deCordova Sculpture Park

... in Lincoln, MA. (Dropped a bunch of work off at the Museum Store there this morning.)





Llove this guy's expression, what is he thinking about? His misspent youth in Bora Bora? Catching the first snowflake of winter on his tongue? Or maybe just the fact that he has a mound of dirty socks that need laundering...)

Feeling Fallish - and A Marketing Observation

It felt decidedly nippy outside today (50s, blustery clouds, gorgeous)... I like it when I break out my fleeces and my favorite vest (purchased about 9 years ago in Alta Ski Area, and still a favorite!). We stopped to buy some pumpkins and mums on our way home from our weekly jaunt to Kimball Farm Ice Cream with my Mum...



We have moved the goldfish inside from the deck (they lived in the little fountain there for the summer), but the plants and snails haven't come in yet. Soon, I think, Mr. SkiingWeaver just needs to get it in gear. The sugar maples' leaves are just starting to get going here, I'll take some photos when they hit their stride... But in the meantime, I'm enjoying the mums. I LOVE fall. Love it.

OK, time for the marketing observation. I have a couple of different ways of displaying my work in my studio/at shows, but I generally use the Scary Mannequin (so dubbed by Ms. B) both for photo staging and for display...


(One of my favorite pieces ever! Sold it at the Ahts Festival - yay, but also - wah!)

So, I tend to put my largest/most expensive piece on the Scary Mannequin. People do tend to look at it and touch it first, so I make sure it's a "wow" type piece that feels just gorgeous in their hand. And their eyes tend to pop a little when they see the price. (If they *don't* pop, then that's a person I want in my studio/booth, most definitely, lol!) But then when they look at the other pieces... Well, the prices seem a bit more attainable, don't they?

I didn't do this intentionally, but it does seem to work that way, interestingly enough.

Of course, there are always the people that happily plunk down a large-ish amount of money for a special piece without blinking which, of course, works beautifully, too.

Just an observation. YMMV. (YYMV = Your Mileage May Vary)

Summer Daisies

Can you tell it's summer in my little garden? (Cone flowers, love them.)


The daylillies are incredible this year! Tons of scapes because of all the rain... (I need to deadhead!)


Bella standing next to her inspiration flowers...


And here is the present for Baby Daisy! Bella drew the pictures, then I embroidered it on muslin and made it into a pillow...

And her is the darling Daisy herself, completely charming her Tio Carlos (aka Mr. Skiingweaver). (If anybody wants to see a couple more photos from our trip to Brooklyn, I'll be putting them up on my Facebook page... I didn't take very many because I am lame, lame, lame!).

Camping, Recital, Rain, Roofers... And My First Weavebird Project

My card reader is working again! Hooray! (Was having trouble reading the memory card from my camera, and I just don't like posting photo-less blog entries.) So, brace yourselves, lots of photos to follow (including a weaving-related one at the end!).

Our campsite at Pawtuckaway State Park (everybody in jammies still) - we were right on the water! A mama duck with eight ducklings would visit every day - and we saw tons of egrets and heard loons and built a campfire every night, it was lovely. Apart from the rain (every day except one). And the fact that I came down with a terrible flu that basically knocked me out for 10 days (mostly at home).

The kids loved having the water right there - and nobody fell in!

Home again, and it was time for Bella's dance recital...


(These pictures are actually from the Dress Rehearsal - but she did wonderfully both days!)

And, we went to Kimball's Ice Cream with Ginga (my Mum) after the recital. Yum! (Isn't that a cute bag she's carrying?)

Notice the sun? About the only days it has been sunny for the entire month of June have been Saturdays, it's been awful! We are getting our roof replaced (as I type they're up there banging away) and we've been waiting forever - we signed the contract in May. Crazy. The poor roofers must be losing their shirts because of the weather!

And, finally, something weaving-related. I had to use my flash, so the picture doesn't really capture the colors, I don't think, but this is my first project from my Weavebird, going into the sink to be washed - it's a 16-shaft advancing twill (with a 212-shot treadling repeat!!) - in bamboo.

I figured I had enough to get used to on the first project (Texsolv heddles, which I like, very quiet), an overhead beater (which I also like, just a bit different motion to get used to, but also very easy), and a new treadling method (because the Weavebird is a compudobby - my brain kept expecting an open shed on both treadles, lol, but, no, one open the shed, the other closes it). So I stuck with a familiar yarn - Bambu7 sett at 20 epi for the twill - and am really happy with the end result.

I was a little afraid that I would find weaving on a compudobby a bit boring - I've always enjoyed the physical action of treadling, it reminds me of playing the organ, which I did sometimes back in the dark ages of my youth - but I loved it! The colors and pattern were just so much fun to look at, I didn't get bored at all. I've got enough warp left to do another scarf in this colorway, I'm hoping to get in to the studio sometime after the 4th...

Speaking of which - Happy 4th of July to everyone! Here's hoping for sunny weather for us Northerners and a bit of a cool-down for the South!

Camping!

Cute little picture. We are heading out camping this afternoon! This is a picture from the park we're going to in New Hampshire - not sure if it's our site or not. But we do have one on the water... Just for four days, we're coming home on Tuesday afternoon, but it should be fun. I camped a lot with my family when I was young - my dad would close his bakery for three weeks every summer and off we would go, all over the Northeast. I remember spending a lot of time in the Adirondacks (upstate New York) and loved our trips to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (and visiting Green Gables, of course).

I took some pictures of my soggy (it's been rainy here all week, clearing up, thank goodness) little garden to post, but my computer has decided it's not speaking to its little built-in card reader. Argh! Another thing to straighten out after we get home.

And, lastly, the white/green/grey pinwheel scarf that I posted below was bought last night! It's going to go live just outside of Paris as a present for a very lovely customer's father for his 70th birthday, how fun.

Yarn...

Not a lot going on around here. Though I did get a box of bright colors today, always fun:

Fun. :) (Bamboo yarn, was running a bit low on black and thought I'd order some other colors while I was at it.) I'm working on setting up my first warp on my Weavebird, I'll post pictures when it's ready to go - hoping to get over to the studio tonight for a little while.

The kids have been outside practically all day lately... We found a neat moth yesterday...



The photo is kind of blurry. Isn't it beautiful, though? Love the false eyes on its wings and its gorgeously fuzzy antennae. (And, serendipitously, Bella got her first issue of National Geographic for kids yesterday and we learned that some butterflies have ears on their wings. And that camels can drink 500 cups of water in ten minutes. Who knew!)

The moth was bigger across than my palm - and, unfortunately, dead as a doornail. Anybody know what kind of moth it is?

Bella took this photo of Little Man and me - she's getting quite good with the camera!

Birthday Girl Goes Skiing - Warning, Lots of Pictures

So, once again, I'm behind. But I did want to get some photos up from last weekends birthday trip to Stowe...


Friday, after school, Bella blowing out her candles (it's been a cupcake sort of year, I guess, but that's what she wanted!).

Ernesto joined us for the first two days! Here's Conall, hanging out with Tio Ernesto.

Bella getting ready to hit the slopes. Conall holding onto Percy and chewing his coat. Oy.

About ready to go over to the Inspiration chair lift...

Nice job, guys! (They're the two in orange, in the middle of the picture.)

Home again. Conall *really* wants a helmet of his own...

I will post soon about the shibori projects I've been working on!

Happy Birthday!

Little Man Conall turned two last week.

Or, not so little Little Man, that is (with Papi, here) - 92%ile height and 80%ile weight at his checkup this week - he's a big one, just like his sister. (Please, please, please, don't play football when you're bigger! Play soccer, or swim, like your Papi, please!!)

She really wanted to help him blow out those candles... He got a couple more Thomas the Tank Engine books and engines and some Play-Doh stuff; a nice, calm birthday after a pretty crazy Christmas this year.

And he wouldn't eat the cupcakes, funny man. He loves chocolate, so I thought he'd eat them, but he'd just take a tiny little nibble from the bottom of a cupcake and then put it back on the plate. Ah well, more for Ms. B that way!

Merry Christmas to All

Kind of a dark photo, but you get the idea, right? We got about two FEET of snow over the weekend. Crazy.


The kids stayed in, for the most part (painting in the kitchen, here, Bella paints practically every day, but this was Conall's first time - so happy he didn't eat any of the paint!).

I decorate the mantel in our living room differently every year. This year, it's little origami trees - I made one and then couldn't stop. Kind of like chips. Or ski runs.

Carlos and I were up far too late last night wrapping presents... I still have to bake cookies and start crescent rolls for the trip to Ginga's (my Mum's) house, plus we're seeing the Nutcracker today at noon - I have a feeling I won't be sleeping much tonight, either. At least there are no complicated toys to assemble this year! (Best toy of the year, IMO - a Harrisville Easy Weaver loom for Ms. B. I even bought Liz Gipson's Weaving Made Easy for her.)

Merry Christmas to everybody! If you're somebody who normally gets a card from us and haven't gotten it, it's because I'm hopelessly lame and haven't sent them out, I'm sorry. I'm hoping to get some out for the New Year - but, in the meantime, I hope you have a lovely holiday!

Apple Picking Trip in New England

Bella and I went on her nursery school's annual apple picking field trip yesterday. Kind of a misty, cool day - a real switch from last year, when it was blazing hot.

Drew is prepared... (Bella thinks he's wicked funny.)



Yum! Though, while we were picking apples, the mosquitoes were out in force - we need a good frost to kill those little suckers off.

Some fall color for niece Timothea, who is missing it while living in the U.K. It's just getting started here...
Classic New England stone wall.

They had a little farm area for the kids to run around in, too, after we picked apples.


Comparing pumpkins with her friend Regan...

Neat. If we ever have a farm, she can handle the tractor-driving duties. :)

A really fun trip, and it certainly makes it feel like fall!

A Long Summer Hiatus

I can't believe it has been so long since I posted... Life got pretty crazy there for a while, and I lost my motivation for blogging, as well, though not my motivation for weaving. Never that!

To sum up about Convergence - it was a whole heck of a lot of fun. The second two classes that I took were about color theory - no pictures, really, to post, but they were good classes, and kind of confirmed for me that I do better than I think I do with the color stuff... In the first, we did a series of exercises with hues (setting up a grey scale and then choosing colors from a huge amount of color chips to go with each hue on the scale - a great exercise, and, I found, a lot easier when I just went with my gut and *didn't* use the little grey scale finder that the teacher gave to us). In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have signed up for two classes on color theory - they were both very good, and either one on it's own would have been sufficient (the teacher for the second one, Ruby Leslie, brought a huge amount of her very fun samples with her to illustrate how colors work together - also fantastic!).

Those colors work together, I think, at least in real life... The scarf is a little more warm than this picture shows. Kind of toffee-ish. Yum. (This is one of my old standby patterns, made in Bambu7 from Silk City.)

The exhibits were amazing - I didn't get to see as many off-campus as I would have wished, including, I'm ashamed to admit it, missing Kathy Roig's piece in the Weave and Resist exhibit (wah! lame!). But the exhibits that were in the Conference center were a lot of fun to explore... And the yardage exhibit took the cake. They hung the pieces from the center of a rotunda in the conference center - really gorgeous, so you could get the full impact of them length of cloth, or go up to the second floor and see them up close.

I've been playing with some really yummy variegated yarn that I found at Convergence lately:

I am actually going to be working on a project using this yarn for Handwoven Magazine very soon! More of the yarn is on it's way, courtesy of Earth Guild's Dragon Tale Yarn. I'm very excited about this - the design is based on the ruffled scarves that I've posted here before, and, hopefully, the project will turn out as Madelyn van der Hoogt and I hope it will and it will get published... Fingers crossed!

In family news, Ms. B started preschool today...

Who is that big girl? Goodness. (Took this picture a week or so ago, actually.) And Mr. Conall is growing like a weed...

Who is that big guy?? These pjs are a riot - I didn't realize it when I bought them, but all the little animals on them actually glow in the dark. He glows all night long. Hooray for Carters!

At any rate, for anyone who has actually been wondering - sorry about the long break, I hopefully it won't happen again. And very many thanks to anyone taking the time to read this now, after all this time... I hope all is well with all of you!

Super-Mom?

I often get the question - "How do you do it all?? How do you take care of the kids, the house, weave, run your Etsy shop, blog, etc.?"

Honestly - I don't. No Super-Moms around here. Though there is a Super-Bella and Super-Conall-Baby:

(They've got capes on - Bella will stand in superhero pose, fists on her hips, cape flung over her shoulders and say "Fly my cape for me, Mum!")

I neglect the housework pretty shamefully (really really need to get back on the Fly Lady schedule - I don't follow it to the letter by any means, but her idea of spending 15 minutes a day decluttering is brilliant, I think...).

And when we're getting out and about and doing summer stuff, everything slips... We've had a fun couple of weeks though.

A birthday party:

Trips to the playground with friends:

Just playing out back:

I have actually managed to post some things in my Etsy store last week and this week, too, after most of them sitting around, finished, waiting for me to get around to taking pictures of them for quite a while. That actually has gotten easier - the only tough part now is catching the good morning light in my studio.


I'm still weaving the second scarf using my second batch of hand-dyed tencel, so no updates there. (Ridiculous, those scarves are very quick to weave and I just haven't gotten around to it, argh - I did weave off the warp on my big loom in my studio on Wednesday evening, though!)

So, I neglect the housework, I neglect my blog (oops), I'm haphazard about updating my Etsy store, and I even wimped out of the June Open Studios at WAS!

And I have a super-secret weapon. Carlos (Mr. SkiingWeaver). He's fantastic. He gets up with Conall at 5:30/6am most morning and lets me sleep until 7am. (That alone is cause for sainthood.) He does dishes, handles bedtime when I go to the studio in the evening, mows the lawn (usually with only minimal prodding, lol), scoops the cat litter *and* is the V.P. at his company. Goodness.

So, obviously, I don't do it all. :) And I think anybody with kids under five years old who says they do is either compulsively organized or has a cleaning lady (wouldn't that be nice??). LOL. I just muddle through and thankfully my family doesn't freak out when I get behind on vacuuming or laundry...