Blossom Merz: Weaving is a Production

Beginner's Luck

2010-03-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

The cloth is coming along, with 8-12 yards a day woven, washed and dried. I am very lucky and thankful that the tension problems on the beam are not affecting the quality of the cloth.

When I was winding the beam, there were so many factors to consider that I neglected to manage an important one. Since my tension box is so wide and my beam sections are so narrow, I tilted it at an extreme angle to make the threads closer together on the way from the box to the beam.

[Tilted Tool]

This caused the sections to be uneven. The dark threads stood up higher and the light threads felt looser. I still don't understand quite what happened. Maybe the friction on the "entry comb" was uneven? Maybe the threads rubbing on the edge of the box after the "exit comb" made them tighter?

[Uneven beam]

I was worried that the cloth would be affected. In the most extreme case, it could have turned into 4" seersucker. I was ready with a plan: cut it on the tight stripes and make hundreds of pouchy little bags. Thankfully, this isn't necessary. The cloth is beautiful and doesn't show any sign that the beam wasn't wound perfectly. I'll still make some little bags, but not 75 yards worth.

When I talked it over with Annie, she said, "Well, why didn't you just thread it narrower in the tension box?" Of course! That's what I'll do next time. I'm always learning.

Designing Handwoven

2010-03-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

Production weaving is a beast all its own. The goals seem completely at odds: make consistent cloth quickly, and make it look "handwoven." In the eyes of the American customer, consistent cloth looks mass produced and cheap. Of course, my tools are mechanical so the result is completely handmade, but it's not hard to end up with a result that is so consistent that it looks "machine made". Here are the tricks I use to make sure the result is immediately identifiable as handwoven and to make it efficient to produce.

1. Warp color stripes. These do a variety of jobs. They hide lost or doubled threads and make reed marks less evident. Color is the most obvious part of the design and gives people something they can grasp. For now, I'm using neutral-colored warps to retain flexibility in my weft choices.

2. Warp grist variety. Using a variety of yarn weights helps enhance the "handmade" feeling along with improving the effect of the color stripes.

3. Plied weft yarns. By winding several threads onto the bobbin together, an interesting effect occurs. The end-feed nature of the flyshuttle loosely twists the threads as they leave the bobbin. This twist creates an appearance that I call "treebark" after the Japanese name for a similar effect in shibori. (mokume) The effect can be subtle or striking depending on the contrast between thread colors. Either way, it helps a cloth to feel more rich and interesting.

4. Slub yarns. Used in the warp, the weft, or both, these give a little randomness and make a cloth feel more "informal" and "natural."

My goal as a designer is to use each of these factors in such a way that they create a natural overall feeling without any one technique becoming too dominant. It's a dance, and one that I can't wait to explore more and more in the coming years.

Finished Samples!

2010-03-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

Today I'm just posting some quick pictures and getting back to the loom. I wove a sample piece yesterday and wet-finished it. This is all incredibly exciting to me, the culmination of a year's work as an apprentice. The ability to design a stable and pretty cloth and dress the loom to weave it were just dreams a year ago.

Here are some quick snapshots...

[White weft]

[Multi-tan weft]

[Multi-green weft, my favorite]

[Nubbly burnt orange weft]

[High contrast multi-blue weft]

Double checking

2010-03-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

[Draft]

I did something with my first wide cloth that is helping me immensely: designed for the width of the section. This turned out to make threading and sleying much easier because I have check points in my work.

As I thread, I know that every "white on the right" section ends with 1-2-3-4. Every "white on the left" section ends with 8-7. If I get to the end of a section and it's not right, I go searching for the problem and fix it. When it's right, I tie an overhand knot and move on.

Sleying is made easier, too. This pattern has 39 threads per section. With a six-dent reed, the sleying is 3-3-3-4. That gives 13 threads every 2/3" or 39 threads every 2". If the last dent doesn't have 4 threads, I go back and find out why.

Incidentally, I make use of the Texsolv heddles to speed up sleying. With one hand holding the tension, the other hand slides heddles over in sleying groups, double checking the threading as I go. For each dent, I carefully lay the threads across the top of the harnesses. When they're all laid out, I grab the auto reed hook and use one hand to grab threads from the layout while the other hand pulls them through the reed.

[Ready to sley]

Since my reed is exactly 60", all this accuracy pays off when I reach the edge and pull the last threads through the last dent. Whew!

[The End]

Maintaining Order

2010-03-03T07:39:00.000-08:00

How do I keep track of 1200 threads once they get onto the sectional beam? Here's how...

Remember last week I showed the crazy contraption that pulls from the cones and gets the threads onto the loom under tension? As each section is wound, I capture the order of the threads with masking tape before I cut them and move on to the next section.

[Threads exiting the tension box]

[Masking tape preserves the order]

Then, when they're all wound, it's time to thread. For one section at a time, I pull the masking tape through the loom and attach it to the closest harness. Then I grab the threads four at a time with my left hand before I clip and thread them with my right. If I don't let go, tangles cannot happen.

Repeat the motion 300 times and the threading is done! Thanks to the miracle of tape, the threads stay in perfect order.

[Carried over for threading]

[From here to there]

[Threaded and ready]

Rain and another cloth delivery

2010-03-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

[Morning]

[Afternoon]

The other day we had the largest single-day rainfall yet this year. In six hours, the creek rose two feet and got LOUD. The culvert in front of Garden House couldn't handle all of the water so the road flooded. The area in front of our cabins is an absolute mud pit. For now, I have to carry everything 1/4 mile through the mud because no vehicle can get up here.

[Mud!]

It was a trip to Lowell to swap materials. I dropped off 150 yards of cloth and picked up 86 pounds of yarn. My next personal warp will be mostly white.

We had a chance to hash out a lot of the details of the next few months. It looks like I'll be taking a loom with me to Southern Faire so I can weave during the week. And the place where I'll be staying is a nudist resort.

The Trickster is certainly at work here... I'm spending six weeks weaving clothing at a nudist colony! How many people can say that they've done that?

[A big pile of cloth]

On the way down the meadow to post this blog entry, I saw that the Tree Swallows are back. It was a pair of them, twittering and swooping through the air, all blue and iridescent. What a beautiful sight!

[photo from iBird Explorer app]

Still Winding

2010-02-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

Who knew that beam winding was such hard work? By the end of the day I was completely exhausted, more than if I had been weaving. It's taking me about 30 minutes per section for a variety of reasons:
- There should be a screen above the cones so the threads don't whip around each other and tangle in the eight feet up to the reed.
- A real tension box would make it easier to aim the threads into the sections
- It would go faster if I had plenty of yarn and could grab another cone when a thread runs out instead of having to wind cardboard cylinders from that point forward for every missing thread.

It's time to drink some coffee and steel myself for a long day of threading. At least I chose a sensible pattern: a simple pointed draft with a repeat that matches the number of threads per section. This will make it easier to catch mistakes.

(Sorry for the flash photos today. It's pouring rain and very dark outside. Natural light makes such a difference!)

[The colors look great!]

[Almost done! Just 5 sections left]

[Not much yarn left]

[Cone replacements]

There's a simple way to handle it when a cone runs out of thread. I grab another cone that has plenty left and wind cardboard tubes with replacement thread. These go onto a cone rack, feeding smoothly into the mix.

The problem with this is that it's time consuming. The more cones I lose, the more time I spend winding little tubes. In the future, I'll make sure I have plenty of thread before I start winding.

Warping Photos

2010-02-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

Today's post is a series of photos to show how I get 1200 threads under tension onto the loom without tangling. This is my first time winding a full-width beam or winding 75 yards of thread, so I invented the specifics of this system yesterday morning.

The 60" beam is divided into 30 2" sections. That means I only need to handle 40 threads at a time. (Only!? Ha!)

[40 cones feed 40 threads at once]

[From the top of the cones through a reed hung from the ceiling. Notice the truckload of black cloth awaiting delivery...]

[Then they go down through a raddle]

[And into the homemade tension box. This device ensures that all threads are under the same tension when they reach the loom.]

[Aren't they pretty?]

[The first hour's work.]

After creating and setting up this whole system yesterday, I wound 10 sections, 1/3 of the beam. Today I'll finish the other 20 sections and head back into familiar territory: threading.

My Own Design

2010-02-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

[The brown warp threads, arranged roughly in order]

This week marks an important milestone in the development of my weaving. It's the first time winding my own full-width beam to produce my first line of merchandise.

Before I start, though, it's important that I know where I'm going. Computers are amazing. With the software that I use, I can visualize in great detail what my finished cloth will look like. I can test my design with various plied weft threads and see an accurate picture of the result.

The software is called Arahweave, and it's the Rolls Royce of weaving CAD software. You need to have a Linux workstation to run it, but the demo version is FREE! The demo doesn't save files, but it can export images. When I have the money, I will certainly be buying this program, but at over $2,000 it's not an expense to take lightly.

If you try Arahweave, expect a steep learning curve. It can do way more than other weaving CAD programs once you learn how. In the beginning, however you're going to wish you could save your work because it takes hours to create anything like what you want. In the end, the accuracy of the result makes it extremely worthwhile, especially if you're doing production. It's much easier to spend the money to wind a 150-yard beam knowing that the finished cloth is going to be what you want. I'll write a whole review of Arahweave one day, but today let me just show you the plan for my first production-scale cloth and a few of the weft combinations I've tested.

[The plan]

[Two-tone dark weft]

[Two-tone light weft]

[Three-tone green weft]

Day and Night

2010-02-21T16:52:00.000-08:00

[Clothes by Wonder. Photo by Wonder.]

I'm slowly ticking off the todo list items as my first faire approaches. Yesterday, along with weaving, I took some time off to hang out in the sun, chat with friends, and try on garb. Thank goodness Wonder has his faire garb box here and that we're about the same size. After I've worked a couple weekends, I should have some cash to buy a little garb of my own (whatever I can't make, that is...)

There are tons of visitors swinging through the land right now. Last night was a delightful few hours away from work, playing games and laughing into the night. On the way up the hill I noticed that it was very cold and the ground felt a little crunchy. Frost? Just a little...

And then this morning I stepped outside and gasped. It sure was frost! And lot of it by this morning.

[A very frosty scene]

[Breakfast TV, tuned to the frost channel]

One of the new garden crew was remarking just yesterday that "we can pull out all the stops now that the danger of frost has passed." I didn't laugh in his face, but I did let him know that we were nowhere near past the danger of frost. We're always learning!

Sunshine and Cloth

2010-02-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

[View from my outdoor bobbin winding station]

It's just been too gorgeous to stay inside all day. It was nice to wind bobbins on the front porch, but even nicer to work with a view of the meadow.

Half the day is still spent inside, until I can figure out how to wheel the loom into the sun. Tomorrow's the last day of black cloth. It's been many nine-hour days in a row. Just a few more weeks until Faire!

[Photo by Dorje]

Full-Speed Production

2010-02-19T07:06:00.000-08:00

[Cloth is stacking up]

It's tough to think of things to write about right now. I'm working fulltime to produce my cloth in time for Faire. It's the same thing day after day: weaving gorgeous solid black cloth. First I have to finish the black beam, and then I'll be weaving my own cloth. At that point I'll have lots to write about. It'll be my first full-width beam.

The weather has been unseasonably gorgeous. I now wind my bobbins outside so I can spend an hour at a time in the sunshine.

[Enjoying the outdoors. Photo by Bambi]

After dinner every night I am working on a new communications infrastructure. This organization has a couple of everpresent problems. Poor communication and record-keeping are one of them. This new system is designed to help fix them both, giving us a single place to discuss the business of all the committees, and keeping a searchable record of our decisions. It's in the very earliest stages of development, but is showing awesome potential.

This system is in private pre-alpha at this point. (English translation: it's set up on a computer here on the land, inaccessible from the internet.) It should go alpha this week, for review and improvement by the rest of the communications team. Then will be the time for others to join us in testing the beta. If you are a member of Nomenus and interested in helping out, please send me an email.

[Forum snapshot. All committees in one place.]

[Closeup on the activity bar. Shows what we're working on at the moment.]

More Gorgeous Weather

2010-02-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

[Sunny and Warm]

The last few days have been amazing here - warm, dry, and sunny. We realized that the tree pruning workshop needed to be done RIGHT NOW! Buds are bursting and trees are leafing out. In February.

[Caring for the trees]

The garden team this year is fantastic. They're making plans, preparing beds, managing compost, planting seeds, and more. Remember that my last career was landscaping in San Francisco. I learned pruning from my business partner, an expert pruner with years of schooling and experience. After practicing daily with him for a few years, I know a thing or two myself now. I was happy to pass my knowledge on to a new generation here on the land. When it seemed like they were getting the hang of it, I walked back up to my weaving. Boy, does it take willpower to sit inside and work when it's so beautiful outside.

[Mary of the Flowers]

[Hanging in the Sun]

And this scene right here is the toughest to pull myself away from - my friends, done with our weekly meeting, all sitting in the sun and enjoying conversation.

Night of Frogs and Owls

2010-02-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

[Photo from iBird Explorer app]

Tonight, the dinner conch blew early and I headed down the hill at dusk. As I neared a tree right on the path, a strange sight beheld me: a tiny grey bird fluttered out of the tree to the ground. We stopped about 10', eyeing each other.

It was a 5" tall Screech Owl, loaded down with a very fat rodent, nearly the same size as the owl. No wonder it couldn't fly! The tiny bird looked up at me for about 15 seconds, obviously trying to decide whether or not to abandon the hard-won meal. And then it flew off to a tree and watched me walk down the hill. I have never seen such a tiny owl at such close range for such a long time.

After dinner, I returned to the loom for an hour, noticing that the rodent was no longer lying in the path. (I didn't think it would be...) When I stopped weaving and took off my hearing protection, I could hear hundreds of frogs and the insistent hooting of a screech owl very nearby. We hear them all the time, but never so insistent. If I had to guess, I'd say it was celebrating or, maybe, sending an invitation to share dinner.

By the way, I thought it might be interesting to share the amount of thread I use for weft. Here are three of four heavy boxes of thread. It's about enough for 3 weeks of weaving.

[Mostly black weft thread]

And this is the setup I use to ply the thread as I wind it onto bobbins. Here, 5 threads are passed through the cone of a thin thread which wraps around them as it unspools. This binder thread helps make sure that they don't come unplied as they leave the bobbin at high speed. This little trick prevents little loops from forming in the cloth. It was taught to me by my friend, Tien, whose blog you can read HERE.

[Plying setup and bobbin winder]

Spring Flowers

2010-02-06T07:20:00.000-08:00

[Crocus in the lawn]

What a gorgeous day! It's traditional to take three days to "land" after traveling, but I don't have that luxury right now. There's just so much on my plate, but that's how I like it.

Yesterday, however, I couldn't resist taking the afternoon off to wander around in a t-shirt in the sun. This has been an extremely mild winter for the most part, and it has fooled even the plants into thinking that it's over. We need to hurry if we're going to get our fruit trees pruned before they wake up. Ordinarily, we'd have almost another month.

[Tiny Wind Flowers make a big color]

Piwacket was so excited by the flowers that he used fresh violets in the richest and most delicious dessert we've had in a long time. It was a pear and lemon Creme Brûlée. Here's how rich it was: this photo was taken after we had all finished eating. It looks like we'll have leftovers tomorrow!

[Violets in the dessert]

Today begins a big push to finish the bolt of black cloth so I can weave my own before the show in April. It's going to be tight.

New Newsletter

2010-02-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

[The front cover of a new, improved membership newsletter]

It's been a wild few days as we travelled back from San Francisco and settled into life on the land. I promised to get our organization's internal newsletter, The RadDish, converted to an email-distributed PDF format. This was a huge task, requiring about 20 hours of work on the formatting/internals, another 20 hours on the content, and 5 hours figuring out the database and mailing list distribution.

My goal with this project is to uphold and enhance the spirit of cooperation and empowerment in the organization right now. Our members can review minutes of January's meetings and see agendas for February's meetings. Most committees are open to all members, and it's our hope that people will jump in and help with the ambitious project goals we've set for 2010.

If you are an active Nomenus member and would like to update your membership to receive the new digital RadDish, please send me an email (blossom@blossommerz.com) and I'll forward you the form. For now, we need a signed paper form, but the Communications Team may make it easier in the future.

Today, the rains have subsided and given way to beautiful sunshine. It's warm and very, very wet. I went down to the swimming hole to check the creek level and found that our mushroom-laden alder tree fell across the creek in the rain.

[October, standing up and covered in mushrooms]

[Today, tipped into the creek and smashed on the rocks]

And, on a wildlife note, last night we heard a mountain lion killing a deer just a few feet from my back door. It was a prolonged, blood-curdling jumble of deer screams, lion screams and struggling. I got up this morning to find lots of muddy skid marks and overturned leaves.

Life sure is different out here in the country!

Meeting Facilitation Apps

2010-02-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

During Great Circle, several people asked me to show them how I was doing the magical things they saw coming from my phone. While the meeting progressed, I used a bunch of apps to do a variety of tasks:
- Edited online proposal documents that others could review
- Added items to agendas for later meetings
- Edited and distributed a new org chart to clarify a proposal
- Shared quirky photos of our meeting, including a panorama
- Enhanced remote participation with announcements of upcoming agenda items

For online document creation and editing, I use NoteMaster and Google Docs. This app allows for remote editing, and has been my saving grace in developing the artist in residence program proposal. When I wake up with an idea or some new concept comes up during another meeting, I just jot a note into the document to flesh out later. When it was time to propose it, I sent out read-only links to the document and hit the floor.

[NoteMaster, a syncing Google Docs editor]

As the board meeting progressed, many items arose that need to be handled in lower committees. When this happened I pulled up Bento, a general purpose database program from the makers of Filemaker. In there, I've created a database for meeting agendas. I just add the item to the appropriate committee's agenda and it'll be waiting for me when the meeting comes.

[Bento manages my agenda items database]

To help demonstrate the place of an Artist In Residence within the greater community, I developed an org chart using InstaViz. As the Great Circle created more committees, I was able to edit the chart and share it with others. I printed a PDF for my presentation and shared an image on the Twitter stream for remote participants.

[InstaViz lets me draw and share charts]

With so many people in one room, the only way to give a good feel for the scene was to share a panorama, created with AutoStitch. I shot three photos to make this montage.

[AutoStitch lets me take wide snapshots to share with remote participants]

And finally, I used Tweetie to interface with Twitter and keep in touch with remote participants. Every agenda item was announced as it came up, and the results announced afterward. This was our first time doing that, and I'll bet we will find other interesting things to do with this technology in the future.

The Tweetie interface allowed me to view only the traffic that had the #GreatCircle hashtag, ignoring all of my regular Twitter traffic.

[Twittering the proceedings]

All-in-all, this Great Circle went off very well, with almost seamless interaction between the main circle in San Francisco, a satellite circle in Wolf Creek, and several callers for specific agenda items, including our first international participant from Guatemala. We are learning to harness technology to enhance the experience. Let's see what tomorrow brings!

Circle's Over, I'm Artist In Residence

2010-02-01T08:51:00.000-08:00

[Sitting around the conference phone, making decisions]

The Great Circle is done. It went amazingly well. There were a couple of times when tempers flared, but even then the meeting was conducted in the spirit of love and understanding. We made a ton of fantastic decisions and did it quickly.

One of the biggest things we did was to empower subcommittees to make most of the decisions and do most of the work. The functionality of many of them will depend on the work of one that I'll be heavily involved in: the Communications Committee. Once we've done our job, the membership will be able to find out what's happening in the other committees and get involved.

[My rendering of the new Org Chart]

Almost last on the agenda was my proposal, creating a new role in the community: Artist In Residence. We've talked about this for years, but nobody's ever written the program. In my first short AIR term, I'll be working with the Caretakers and Community On The Land committee to flesh out the details of a proper program so that others will know how to apply for this position and what it will require of them.

So today my brain is mush. I've spent many hours preparing for this meeting and now it's over. A good night's sleep (check!), a walk in the sun, lots of water and some healthy food should bring me back to normal.

Tomorrow I drive with my cohorts back to the land and get back into the swing of weaving, now without the time-consuming responsibility of a Caretaker. Woohoo!

Great Circle

2010-01-30T07:49:00.000-08:00

[Before]

[After]

This week I've travelled to San Francisco for Great Circle, the semi-annual planning meeting for Nomenus, the organization that owns the spiritual sanctuary where I live. Earlier in the month I made a spectacular mistake by publishing scathing criticisms of the organization's status.

This morning I'll have to answer for myself and try to turn that mistake into a learning experience and change those criticisms into obstacles we can overcome. In the last few days I've had offline chats with the people who received the brunt of my criticisms and learned a lot.

This new generation has a fantastic vision for where they want the organization to go. Some of us old guys have fantastic experience with the systems that worked in the past (and, more importantly, those that didn't). I think this is the meeting that will bridge the chasm and set the course for Nomenus to grow fast and find itself while retaining the spirit of the founders.

My two-word goal for the way I'd like to see things run in the future is "consensual agility". We have few active members now so we should be able to change direction FAST while making sure that everyone affected by an action is able to be involved if they want. It's going to take work from all sides to get there, but I think we can.

If you're a member of the organization, you can call into our usual conference number and be involved. We'll open the line at 10:30 so we can just chat for half an hour before the meeting starts. If you want to follow along with the agenda and decision results, go to Twitter and filter for the #GreatCircle hashtag. If I can get permission from the participants, maybe I can spice up the info stream with some pictures.

Black Cloth Pics

2010-01-27T08:51:00.000-08:00

[Checking the threading with a few inches of white weft. Notice the extreme difference in warp thread weights.]

Photographing this black cloth has been a challenge. There are several things that make it particularly pretty: the subtle shades of black, the variety of textures, and the shimmering patterns that change as the cloth moves. Each of these features is difficult to capture alone. Add them up and the pictures don't do justice to the cloth at all.

Here they are, though, the best I can do with my current limited knowledge of textile photography.

[Laying flat, colors, textures, and pattern visible]

[Curved around the beam, color and shimmer overpowering the pattern]

[Sunshine, extreme angle, closeup. The shiny weft looks grey at this angle.]

New Weaving Challenge

2010-01-26T10:51:00.000-08:00

This week, I was presented with a weaving challenge. There are so many factors in setting up a beam for weaving that it's easy to make mistakes.

When threading the tension box to wind the beam, it's easy to forget that some threads are dented singly and some are double dented. After winding one section with too many threads, it would be a big waste to take them off the beam. It's easier to look for another solution.

The solution this time was to wind all of the sections with too many threads and leave two sections empty. It makes no visible difference to the finished cloth.

[One empty section]

The denting process is a little fiddly, though. Instead of 20 sections of 3", there are 18 sections of 3.33". To make sure the density is even across the cloth, I marked the harnesses at every 3" beam section and separated the reed into 3.3" inch sections. On a 10 dent reed, the sections have uneven dents: 33, 33, 34, ...

[Harnesses, marked at 3"]

[Reed, marked at 3.33"]

I was glad that I did this background work. As I sleyed the reed, it was assuring to have progress markers, knowing that the density would be even all the way across the cloth. In the end, the threads filled exactly 60" of reed.

[Reed, perfectly full]

You can see below that the angle required to fill the empty sections is very shallow. It will certainly make no difference at all in the cloth.

[The narrow gap closes at the reed]

Now I'm weaving through the samples and yardage to ship before traveling to San Francisco for the bi-annual organizational for the sanctuary where I live.

The velvety black cloth is absolutely beautiful. It's tough to photograph, but I'll post my best pictures of it tomorrow.

Hazy Day, Inside and Out

2010-01-24T09:48:00.000-08:00

[Pretty sunset over the greenhouse]

January has been a grey and dreary month for the most part. When the sun comes out we dash into the meadow to catch some. A couple of nights ago, the sky cleared at sunset to give us beautiful colors.

Last night was pouring rain all night, the heavier-than-normal drops pounding on the tin rooves. I woke up to find the entire road in front of the cabins turned completely to mud. The little drainage channels we cut last week are making no difference at all.

[The road is MUD]

Upon reaching the meadow, I saw that the rain isn't all bad. The hills are gorgeous with the mist swirling around them.

[Misty hills]

Haze in the house isn't as pretty. Instead of one person cooking for the rest of us tonight, we're having a potluck. Somebody got up early to finish in the kitchen before everyone else wakes up. Something dribbled in the oven and the whole house filled with greasy smoke.

[Sol in the hazy house]

The weaving is a little slow because of some strangeness with this beam. I've been taking pictures of the process to share in the next few days.

Weaving Milestone

2010-01-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

[My knees and a rare bit of sun as I tie the 1200 black threads on the left to the 1200 navy threads on the right, in the correct order, without tangling.]

This week I crossed an exciting threshold: I now have some yarn of my own. I worked out a deal with Annie, the woman I weave for, where I'll be paid less for my work, and take some yarn from her stash instead.

This is important to me because I don't have a strong enough cash flow to buy yarn in enough quantity to get the kind of discounts that make weaving profitable. By picking a cone at a time from her candy store, I don't have per-color minimum order requirements, either.

It's all part of a bigger plan to turn me into a self-sufficient weaver without requiring a lot of money. I'll be weaving this batch of thread into cloth and sewing that cloth into sample merchandise to sell in Annie's booth at the Southern Renaissance Faire in April.

She's hiring me to work in her booth, too. I'll get feedback on my designs on weekends, and sew up new, modified merchandise during the weeks. By the end of the show, I hope to have no cloth left, little merchandise, a bit of money, and good ideas about how to design for the next show in September.

[Look at all my yarn!]

[The colors that I'm using for the first batch of my own cloth. The back row is a multi-brown warp, front row is a variety of wefts.]

[Yarns in front of my muse, the forest]

[Random colors to fill out the palette and let me weave samples with variety.]

Busy Thinking

2010-01-20T07:41:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging much this month. The big realization from earlier in the month is still ringing in my brain: the organization that runs the spiritual sanctuary where I live needs some deep organizational help. I've spent a good chunk of my time this month developing models to help us prioritize the work of redeveloping our infrastructure.

The model that I've decided is most generally helpful is based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The theory states that lower level needs must be met before higher levels can be reliably sustained. I'm writing it all up into a small booklet for informal discussion during our semi-annual general meeting, The Great Circle.

[Wolf Creek Sanctuary Hierarchy of Needs, Rough Draft]

The other chart I've been developing is an org chart for the various committees so newcomers can understand how it all fits together.

[Nomenus Org Chart, Rough Draft]

If you happen to be familiar with this organization, you'll notice a new title here, Artist in Residence. This community has talked for years about developing such a program, so I am taking on that development task, under committee supervision, of course.

And weaving? It's production. After a planning snag that left me without weaving for a while, I'm back on my feet and dressing the loom to weave a bunch of black cloth.

Tomorrow I'll post pictures of the new yarn I got to do a batch of my own weaving.

What My Temper Has Taught Me

2010-01-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

[Bluegreen water is flowing, flowing, flowing]

The last few days have taught me a lot as I come to realize that things in the organization that runs the sanctuary where I live are not as tidy as they sometimes seem. In the seven years since I was last active in this place, we have endured a period of absolute chaos at the hands of a couple rogue members who successfully hijacked the consensus process for a while. They drove longtime members away and created a situation where big pieces of our history and procedures were lost.

Those who were left have done their best to put the pieces back together. In some places there are gaps that are not readily apparent. Many things look the same as they ever were, but they aren't. Last week some of these gaps and illusions lined up together in important places and I felt like the ground was falling from beneath my feet. I responded with panic. I said a bunch of harsh things and angered the people who've worked so hard to get this place running again. I've apologized to those I could and tried to make amends. I think that nothing but hard work on my part is going to make those relationships right again.

What I've learned here, hopefully, is that assumptions can be sneaky. Here are some of the major ones that I didn't even know I was making:
- The minutes of a meeting may not reflect the whole of what happened there. Inaccuracies are easier to catch than omissions. If something "wasn't even mentioned", it could be that the secretary stepped away or forgot to click 'Save'. This isn't OK, but in an organization trying to recover from utter chaos, it's not far out of line, either.
- In particular, mayhem is diminished in the process of typing minutes. It's tough to convey fatigue and duress when transcribing minutes, so they disappear. A reading of those minutes makes motives and process appear very different than they really were.
- When recovering from a period of chaos, people want to think that everything is OK. They're doing the best job they can and the situation is better than it was. This reality caught me off guard. I assumed that everything really was OK, and that the problems I noticed must be intentional. I didn't realize how many deep problems were being accidentally swept under the carpet by new people who were focused on moving forward and making the good parts better.

In short, I made a woeful error in thinking I had the slightest idea where things stand at any level of this organization. I have had a suspicion that we need to redefine most of our processes from the ground up and document them afresh, separating them from the stream of meeting minutes. Now I'm sure of it. I'll be working with the various committees to do just that.

I'll also be working closely with the organization to determine if and how we need to release an official call for help. It's my opinion that we badly need it, but I'm going to wait for the input of others before I attempt to draft such a thing.

The personal plea of my last post still stands, however. If you are a member of this organization, especially a longstanding member, please consider calling into meetings and lending your voice. It has always been your right, though few have exercised it.

We have a Great Circle coming up and no plans for a Portland contingent that I know of. Won't you organize a satellite circle and call in to help? http://nomenus.org will contain up-to-date information about the circle as it comes together.

We need help with some other things, too. If you've got skills in recording minutes (typing), newsletter production, web development, or nonprofit organization, we could especially use your help. Just call in to a meeting or two and you'll rapidly find your place.