{"id":8042,"date":"2016-12-14T14:44:03","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T19:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/?p=8042"},"modified":"2016-12-14T14:44:03","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T19:44:03","slug":"new-adventures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/2016\/12\/new-adventures\/","title":{"rendered":"New adventures"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"shawls<\/a><\/p>\n

Helen Keller is quoted as saying that life is either a grand adventure or nothing. I don’t know exactly how I feel about that sentiment, but I do know that I’ve certainly had my share of adventures in the last decade, especially in the last few years.<\/p>\n

My latest adventure is placing some of my weaving in high-end retail locations. I’m starting with the one that makes the most sense given my status as a Roycroft Renaissance Artisan – the Copper Shop Gallery<\/a> on the Roycroft Campus. <\/p>\n

It’s taken time for me to wrap my thinking around retail outlets. They need to cover all their costs for a brick and mortar store, and still I need to get paid reasonably for my time designing and weaving. I had an “ah ha” moment sometime this fall, when I realized that if I applied a percentage the cost of jury fees, booth fees, van rental, meals, etc. to the items I sold at shows, to say nothing of my time in setting up, tearing down, and staffing the booth, that the commission that retail outlets take made sense. Then I felt like I had to make it through the remaining shows I had.<\/p>\n

I have an appointment Friday morning with the manager of the Copper Shop. That caused me to once again look at my tags. I’ve hated them for a long time and am in the process of working with a printer to devise an alternative. But in the meantime, my tags for a retail outlet needed to do double duty. They had to both give the important information about the fabric and <\/em>identify my business so customers could find me for future purchases.<\/p>\n

\"business<\/a><\/p>\n

I’d spent some time looking at the tags of other weavers at both the Weaver’s Guild’s Holiday Sale and the Roycroft Winter Show, and decided that for now I’d adopt a common strategy; I’d hand write the information on the back of a business card and hang it from the piece. Hanging doesn’t work if the fabric will be folded or rolled and placed in a storage bin for moving, but it does if there are a limited number of items that will be transported on hangers and then displayed.<\/p>\n

\"fabric<\/a><\/p>\n

I spent hours choosing what pieces I would bring, pressing each piece to remove wrinkles, re-tagging them, and creating an Excel spreadsheet so I’d know what I was bringing and what I anticipated for sale price of each item. I’m bringing 8 shawls in various fibers, 8 silk scarves, and 12 scarves in assorted fibers. I’ve probably overdone it, but that’s how I am. That’s how well most of a day gets eaten up.<\/p>\n

Amidst continuing to make Christmas presents that I can’t yet show you, I’ve also done some weaving, mostly of those towels from the last post. I got 7 towels out of the warp, although the last one, with a test fiber, is short.<\/p>\n

\"7<\/a><\/p>\n

After this shot I machine and hand hemmed, inspected and fixed some weaving errors, washed and dried, and hard pressed. Here they all are in their finished state.<\/p>\n

\"7<\/a><\/p>\n

The top three are for my daughter to give as gifts. Burgundy, celery, purple, and red (for my inventory) all have the same treadling pattern. I hadn’t intended to do this, but liked how it worked so went for it.<\/p>\n

\"treadling<\/a><\/p>\n

After weaving those four, in an effort to continue to use up the stash, I decided to use a cool variegation of earth tones in a cotton and linen blend. Even though it was much fatter than my 8\/2 warp, I figured it would both look good and be thirsty.<\/p>\n

\"earthy<\/a><\/p>\n

It wove up so quickly that I used a variegation of green, blue & yellow of the same fiber. <\/p>\n

\"green<\/a><\/p>\n

Because of the thickness of the yarn I had to modify the treadling pattern for these two towels slightly.<\/p>\n

\"treadling<\/a><\/p>\n

For the last towel I wanted to try out another fiber in my stash. I’m not sharing what it is here, because if I have time (what?!?!) I want to put on a short warp and weave a few of these as gifts so my family can give me some honest feedback about how they work and feel. I modified the treadling pattern for this towel.<\/p>\n

\"treadling<\/a><\/p>\n

When I got all the towels off the loom I was surprised by how much the cotton-linen warp pulled in. When I took them out of the dryer – wow! They were small and lumpy! Here’s what the earthy towel looked like on my ironing board before the hard press.
\n\"cotton-linen<\/a><\/p>\n

And afterward.
\n\"cotton-linen<\/a><\/p>\n

A very clear example of why that hard press is an essential part of finishing every piece of weaving.<\/p>\n

Now I’m going to take Jack for his afternoon walk and then get back to my gift making. Maybe one of these days I can get to writing my Christmas cards. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Helen Keller is quoted as saying that life is either a grand adventure or nothing. I don’t know exactly how I feel about that sentiment, but I do know that I’ve certainly had my share of adventures in the last decade, especially in the last few years.<\/p>\n

My latest adventure is placing some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[227,325,557],"class_list":["post-8042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weaving","tag-handwoven-scarves","tag-handwoven-shawl","tag-linen","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8042"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8058,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042\/revisions\/8058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondwindjewelry.com\/jewelry-weaving-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}