended in front of the booth to let me light the front of my garment racks.
- There is another horizontal above the entrance to let me aim more light toward the back wall.
- There is an adjustable rail set at 7' high on 3 sides. This will let me attach the gridwall for displaying scarves and hanging the mirror.
- There is a frame from which to hang the drapes.

So, even though my space is tiny, It'll have all of the features of a full-sized booth: carpet, drapes, gridwall, lighting, racks and mirror.

One benefit to a modular solution like this is that it's reusable in multiple situations. The show after this is another indoor show, but with a standard 10'x10' booth space. For that show, I'll use the canopy, but reconfigure this pipe setup as a sturdy wrap-around lighting rig. To do that, I'll need two 10' pipes, but no other new parts. I'll zip-tie the front uprights to the canopy, but put no weight stress on the canopy itself. (This is important because the canopy cost twice as much as the lighting rig. I don't want to break it by trying to cantilever lights off of it.)

Since the system I've chosen uses standard 1" electrical conduit that's available from any hardware store, I will be able to design and implement new uses for these parts on the fly if I get to show and find that there's something else that I could use them for.

If you're wondering what software I used to calculate these drawings, it's a little java program that I've been using for years. It's really meant to teach and explore geometry, but it's perfect for this sort of thing once you get used to it. It's called Zirkel or C.a.R., which is an abbreviation for "Compass and Ruler". You can use it in your web browser or download a desktop version HERE. It's completely free and much more powerful than what I'm using it for.

It does something that no other program will do for me - maintain live linkages with the geometry. Any "arbitrary" points are moveable and the rest of the construction will modify itself when they are moved.

For a design like this, I start with two arbitrary points, constrained to be 8' from each other, and a line segment between them. Then I use geometric primitives for everything else - the horizon is perpendicular to that first segment, passing through the lower of the two points. All of the uprights will be perpendicular to the horizon. The locations are determined by using circles to carry distance, etc.

In the end, I can set the distances and angles that I know and then take accurate measurements from the drawing itself for the distances that I don't know. There's no "eyeballing" or "guessing". And when I'm done calculating, I can hide the things that I used for calculation and create a clean finished drawing. Here's what this drawing looks like with the calculation objects visible:

Those little dots and circles across the bottom are really the secret. The 3/4 view is an oblique view, meaning that the heights are accurate and the widths are accurate, but offset from each other to give the illusion of 3D. Those little dots let me move the whole drawing or change how much the planes are offset from each other to create the oblique view. Some of them are constrained to the correct measurements. Once you get the hang of it, there are lots of problems for which this simple program is the easiest and most elegant solution.

How I Make Stripes To Reflect The Natural World

2012-01-23T10:43:00.001-08:00

... or "Multidimensional Mathematical Noise In Nature, As Reflected In Woven Thread Ordering"

Caution: Math! Skip to the final image if math is boring to you.

In a previous life I worked in digital special effects. I got into the studios because of the skill I developed as a 3D graphics software developer. In that world, my specialty was the mathematical modeling of natural surface textures like clouds, stone, wood, and dirt.

Back in those days, computer memory was extremely expensive. Capturing and storing high-resolution images and using them to "paint" the surface of digital objects was often cost-prohibitive. What we needed was the ability to create mathematical formulas that could generate natural-looking surfaces without using photographs.

One of the tricks we used was called "fBm noise." fBm means "fractional Brownian motion". It's what you get when you take regular noise (like TV static), scale it to several different sizes, and combine those different-dimensioned noises together.

This is one of the algorithms that's still used to create all kinds of stuff like digital landscapes because of its uncanny ability to mimic nature.

For each of the following images, I've scaled the noise, stretched the last row of pixels so we can visualize the thread pattern, and drawn a graph based on the brightness of each column of pixels.

The thing to notice is how each of the single-dimension images just looks like TV static. The one called 1+8 is made by combining scale 1 and scale 8. There is so much scale difference between the two that they don't blend.

But look at that final image. Doesn't it look like an aerial photo of trees? Or a closeup photo of polar fleece? Maybe a microscope image of mold? The point is that it looks like something more than just static. It looks "natural".

There are two tricks to making it look exactly like a particular item from nature. The first comes in choosing the scales. Doubling is easy, but nature doesn't usually do that. The second is choosing how strongly each layer contributes to the final image.

You might wonder the point of all this. Well, believe it or not, this concept of scales of noise has a large bearing on how I choose the order of the threads in my warp. Right now I'm winding a beam based on exposed, weathered sedimentary rock. When I'm choosing where to place the threads within a section, I'm continually comparing the contrast to the value graph that would come from real stone. I want the color gradients to match what real stone does, between individual threads, between sections, and across the whole beam.

These colors are nothing like the colors of thread that I have, but I'm not looking at the colors. I'm looking at the transitions between the colors. That little graph shows me how fast the colors are changing in various parts of the photograph. If I change my threads with a similar speed, I should get a similar feel in the finished warp. And the multi-dimensional noise stuff helps me to figure out how often and how abruptly I should change the speed.

The plain-english bottom line is that I need the transitions to be smooth, but not too smooth. There is some "up and down", but not too much. It's mostly an uphill climb. Shades from other sections do appear, but not frequently.

So I'm keeping all that in mind as I wind. As always, fingers crossed!

Why Blog?

2012-01-22T10:16:00.001-08:00

For me, blogging boils down to one thing: networking. The more people who know what you're doing, the more likely that they will be able to refer you to resources and opportunities that you might never have known about.

If you saw my blog post two days ago, you can see that magic unfolding in the comments. I wrote about how I had made a mistake in one of the images that I submitted to a show through Zapplication. An hour later, someone from Zapp saw my blog post and told me that I could ask the show to mark my application incomplete so that I could swap out that image and resubmit it. I followed their suggestion and a few minutes later my application was resubmitted in perfect order. If I hadn't written that blog post, I would never have known that correcting my application was even an option.

And then they posted a link to my blog post on the Zapp Facebook wall, giving my story even wider exposure.

And this is just the most recent example. I've learned a lot from the comments that people leave on my blog. Blogging has allowed the few of us who weave as a passion or for a living to connect with each other and offer mutual support.

The other side of writing a blog is following other blogs. I currently read 20-30 blogs written by other fiber artists, and every once in a while I have a comment that might mean something to one of them.

And the most amazing part of all this is that weavers seem to be, by and large, living far away from each other. We've got studios in spare rooms, barns and basements all over the place. We don't have the chance to see each other in person very often. And yet, through the magic of the free (as in liberty) and accessible internet, we are able to have a strange sort of community.

It's all pretty magical.

Stone Grey Batch Is Started!

2012-01-21T11:07:00.001-08:00

At a certain point with every batch of cloth, I have to stop planning and start DOING. Today is that day for the stone grey cloth.

For more painting metaphor: I've spent a lot of time mixing my paints and now it's time to transfer those colors from the palette to the canvas - the threads from the shelf to the loom. And I realized this morning that I'm a little scared. I'm quite comfortable with colors - bold, saturated colors. These generally evoke images of beautiful things: flowers, fruit, gems, tropical fish, autumn leaves, etc.

Once the saturation drop to about 50% I start getting uncomfortable. There are lots of unsavory things with unsaturated colors, and I want none of them to come to mind when looking at my cloth. There are also many beautiful unsaturated things: tree bark, desert plants, animal fur, and stone.

It's that last one that's my inspiration for this batch of cloth. I want it to invoke exposed layers of sedimentary stone lit in the noonday sun. My awareness of the incredible expense of the threads I'm using combined with my awareness of how little spare cash I have and my discomfort of unsaturated shades has me wishing that there was some certainty that the cloth would turn out beautiful.

But there is no certainty. I just have to trust my muse. I'm showing up to do the work. If the muse shows up, the cloth will be stunning. If not, it will be saleable and probably all gone in six months anyhow. No problem.

First Zapplication

2012-01-20T10:51:00.001-08:00

In making the leap to the next level of shows, I've jumped through the hoops to get set up with a service called Zapplication. This system is used by many higher-end craft shows to handle the application and jury organizing process.

The idea is pretty simple - you upload your photos to their service and then attach those photos to applications when you submit them. They publish a set of guidelines for photo submissions, and these are what I've used to tailor my photography to the jurors' experience.

On the other end, their software helps the jurors to review the photos for each applicant and score them.

I worked with "my copy editor", one of the guys in the collective who has a gift for words. I finally hit "send" on the application last night.

Then I set out to copy the final photos to my phone to write this blog post. When the iPhone displayed it with a black background, I was horrified to find a mistake in one of the images. It's not huge, but might just be big enough to take points off my application and keep me out of the show. I'm kind of kicking myself for not noticing until it went live. And, I thought I had set up the file to prevent this and I thought I had checked for it before I uploaded it.

Grrrr...

See? It's not a big deal. Just a single strip of white pixels along the bottom of one pane of a triptych. But, these images are going be have a black background applied during jurying and probably be projected to fill a wall.

Ah, well. What's done is done. I seem to make at least one mistake like this the first time I do anything. It keeps me humble, right?

My First "Failed" Show

2012-01-19T13:08:00.001-08:00

Well, it had to happen sometime. Let's hope it's just this once. This last weekend was a bust. I didn't even make back my booth fee, say nothing of the fuel and other expenses.

As always, the first day was slow. This is true at most shows. I take it as a "warm-up" day. There are few customers and the general consensus on the floor is that the next day will be better. And it usually is. Not this time. I sold a couple of small items on the first day and even less the second.

The venue was great, a large indoor hall with lots of light. It was mercury-vapor light which messes with colors, but at least the place didn't look gloomy.

The organizers were organized. They knew exactly where they stood with each vendor, which fees we had paid, and what our needs were. They had everything set up in plenty of time for us to load in and gave us the room we needed to get our work done. They were seen on the floor throughout the show, and never looked stressed or out-of-control.

The customer flow was OK. There weren't "giant crowds", but I don't do well in crowds anyhow. There seemed to be lots of media coverage and plenty of people came out.

But here's the problem - the people who came out were not MY customers. Since I've never done this type of show in this area before, I expected that "Wine Festival" would bring out wealthy connoisseurs who would spend good money on exquisite outerwear that's appropriate for outdoor events like wine tastings and gallery openings. (Remember, I lived for 15 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, where these things, and the patrons for them, are common.)

What I found instead were sports fans. I have learned that green and gold means "Ducks" and that orange and black means "Beavers", and that these are opposing teams. Most items at the show were priced way below my range, and most people were just there for the wine.

My style and price point are not conducive to "hawking" in the aisles. I wait for people to stop and look more closely at my cloth before I approach them. I invite them to touch it, feel it on their shoulders, and tell them a little more about its origins. But the first step is for them to show a little interest. And at this show it was not unusual for an hour or two to pass between people expressing even a passing interest. As they drank their interest seemed to become even more acutely focused on "more wine."

As they say, this show was DEAD - for me, that is. My customers just weren't there. If I was selling something glitzy and less expensive, I might have done better. $10 Swarovski crystal hair ties? Awesome! $20 wineglass holders that hang around your neck? Fantastic. $300 handwoven outerwear? Not at all.

And, on top of it, I became very sick during the first night. It dipped below freezing and I discovered that I had left a few blankets out of my van so I was COLD. I woke up with my head spinning from fever and congestion, but the show must go on! I ran to the grocery store and stocked up on OJ, Emergen-C, and DayQuil. By the end of 10 hours on my feet in this state, I decided that I would not pack up that night. I bundled up in bed, took NyQuil and tried my best to rest.

In the morning it was snowing, but the upside is that most folks had left so I could actually drive my van right up to the booth space and load it. This saved about an hour of schlepping heavy booth parts and got me on the road in the warmest part of the day.

It snowed most of the way home, but thankfully it wasn't sticking. It was a wet, sloppy snow, but it wasn't slippery. My van handles terribly if it's slippery and it would have taken me all day to get home to bed.

We don't keep our house very warm so I called ahead to ask someone to put a heater in my room. I crawled into bed and didn't really perk up for 4 days. Sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever - yep! That pretty much describes it.

Sooooo, I'm not taking it personally. I know that I'll probably need to do a few more duds before I have a clear way to find the shows that my customers frequent. But, yuck, what a terrible-feeling weekend!