Blossom Merz: The Weaving Monk

Portable Pillow Workshop

2012-05-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

The pillow blanks arrived just before the trip to Seattle. I guess I never realized how much space 60 pillows would take up.

I was able to stuff some before I left, but most of them were waiting at the sewing shop to grab on my way by and stuff on the road.

There are two operations for each pillow. First I need to inspect the sewing while turning it right-side out. (Those corners take a bit of time to get right.) Then I need to scrunch and stuff the pillow into it. It ends up taking over a minute each or two hours per batch.

Here are a couple of shots of my little stuffing operation. The end result was 6 storage boxes of pillows. I hope they're popular!

thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!!!

2012-05-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

Well, y'all pulled through for me and it looks like I get to keep on weaving for a while longer. (I keep phrasing it this way because I'm never sure if or when I'll make the mistake that sends this business in the direction of most other startups.) Now that show season is officially here with my first "big" show in Seattle's UDistrict this coming weekend, I think I've made it for real.

There are a few more shows with fees to pay, a few booth modifications, a tune-up for the van, loan payments, and the ever-present "overhead" but otherwise the money that I make at these shows will be going toward new yarn to keep it all running and, finally, profit!

Thanks to the folks who heard my call and preordered black cloth, the same amount of money came in as I had expected to earn at the show last weekend.

I continually struggle with the question of who makes up my community. Is someone a friend, just because we've known each other for a long time, even if we rarely influence each other's lives? Is someone a friend because they clicked "Add Blossom As A Friend" on Facebook? How about if we read each other's blogs but have never met in person?

Experiences like this past weekend blur the distinction even further. I was laying in bed, high on pain drugs, getting up to change burn dressings a couple of times a day, and answering emails from people who want to place orders for cloth: a nurse in Colorado, an alternative energy consultant in San Francisco, a member of my spiritual community, living in Chico.

And the answer that I come to is that the words don't matter. We're all one big, complex community of sorts. The internet makes it all that much faster and more complex. I really just need to focus on these definitions for the people I expect to live with. Everyone else, unless they've shown themselves otherwise, are friends.

Thanks, friends! I can't wait for us all to see the results of our investment in this batch of black cloth. It's coming...

Help Me Get To Seattle By Buying Black?

2012-05-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

Well, the infection that I wrote about yesterday got way worse over the last two days. I just got home from another trip to the doctor. They told me that I was allergic to the SSD antibiotic cream that I've been faithfully applying to my burn. As the "infection" got worse, I was more generous in my application of the cream. They've switched it for an ordinary bacitracin cream and think that it should look better in a few days.

Buuuuut, I can't set up a booth and stand on this leg all weekend greeting customers and selling garments. I was supposed to pack the van today and set up for the show tonight.

So I'm in trouble. These medical procedures are expensive and have now caused me to lose a batch of income. I really needed this income to pay for my trip to the first big show in Seattle next weekend. In a couple of months, I'll have some show income to cover things like this, but this is all hitting me right after I've paid all my fees for the year but before I've started making money.

Along with all of the bad news, I have had more interest in the black cloth than any other color that I've woven. So I want to ask a strange favor of y'all who read my blog...

Who wants to help me get to Seattle by preordering a black garment?

And here's what you'll get: a new black garment, delivered by the first of July at the absolute latest. (It will only be that late if this leg injury prevents me from weaving for another whole month.) Black cloth will cost 15% more because of the thread price, but I'll give it to my faithful friends and blog readers for the same price: $300 for a ruana, $150 for a shawl. And, I'll cover the cost of shipping.

So, what do you think? Do you want a black garment yourself? Can you help me get the word out to others?

Here are some photos of the threads that I'll use to make your cloth. First, the many spools in two shades of matte black.

Then, the plied threads in over 20 shades of shiny black with little splashes of dark colors.

And a closeup of the colored threads. Don't worry, though. These will not overwhelm the black. They'll be sparse enough to just make it look iridescent.

And finally, for those who aren't familiar with my garments, this is a ruana in deep purple. Yours will have the same luxurious drape and weight, but in dozens of shades of black.

And here is a shawl. It's a square approximately 53"x53" with fringe on two ends.

If you want to place a preorder, just send an email to me: blossom (at) blossommerz.com

There are two options to get the payment to me. If I can call you to run your credit card over the phone, I'll have the money before my trip. If you pay me by PayPal, I'll have it in time to cover costs for the trip home.

If you want to pay by credit card, be sure to include your phone number in the email so I can call you to run it. If you want to use PayPal, just send the payment to my email address.

Please don't send your credit card number through email. That's just not safe. :)

Thanks so much for all of your support over the years and for helping yet again as I work to overcome what I hope is the last great obstacle to total self-sufficiency.

Gross Photo Essay: Tick Bite & Burn

2012-05-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

If you're easily grossed out, I'd recommend skipping this post.

A few days before May Day, I went for a walk through my favorite meadow, barefoot and wearing jeans. I've done it hundreds of times before, but this time I picked up a tick. That's also happened a hundred times before, but I usually catch them before they burrow in.

Not this time. He got deeply embedded in my leg in about 20 minutes. I gently but nonchalantly pulled it out and checked to make sure that his head was attached to his body before I crushed him. (Why is the tick male? I don't know.)

The bite hurt immediately. Actually, that's how I found it so quickly. By morning it had swelled up and started to look a little infected. By the following morning it had developed a wide necrotic center with a 1" ring of infection. Time to go to the Urgent Care clinic!

They did a 6 mm punch biopsy to remove most of the necrotic flesh and be sure that all the tick parts were removed. They cauterized it with silver nitrate, put a bandaid on it and sent me home with a 10-day course of antibiotics to prevent systemic infection, including Lyme disease.

And here's where the photos begin. This is what it looked like after removing the silver nitrate soaked bandaid. The black is from the chemical. The smear is from me wiping it off with gauze before realizing I should photograph it.

And here's where it gets interesting, in a Darwin Awards kind of way. A couple of days later, the center looked and felt infected so I thought that it would be a good idea to use hot epsom salt to draw out the infection. The idea was simple: I'd put the hot liquid in a cup and seal it over the wound. As it cooled, the suction would pull out some of the infection.

What happened instead was that the top layer of skin peeled off. I was kind of mystified as to why this happened because the water didn't seem that hot. Well, I've since recalled some basic chemistry stuff and realized that Epsom salt can hold five times as much heat energy as water. (At least, I think that's what the numbers from WolframAlpha mean...) While hot water would cool down before it burned you, hot epsom salt water might not. And in this case, indeed it didn't.

But see? It doesn't look that bad. It's just one layer of skin, right?

Now I don't know that much about healing burns so I thought that the right thing to do would be to keep it clean and let it get plenty of air to dry it out. Remember, I'm on antibiotics that should keep it from getting too infected. These next photos were taken one each day so that I could keep track of the thing.

Here's an angle with sunlight showing just how deep it's getting.

And then the pain kicked in. I mean, it had hurt all along, but yesterday the pain just kept climbing until I could hardly see straight. This last development just took a few hours. The level of pain and the rate at which it was increasing sent me back to Urgent Care.

The doctor said I had a slow-developing deep second degree burn with secondary cellulitis. This means that the burn was bad and that the infection was spreading through the fat layer deep under the skin.

Here's the last I saw of it before the nurse fixed it up. Notice the pink that extends about 2" in every direction. I hadn't noticed it before, but it's actually really important. It's what told the doctor that the infection was spreading.

The nurse smeared it in silver sulfadiazine cream, covered it in petrolatum-soaked gauze, then about 10 sheets of dry gauze, wrapped it with 2 rolls of gauze, and a held it all together with a layer of self-adhesive rubber bandage. I'm told that this is standard dressing for large burns, and I took notes on the order and amount of dressings because I need to clean and redress it myself twice a day for a while.

The doctor noted that a burn like this must be causing a lot of pain so he prescribed Tramadol. I'm not a big pill popper, but let me just say that it's kind of amazing how good these drugs are. The pain is greatly lessened, sleep comes easily, and there are no other noticeable side effects. [Update: I just had my first daytime dose. "Sleep comes easily" is an understatement. It should read "This stuff drags you under the surface of consciousness like the kraken latching onto a dinghy."]

When I opened up the dressing this morning, I was a little surprised at how disintegrated it is. There's really no structure at all, just a deep, soupy mass. I gently cleaned it with Hibiclens, being careful to only rinse away the truly liquid parts of the wound. If some part of this is going to become skin, I don't want to jeopardize its integrity. The water evaporated quickly because this thing is HOT, and I immediately covered it up with fresh burn dressing.

So, what does this mean for business? Well, first off it delays the introduction of black cloth by about a week. I learned from the blue beam that I should not make the complex decisions that it takes to wind a beam while my mental capacity is compromised. I spent three days plying black threads so I'm ready to start winding as soon as I get back from this weekend's show. And, even if I have to spend most of the time sitting, I need to go and do this show. All this doctor stuff is super expensive.

Instead of weaving, I'm spending the next couple of days doing things that I can while sitting at a desk: price tags, signage, branding bags, etc.

And this is why the retail price is twice the wholesale price. The markup has to cover the time and materials that it takes to present items to customers in a professional manner. Wholesale pays for production, retail pays for getting it to customers.

Scannable Price Tags

2012-05-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

My bum leg and pain meds have had me in a weird place for being productive. I'm loopy enough that I can't risk making a big mistake in winding the black beam so I'm spending my time preparing for a new, more accurate, and faster checkout process.

The point-of-sale software that I already use has the ability to use the iPod's camera as a handheld barcode scanner. Because it can pack more information into a small space and has more error-checking, I chose to use the QR code format for my scan tags.

I tried really hard to use a pre-existing Avery label size, but found that there is enough jitter in the paper-feeding mechanism of my cheap printer that this wasn't feasible. They just wouldn't line up consistently, so I went with old tech: a paper cutter and glue sticks.

First, I used an iPod app to create the codes, then used Illustrator to lay out the sheets using the smallest code size that was consistently readable without errors.

After the sheets are laid out with the correct information and the correct barcode, they need to be sliced up and kept separate.

I then designed a sheet for the tag itself. The size is based on the barcode tags, leaving a margin around the edges and enough room at the top for the string hole. The front side contains a pared down version of my business card.

I used the inkle loom as a convenient way to measure out and cut lots of string to the same length, and again as a way to keep them from tangling after I tied the knots and before I threaded them through the tags.

Here's a shot of the final result: professional hang tags with the garment name, price, and a functional barcode on the back.

And here's my new labelling kit. There are blank hang tags, spare code slips sorted into separate envelopes, and a glue stick. This will travel to shows in case I need to repair or replace a tag on the fly.

The next thing to work out is a register scan sheet for sales. At the show, for instance, I'll be selling scarves at a steep discount to make more room in the booth for pillows and throws. Rather than change all of the tags, I'll hang up a sale sign and ring them up using a sheet of codes behind the counter. Simple! You see this sort of thing all the time at grocery stores.

The whole goal here is to compensate for a thing that happens at a wildly successful show where I'm so busy jumping from customer to customer that I sometimes forget to record the sale accurately and have a tough time reconciling inventory afterward. I've even made mistakes in calculating totals and undercharged people. One time I charged someone $30 for a $300 garment. Thankfully, she came back and paid the difference - minus a 10% discount that I gave her for being honest!

I'm hoping that spending a little extra time now will give me more time and energy to focus on customers at shows while improving the accuracy of my checkout and inventory management.

Pricing Pillows

2012-05-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

I'm super fair in how I set my prices. I earn a decent wage for my design and weaving time. Careful tracking of my hours for three years of production weaving tells me that the cloth needs to sell for $50 a yard wholesale or $100 a yard retail. When I make a mistake like I did on the blue beam, it takes longer and I earn less. It's not the customer's fault that I made that mistake. When materials cost more, like on the black cloth, the price only increases to cover the cost of materials and no more.

I have put the line of throw pillows into production to convert small pieces of cloth into merchandise that can be sold. One of my background goals is to reach new markets with them and make sure that they are profitable enough that I can afford to make lots of them if they're a hit.

In the last month, I've pulled my garments from all of the galleries that were showing them because they just don't sell in that environment. People seem to visit galleries for art and not garments. There are other galleries that specialize in housewares. I am rolling out the pillows alongside a line of sofa throws with the hopes that these items are more readily understood by customers and embraced by designers.

But I've been so busy with show prep that I didn't take the time to cost them out. To be fair to myself, I also didn't know what the costs were going to be until I was well into the process of making them. This is partly due to cashflow. I hired the seamstress to design them before I had the money to buy pillow blanks, for instance.

Well, now that I've got the numbers and ran a quick cost calculation, I realize that I'm kind of in trouble.

1. If I want to be paid my full rate for weaving the cloth that's going into the pillows and charge full markup on the materials and labor to make them, they need to cost $30 each or $50 a pair. This is too much for a 12" throw pillow.

2. If I don't get paid for my weaving but charge full markup on labor and materials, the cost drops to $16.50 each or $28 a pair. This is unsustainable.

3. If I charge full price for the weaving and charge no markup on the labor and materials, they cost $20 each or $35 a pair.

You'll notice in the last option that I am fiddling with the retail price calculation. This is kind of bad. It means that I must sell all of the pillows myself. They cannot be sold through galleries, showrooms, interior designer specification, or anything else and still be affordable.

My plan for now is to sell them myself, using pricing model #3 until I can find outlets who can charge the prices in #1. When they start to move at those prices, I'll increase the prices in my booth to match.

The Loss Leader

I'm starting to realize that these pillows are a thing that stores call a loss leader. They are not as profitable as other items in the shop, but they draw in customers who might not have stopped otherwise. The other thing that makes them work is LOUD, CLEAR ADVERTISING of the fantastic deal to be had on these items. It's what grocery stores are doing with the 3'x4' painted signs in the front windows. For the first time in my booth, I'll be hanging advertising signage to grab people's attention with a low price and get them in the booth.

Another part of the equation is the length of the sales cycle. At the next few shows, I'm going to need to learn how to sell cheaper items faster. I'm hoping that this happens naturally, that people don't need to spend as much time thinking about a $35 purchase as they do a $300 one. I'll also be streamlining the checkout process for increased inventory accuracy and accurate calculation of volume discounts. (one for $20, two for $35, four for $60)

More on the checkout process later...

New Product Development: Throw Pillows

2012-04-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

When I started making ruanas, I made different decisions from my teacher on a number of fronts. One of them was the uniqueness of my cloth. I design my cloth with much more complicated color gradients. Another was the decision to never weave two garments with the same weft colors. This means that hoods are not interchangeable and that there will always be "left over" cloth when we cut out the hoods. We use the center of the cloth and have a matching pair of squares that remain unused. I've been carefully folding them and putting them in a box, waiting for the day that I can develop a line of throw pillows.

Well, that time has finally come. Today I'm at Select Designs, where Karen and I are problem-solving the development of these pillows.
What weight of cloth should we use for the back?
How much cloth does each one take?
How are we finishing the edges?
Do we need to use bias tape to hide the seams?
How long will it take for each one when we get into full production?
What size pillow form do I need to stuff them correctly?

We're working out the answers to all of these questions today so that I can buy, prewash, and iron the bolts of backing cloth, buy the pillow forms, and have about 30 pairs of them sewn and delivered in time for the UDistrict Street Fair in Seattle two and a half weeks from now.

I think that throw pillows are going to take the place of the scarves that I've been (not) selling. They're meant to bring a different customer into the booth: people who are more interested in adorning the house than adorning themselves. They'll probably be priced about the same as the scarves. It's much less cloth but much more money for other materials and sewing time.

Whole Day Off!

2012-04-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

I woke up yesterday and went into the studio to start my work right on time. But when I got there, I just couldn't do it.

We've had beautiful weather for a few days now and I've stayed inside expanding the usable studio space and weaving just as fast as I can. And today my body said, "get out there and enjoy the nature!" And so I did, production schedule be damned.

It was a whole day of trekking around and exploring the AMAZING natural sights in the area: mountains, rivers, and forests filled with wildflowers. I reveled in the smells of new cottonwood leaves, buckbrush flowers, pine needles in the sun, and many, many more.

I didn't take out the iPod at all except to share one breathtaking sight. At Mill Creek Falls in Prospect there is the most powerful display of the natural power of water that I've experienced in a long time. In the spot where I took this video, there is no fence protecting a person from falling hundreds of feet into the raging torrent. My heart is racing now just thinking about it!

Even the ending of the day, one of my dangerously bald tires finally giving out, wasn't enough to lower my spirits. The day was glorious and gave me the energy to keep pushing through my production catch-up schedule. Just another month of long days and I'll have enough inventory that I should be able to keep up, even while doing two shows a month. And if I run out of inventory at that point, well I'll be "crying all the way to bank", as my dad would say.

Super-productive Day

2012-04-21T07:49:00.001-07:00

I used my emotions to make a decision for once, and I think it was a good one. After weeks of dealing with the tension issues on the blue beam I decided to just work super long days and get it done and out of my way instead of sitting there as a constant reminder of the mistake I made back in the old basement studio.

I was reminded of the adage, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" and struck by the passive-vs-active dynamic in the wording. It doesn't say "remember lemonade", "wish for lemonade next time", or "talk about lemonade". It tells us to think of the best result we can achieve with what we have and take action to make it into reality. Action is magic.

The result of my push to do the best I can with the blue beam has resulted in a big bolt of cloth, much of which is in the form of strips with fringe between them. (It's about 30 yards altogether.) I foresee a new line of fringed stoles, dresser scarves, table runners, placemats, and some beautiful long scarves.

Here's a photo essay to show how the end of the weaving went...

I also created a new system to keep track of how much yardage I'd woven in the various colors. The strips of tape have one inch of length for every yard of cloth.

After the cloth was done, I immediately put the remainder of the grey beam onto the loom. Then I went into "new studio setup" mode, clearing out the other loom nook, stapling up the plastic to protect the cloth from fiberglass, vacuuming, and hauling all of the loom parts up the stairs.

And then, after doing dishes, I spent a few pleasant hours sitting in the comfy chair next to a jar of hyacinths brought in from the garden. Simple pleasures like this make it all worth it.

Daily Routine

2012-04-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out a new concept and a new piece of software to support that concept...

I'm sure you've met people who love their routines. Heck, I've been in our little community long enough that I forget that most of American culture (Western, for that matter) is based on them. Rush hour happens because so many people have the same schedule Monday through Friday. Living out in the forest and setting my own schedule means that I don't have that same sort of structure.

One reason that I'm a weaver is that I like to do the same thing over and over again. How did it take me so long to figure out that I might try applying that to my daily schedule, too?

Well, I'm doing it now and I LOVE it. I've designed a schedule just for me. It takes into account my preexisting tea ritual and the fact that I need more frequent breaks the longer I've been working.

The Daily Routine app lets me create separate routines for different types of days. Office days have fewer working hours and more breaks because it's tougher for me to do brain work for the same amount of time as I put into weaving.

Some of the other types of days have yet to be defined. I just haven't set aside the time to set them up, but I will before the first one of them arrives.

Once the routines are defined, they are then applied to actual calendar days. The method for doing this is a little convoluted, but the beautiful and clear interface makes it pretty simple anyhow. (You can see that I've only been using this since April 17th...)

And once all that input work is done, the app just works. I've told it that all time blocks except sleeping and relaxing should begin by chiming a bell and popping up an alert to tell me what that bell means.

I find that it's making me WAY more productive. Instead of finishing a task and taking a quick break, I look to see when my next break is scheduled and find a task to fill in that time. Fewer unnecessary breaks means that I magically get more done in the same number of studio hours.

I'm especially amused at this last image disclosing my personality type. "11 hours and 19 minutes of fun left." That phrase seems to just suck the fun right out of it, doesn't it? Well, it doesn't really, not for me. I'm OK knowing that my day off consists of sleeping in until 9:00 and then having 13 hours of fun before bed. And since I'm so much more productive in the rest of my days, I've decided to take two days off every month for a while and see how I like it.

Changes in the Blog and Newsletter

2012-04-17T19:41:00.001-07:00

I've decided to change the approach on my blog and my other social networking efforts.

I love blogging. It's really fun to tell my story for folks who want to hear about the "behind the scenes" aspect of starting and running a weaving business. I've been hearing requests for another type of correspondence. People want to join a list where they can just hear about the products and deals without all of the back story. So, I'm changing things up a bit.

I'm working on a separate blog, Weaving Monk, that will serve just to announce new colors, new products, and special deals.

I'm also reconsidering the amount of focus and interaction that I engage in on my other social networking venues, too. I think that they need more attention.

What does this mean for my main blog? Well, I'll probably be cutting back on my posts here to give me the time to work on other networking efforts. I promise that I won't disappear entirely, just probably cut back to two or three posts a week here instead of posting nearly every day.

As for the email newsletter, it kind of doesn't matter what I do with it since I haven't sent one out since last fall. It will reflect the Weaving Monk blog, focusing on product announcements and special deals, and probably change to a more intentionally sporadic format to correspond with new color rollouts.

Do y'all have any ideas on these changes? Any comments on what else I should put into my new-product-and-special-deal focused newsletter?

"The Goods"

2012-04-17T11:20:00.001-07:00

Look at how we unceremoniously haul thousands of dollars in handwoven garments in trash bags...

I went to Medford for the seamstress swap that gave me my first batch of blue ruanas on the afternoon before I left for the show in Bend.

The rest of that afternoon was spent on the floor of the bathroom with sudden and severe food poisoning. After nine hours of painful purging and frightening fever, it rapidly ended, just in time for me to go to bed and wake up to pack the van. Whew! That was a close call!

And see? These are gorgeous garments that wear just like they're supposed to. No sign of the tension issues that caused me so much trouble in weaving them.

The one in that photo is probably the one that I'll keep for myself. The blue areas are a deep cobalt.

Did y'all know that I keep one garment from each batch of cloth for myself? I know that I won't be doing this forever, and I'd like to have some memorabilia from my younger years as a production weaver. And I write off the inventory loss as "marketing" because I will need to have some of these garments on hand to rephotograph every time I shoot a new set of photos for jurying.

Eventually, I plan to do color-specific shoots with blue shot next to Crater Lake, red shot with Autumn leaves, grey in front of a sandstone cliff, etc. I may even enlist compelling models and hire a real photographer. Eventually. But until then, I just keep one of each garment color in my closet.

The Miracle of GPS

2012-04-13T12:29:00.001-07:00

Last fall I was looking over budgets and trying to cut any fixed monthly bills out of the equation, even if it meant spending a little more money in the short term.

I had been paying $40 a month for portable broadband, using a device called a MiFi hotspot. This was a great deal, but I really didn't want to pay it if I could find a way around it. I looked at the reasons that I had that bill: to process credit cards on my iPod and to give me Google Maps when I was in unfamiliar places.

I started asking other vendors how their credit card systems worked and found a great one: North American Bancard. The fee was the same as I paid to Authorize.net for my iPod-based system, and they don't require you to buy the terminal. When new terminal hardware comes out, you can upgrade for free.

Poof! One reason to keep my broadband bill evaporated immediately. Now, the maps. I decided to spend the money and try a dedicated GPS.

Holy Cow!

I searched around for the best deal I could and ended up getting one from an online electronics company running a hefty sale so it cost me about $150 with no monthly fee. That's less than four months of broadband, meaning that I'd own it free and clear and have an extra $40 in my pocket every month after January.

Now that it's paid off and I've had some experience with it, I'll give a little review.

If you travel to unfamiliar places very often, a GPS is worth its weight in gold. Instead of having to look at a tiny iPod screen while I drive and pull over to get new directions every time I veer from the route, I've got a talking navigator who sees my "variations" from the route and gives me clear spoken directions to get me to my destination no matter what.

It also has a useful feature that helps a lot when I have to make multiple stops along the way. I can program every destination into a "trip list" and it will speak out to direct me to each place in order. Do you know how many times I've arrived at a show site and then remembered that I was supposed to stop at Home Depot on the way to get some little booth part? Well, not any more. The GPS directs me to Home Depot, and when I turn it back on, it resumes the directions to get me to the show.

An added bonus to the trip list is that you can tell it how long you expect to be at each destination, and what time you need to arrive, and it will tell you when you need to leave.

And these time estimates aren't based on things like speed limit. In my understanding, one of the privacy trade-offs that we make in using a GPS is that it reports the actual travel speeds of its users back to satellites. This allows the GPS companies to know how fast people actually drive down every road in their databases. These estimates are continually being updated, giving us incredibly accurate trip timing estimates.

There are other nifty features that aren't essential, but sure are nice to have. If you've read my blog for a while, I'm sure you've noticed my inclination to see as far into the future as I can. When I'm traveling, this means guessing how long it's going to take me to get there (or trusting Goole Maps) and continually calculating my arrival time in my head while I drive. Well, guess what!? The GPS does it for me. It's got little programmable indicators off to the side. I have them set for "Current Time", "Arrival Time", and "Elevation". (This helps me see if the straining sound on the engine is a problem or just the fact that I'm climbing up a mountain that somehow looks level compared to the surrounding mountains. On this trip, the GPS showed me that this is why I had one of my boil-overs last year.)

And then there's the gas mileage calculator. Every time I stop for gas, I fill the tank and tell the GPS how much gas I put in. It knows how many miles I've travelled and calculates the gas mileage for me. I'm always in a hurry, but if I wasn't I could set the GPS to calculate routes based on efficient gas mileage. I did this for a while, but found it taking me on winding country highways to avoid faster mountain passes.

Overall, the GPS is like having a passenger along to help make sure I remember where I'm going, look at the map for me if I get lost, and give me clear directions when I'm driving somewhere I don't know.

In choosing a voice for the device, I went with the highest quality voice that it came with, in this case an Australian man whom I've named Dave. When he gives me bad directions, like the time on the way to McMinnville when he didn't tell me that I needed to merge across three lanes of traffic to get to an exit less than 1/2 a mile after getting onto a highway, I can calmly respond to his direction with, "I'm sorry. I can't do that, Dave."

How I Made My Tension "Good Enough"

2012-04-12T08:48:00.001-07:00

I finally have a little bit of time to write about what I did to make the unacceptable tension on this batch of cloth acceptable. There are several things that told me the tension was unacceptable. First, one section was skipping, creating long floats on the surface of the cloth. It's because the beam turns at the rate of the tightest section and everything else is relative to that. That tightest section was REALLY tight. I had to set the beam tension to keep from breaking threads in it.

I added a little weight to the slack area so that I could weave enough cloth to wet-finish a sample. This is the true test of a cloth's characteristics. I needed to see whether I could get away with "sort of wonky" tension or if I needed to forget about having cloth in time for the next show and really fix the tension.

When the sample was done, I decided that I needed to reduce the tension on the tightest section, but that the others would be OK.

The procedure for fixing it is pretty simple. I just removed the tight section from weaving, taped it back into place, and wove off a bit of cloth with the remaining sections.

When the nearby sections are down to the same diameter, or really close, I put those threads back into action and the beam is ready to go!

Rethreaded, resleyed, and ready to start.

The result a few inches later...

Here's the piece of cloth with the section missing. I'll have to get creative to cut this cloth into scarves or shawls with fringe on the long side. Any cloth that's left over will get turned into throw pillows.

To make the tension "perfect", I'd repeat this procedure for the remaining tight sections, removing each one from service when it reached the diameter of the section I just fixed. I'd remove more and more sections from service while continuing to weave until all sections had the same diameter.

This is what will happen at the end. The short sections will run out and I'll keep weaving with the rest until the resulting cloth lies in strips too narrow to use, even for scarves.

There are several differences between doing it at the beginning and dealing with it at the end. The first factor, and the one that kept me from doing it, is time. It takes a long time to capture the thread order and rethread when it's time to begin weaving that section again. Doing it now would have prevented me from having blue cloth for customers who will arrive in my booth on Friday. That date will not change. At the end of the beam, I don't care about thread order. I'll just remove those sections when they run out and rethread them for the next project. It will take less time, and time will be less of a factor then.

The next factor to consider is tension. If I take the extra time at the beginning, the tension will be better for the rest of the cloth. If I don't (and I didn't) the tension will be an issue for the whole beam, finally resolving itself at the point when I'm weaving gappy cloth. And that's the price I'm paying for a simple mistake early on in the winding process. I've already spent about 60 hours dealing with this problem. There isn't enough profit in my production to pay for any more time fixing this cloth. I need to get it woven and move on to the next color. The only people, other than my blog readers, who would notice anything amiss with the cloth are textile aficionados, holding it flat against a wall and looking for flaws.

I blame my muse. Remember how I give credit to the muse when the cloth turns out perfect? Well, the flip side is that I get to share the blame when it doesn't. And perhaps I angered the muse by working on an unnamed loom without a talisman. These will both be fixed before I work on that loom again in a few weeks. Superstitious? Yeah, but to a healthy degree, I think. I recognize that my superstition really just serves to keep me humble when things go well and protect my ego when they don't.

Belated April Spools' Day

2012-04-11T08:14:00.001-07:00

I'm running over a week behind in everything right now, including reading the blogs that I love so much. It's funny, starting the day by reading about other weavers and their work helps me to feel like I'm part of a community, even though most of them don't even know that I read their stories.

Meg in Nelson posted a challenge on the first for people to submit photographs of their spools, bobbins, pirns, and whatever else they use to weave with. Well, I guess it's providence that I didn't read the message until today because I finally retrieved the photos of my sample bobbins from the camera last night.

Here they are!

Dream Alarm Clock

2012-04-10T14:00:00.001-07:00

OK, so in the midst of all the show prep, I heard about a new alarm clock app for the iPod and decided to try it. It is pretty amazing.

This alarm clock uses the motion sensors in the iPod to determine how deeply you are sleeping, and connects to weather services on the internet. This lets you tell it to wake you when certain parameters are met:

1. Have I actually slept enough?
2. How deeply am I sleeping right now?
3. Is it warm out? Calm wind?

You can use all of these parameters to set intelligent alarms.

Here are the setting I'm using right now, and they're gaining me something like two hours a day.

1. It knows whether I've slept enough and wakes me later if I haven't.
2. "around" means that it will wait until it senses that I'm sleeping lightly before trying to wake me, regardless of how long I've slept.
3. The failsafe. If I didn't sleep well and I'm sound asleep, but it's now 7:00, it will wake me anyhow, using a more raucous sound.

At the end of the night, it saves a log of how deeply you slept. You can look back at old logs to remember how well you're sleeping and see if changes in diet, exercise, or something else caused a change in your sleep pattern. Pretty cool stuff.

And then there are all of the other parameters like if someone tweeted you. I can't imagine how to use that, but I'll bet it's useful to someone!

This is a pretty cool app, and has done a great job so far at helping me to wake up after I've gotten enough sleep instead of turning over and going back in to unneeded REM for another hour and waking up late and groggy.

I did it!

2012-04-09T12:48:00.001-07:00

OK, so my correspondence is languishing, I haven't slept much the last few days, and I probably don't smell that great, but I delivered the cloth to the seamstress just in time to have blue ruanas for the show next weekend.

And now, to save myself another trip that costs much time and money, I'm going to keep up the frantic weaving pace. When I pick up the finished ruanas on Wednesday, I'll drop off another (smaller) batch of sewing that I'll then pick up in a couple of weeks when I'm in Wolf Creek anyhow.

And thus, the sewing pipeline will be stacked. Every month when I'm already passing through Wolf Creek, I'll swap a batch of cloth for the previous month's finished garments. No more running around like newly headless poultry. At least that's the plan...

Blue Cloth Is Finally Under Way!

2012-04-07T13:28:00.001-07:00

After much futzing and cajoling, the blue cloth is finally behaving well enough for now. When I set this deadline two weeks ago, I made sure that it was a little flexible. I would deliver cloth to the seamstress on Friday afternoon or Monday morning first thing. If I weave night and day, I can drive away at 6:00 AM on Monday with 8 ruanas ready to sew in time for this show. I'll weave shawls on Monday and Tuesday, pick up the ruanas on Wednesday and leave on Thursday. Perfect!

Here's my extra-long sample blanket.

And my winding station by the window, just crammed with blue thread.

New Seamstress

2012-04-06T10:35:00.001-07:00

I've made a couple of allusions to this, but haven't really talked about it...

Wispr has gone on a vision quest until June, at least. I miss my brother for lots of reasons, but in this blog I'm writing about the weaving business. He's been the one doing most of the sewing for about a year now, and his absence means that I have to do the sewing myself again (in my abundant spare time!) or hire someone else to do it.

Well, I just happen to have some good friends who own a production sewing company in Wolf Creek. They've been the largest employer in Wolf Creek for years, employing more people than the Inn, even during their slow periods. They are called Select Designs, and do incredible work. If you know anyone in the area who needs production sewing done, these are the folks to call. Most of their work is in outerwear: garden hats, raincoats, safety gear, and the like, but they have decades of experience in every type of sewing you can imagine. And they are FAST! That's one of the benefits of trusting a professional. They do not waste one movement or make due with cruddy tools. All of their machines are the best that's available. (They were the ones who sold me the horse-power-and-a-half production sewing machine that quadrupled my sewing productivity...)

Well, we've worked out a deal where they will do almost all of the sewing for me for a decent price, and even deliver it to Medford and save me an hour and a half of driving for each batch of cloth.

We're working on another deal now where they will design and sew pillow covers from my "scrap". I'll let y'all know when that comes together. They're going to be beautiful!

Canvas Heat Wall

2012-04-05T08:50:00.001-07:00

The new house and studio is in a beautiful place up in the mountains. And today it's becoming clear that the key word is UP. We're at about 2300 feet.

Two days ago was warm and sunny. Yesterday was grey and drizzly, but today there's snow.

I'm glad today for a change that I made to the studio yesterday. I realized that I was running a little electric radiator to heat the whole space even though I am using only a tiny piece of it right now.

So, I whipped out my trusty canvas dropcloths and fixed up a wall. It's not much, certainly not "well insulated", but it does a good enough job of heating just the room where I will spend another day inside the loom tying knots. It's so much easier to fit inside that machine if I'm not wearing two layers of wool, too.

New Studio Setup

2012-04-04T09:08:00.001-07:00

The morning after the move was finished, I needed to get going on the studio immediately. Yeah, I was exhausted and just wanted a day off, but no such luck! I've got shows coming and need to get the cloth done as fast as possible. Which means first getting the studio at least partially set up.

Before picture: the loom frame is starting to come together, but the rest is still just lumber.

As soon as the loom was assembled, I went to work on the lights.

I ended up hoisting an extra set of lights to the high part of the ceiling to give me enough illumination on the backside of the beam.

And this is when I got my first surprise of the project. After a day of working in this space I discovered that I itched. A lot. And then I noticed that the walls and ceiling are unfinished. I mean, of course I had noticed that before, but this time I noticed that what they did contain is lots of raw fiberglass.

OHHH NOOOO !!! I cannot let that stuff get anywhere near my cloth! I was reminded of a story from my grandmother who washed her fiberglass drapes with my grandpa's underwear. The results were disastrous.

I've already vacuumed the floor within an inch of its life and I'll do that every week. As I begin to use sections of this studio, I will need to cover the walls. I started with the first appointed loom nook so that I can get started with tying on the blue cloth that needs to be delivered to the seamstress in seven days.

So, it was more money spent on startup costs, and most of a day to get it bought and installed, but this is something that absolutely needed to be done. I'm talking with the landlord about splitting the costs to drywall this space, even if we don't tape and mud right away. Why would I pay for something that the landlord gets to keep? Well, because I would get to use it myself for the rest of my time here. It sure would be nice to work in a space that wasn't just plastic over fiberglass. It's not required, but it sure would be nice.

The Move

2012-04-02T20:47:00.001-07:00

Well, the move is done and we have internet service again so I can start catching up on blogging.

The home and studio move were grueling. I packed up the whole studio on Monday and Tuesday, and we mostly packed the moving truck on Wednesday.

Thursday was the marathon. We finished packing the truck, realized that there was no room for the last member of the new household, joining us from Grants Pass. So we came to the new house, emptied the truck and drove out to her place at the end of a 12-inches-wider-than-the-truck, muddy, winding road. On the way out of the driveway, the sun was setting so fast that Arcana had a hard time seeing to direct me over the tiny bridges and through the narrow gates. I've never driven a 24' truck before and I really thought that my heart was going to pound out of my chest.

But we did it, and we did it all in one day. Here are the photos...

This ugly basement storage area was a working studio just the day before.

...and this is where the stuff went. It's in boxes in what used to be the photo studio.

Arcana is the Pack Master. Notice how he has the two looms packed vertically and completely separated from each other? Genius!

...and here's how much space was left after he was done. None, really.

Here's the giant truck pulled up outside the two-story garage that will become the new studio.

Here are the traces of the most harrowing part of the drive up to Hilarey's. As I turned the tight corner, I could feel the back of the very heavy truck tilting and sliding off the edge of the road. I gunned it and miraculously pulled out of the mud, avoiding a slide into the ravine by less than a foot. If I hadn't made it, there's basically nothing that anyone could do. It would probably take a larger truck to pull out a truck of this size, and a larger truck just would not fit down this driveway.

And here's the garage on the next morning with my whole studio stuffed into it along with Hilarey's kiln.

This stuff is going to get organized and split between this space and one just about the same size upstairs. In the end, it will be a spacious and somewhat tidy weaving and sewing studio again.

Looms or Lumber?

2012-03-29T07:59:00.001-07:00

Here's the state of the studio after disassembling the looms. The three of them are carefully separated into their own corners. The trick in packing the truck will be to keep the parts separate. It's just way easier to put them back together if I know for sure which parts belong to which loom.

Well, Arcana is the pack master. He got two the looms into a TINY amount of space in the truck, keeping them totally separate from each other. The third one and the 36" folding jack loom went into my van. By the time we finished packing the truck it was pitch black. Today is driving and unpacking day. Yay!

The foremost thought on my mind this morning is gratitude for ibuprofen. I haven't used it in years, but after a winter of sedentary life and two days (so far) of moving lots of heavy things I'm sure glad that bottle is on the shelf. Yes, it's damaging to the liver if it's used too much, but today it's making it possible for me to keep going instead of laying on ice. And I need to make a point of getting more exercise. Apparently, production weaving isn't enough. :)

Trying To Avoid The Fallacy Of Sunk Costs

2012-03-27T09:20:00.001-07:00

In making decisions for my weaving business, I try to avoid a common fallacy, summarized like this, "I've already spent X to get started. I will lose that money if I don't follow through."

The truth is that I've already lost that money. Once it's spent, it's spent. In every moment begins life anew. This is my opinion, at least, but there are some idioms in English that back me up: "throwing good money after bad", "in for a dime, in for a dollar".

This is also referred to as escalating commitment. I know we've all experienced it when we keep pouring money or energy into a project just so that we don't lose the money or time we've put in already.

I'm reminding myself of this concept because of a series of decisions that made me VERY busy over the last few days. If you look at my strange operation to save the thread that was overwound onto the latest batch of cloth, you might think that I was trying to capture sunk costs in time or materials. Here's what I was actually considering...

1. I have a remote apprentice sort of flitting about in the wings. If he follows through with getting trained, it would be helpful to have the spare loom prepared for him to learn on without affecting the main production machines. If he doesn't, I can use that loom to experiment with new weave structures for new products.
2. If I look at the time that it would take to set this project up afresh, it would very likely be more than the time I'm spending saving the thread from a previous project.
3. Fixing the tension problems on the main beam before beginning to weave will SAVE me time. If I just plow ahead, I will need to stop and adjust fiddly little tension-fixing devices every few minutes. These devices will also just waste the thread a few inches at a time as I weave.
4. On the main project, I actually don't have the spare thread to rewind even the bad sections. I'm really skating on the edge of how little yarn I can have in stock and still get a project done. My investment in black thread for the next project has wiped out my thread budget anyhow.
5. There's a time constraint that keeps me from ordering more yarn for this project. I've got a show in about two weeks and really want blue cloth for that show. That means moving the studio, tying on the new cloth, weaving the sample and producing a couple batches of garments all in one week so that there's time to sew the garments before I leave. Having this cloth in the booth will increase sales and pay for the extra work that it's taking to get it there. Notice that, even if I had the money, there's no time to get the new blue thread in time for this tight deadline.

With all of that said, here is how I would make the decision differently now that I've gone through the process...

Basically, I would not do what I did at all. By plowing through the winding of the beam and pushing off my decision-making until later, I bound myself into the strange work that I just did. Next time, I would not overwind subsequent sections. I would wind them to the diameter that will make for decent tension overall and unwind the few initial sections that were technically correct but ultimately too long.

I also completely underestimated the amount of time that it would take to sley and (UGH!) unsley, 600 threads in a 20-dent reed. This is the one place where I sort of succumbed to escalating commitment. After starting the operation, I would rather put in an extra four hours' work than just throw it all away.

But it's done now, and the packing up of the studio is well under way.

Unsleying To Capture Thread Order

2012-03-26T10:10:00.001-07:00

You know how I use multiple threads loosely plied together to make my warp color gradients? Well, this sometimes causes me to jump through flaming hoops to maintain the order of them and remember with certainty which three belong together. Here's what I did yesterday to recapture the thread order for two beams at once.

First, notice that I did not unsley the purple threads that I will be tying onto next week. I just threaded the blue threads in the reed along with them. When it comes time to unsley, I just use post-it notes to keep the two sets of threads separate from each other as I carefully cut one thread at a time.

Then, I stick the two ends to two pieces of tape, one for each beam.

Here's a section that's all done. Just 15 more of them!

When deciding to do this operation, I failed to realize just how long it would take to do with so many threads. Ah, well! It's done now.