Elizabeth Brandkamp posted this list to the DyersList; it was so much fun I asked for and received her OK to share with you…and added a couple of my own signs… If you’d like, visit her blog here.

Here’s her list:

Hope you don’t mind the long post but wanted to interject some hopeful humor!  I was posting this to my blog but thought many of you might enjoy this and maybe add to it!

1.  You look forward to days when the temp is in the 90’s and the humidity is at least 80%.

2.  You have to plan your showers ahead as you frequently run the hot water tank out of hot water!

3.  You only buy clothing that is white.  In fact you buy one of everything, take it home, see how well it dyes.  If it passes, you go to every store in the area buying up your size and one size smaller and larger.

4.  People avert their eyes when they see  you in public with large bruises (really just that purple dye that got away from you).

5.  All your pillowcases are tie – dyed.

6.  You always spell out “d – y – e” or “d- y – e – i – n – g” when speaking in public.

7.  You can recite from memory all the Procion MX pure dye colors and their numbers.  You even know what the numbers and letters mean.

8.  You know what every MX color discharges to.

9.  You analyze every piece of commercial batik trying to figure out “how did they do that?” and then try to duplicate it.

10.  You own salt in 20 different sizes.

11.  You own a rainbow colored microwave which lives in your basement.

12.  You know the weight in grams of every pfd fabric on the market and you own some of each.

12b (from Sarah):  You’ve tried every PFD on the market, but are a snob and will only use a select few (Hoffman Lawn 1377, Testfabrics 419M, and that heavenly Kaufman sateen).

13.  You never have met a color you didn’t like (and want to duplicate).

14.  Your husband has to schedule when he will do his whites as there may be no hot water in the tank.

15.  You contemplate dyeing that white streak in your hair green or purple or better yet multi-color.

16.  You regularly check out thrift stores and ebay for old white linens and silks.

17.  You wonder why everyone doesn’t know the difference between dyes and paints.

18.  You own pvc pipe in every diameter that is made.

19.  You stalk construction sites to see if you can get 6 inch pvc pipe for your shibori.

20.  You covet your neighbor’s six gallon buckets as they would be perfect for your next dyeing session.

20b (from Sarah):  You buy kitty litter based on the buckets:  white is good.  Tall and square idea for Shibori poles.  Squat and white good for bucket dyeing….

21.  You try to buy all products in large plastic containers.  Your husband just thinks you are being frugal.

22.  You don’t make homemade frosting anymore as the container that the store-bought stuff comes in is perfect for your dye solutions.

23.  You can’t imagine buying your dyes in anything less than 1 lb containers.

24.  You seek out pool stores in winter in the cold Northeast and then buy the largest containers of pH+ they have.  (They never fail to offer you a small container first for your “hot tub”.)  Corollary:  you go around to all seasonal displays in supermarkets, Walmarts and home stores to find half priced pH+ in September.  You check the label to make sure it is indeed sodium carbonate and not bicarbonate.

25.  You buy a heated mattress pad to use in your dye studio.

26. appears to have gone awol….

27.  You do your chores in the hour it takes for your low water immersion fabrics to batch.

28.    You have to caution family members not to get too close to the edge of all your laundry sinks as they might stain their clothes.

29.  If there was ever a fire in your house, you would take out your  3 1/2 inch  thick dye book first as one of your treasured possessions.

30.  You own every dye book ever written but never look at any of them (except for your treasured dye book).

31.   You frequent home stores on a regular basis with your husband as there may always be a new brush or sponge or leftover  pieces of plexiglas.

32.  Your children and husband roll their eyes when they see what socks and tshirts you are wearing in public.

33.  You  now own a lot of black clothing as it does not show any dye stains!

33b (from Sarah): the Marian Reid corrolary:  once a year you do a black vat-dye to rejuvenate (as in dye over) your black clothes.

34.  You buy fabric 100 yards at a time.  You never let the supply in your basement get below 100 yards.

35.  You no longer have to look up any formulas for soda ash or urea water!

36.  You have given the MSDS sheets of every color of MX dyes plus the auxiliaries  to your engineer husband so he no longer believes your are trying to poison your family.

37.  You treasure your dye dogs (note from Sarah:  a really ugly piece of fabric) as they are just the beginning of a more interesting piece!

38.  You get  most of your daily exercise by running up and down the steps to check on the progress of things in the dye pots.

39.  You always find something you can use in your dyeing in the dollar stores.

40.  You still take classes on dyeing on the outside chance that you will learn a new or better way to do something.

41.  You finally have a use for all that old pantyhose from your work days in the corporate world.  (It works wonderfully for staining dyes or for scrunching fabric.)

42. Your friends and family nod politely when you start talking about your dyeing experiments.

43.  You have absolutely NO problem cutting into hand dyed fabric!

44.  You have been known to sit in bed and fold and refold newly dyed fabric.

45.  You save all your priority mail envelopes as the Tyvek doesn’t take dye and washes wonderfully so you can label all your experiments without losing the information on a heavily dyed piece.

46.  You get Tyvek from all your friends as well!
46b (from Sarah): You know that “permanent” Pigma pens RUN if used on tyvek, so have a black Sharpie to use on it instead.

47.  Your local fabric store has your number on speed dial and gives it  out to anyone who wants something dyed.  (It should be noted that you don’t do commission dyeing.)

48.  You can recognize fabric you have dyed in any of the local quilt shows (or see people walking around in something you have dyed).

48b (from Sarah):  you can recognize the work of other hand-dyers (like Judy Robertson’s fabrics).

49.  You are invited to new groups (so people can be the first to pick out fabrics they want).

50.  You read Dyerslist and Complex Cloth each day without fail in case there is something new you can experiment with.

and from Sarah:

51.  You buy quarter yard cuts of commercial batiks so you have a ready-reference for color combinations you want to try.

52.  You have a folder of photos and pages torn out of magazines with color inspiration.

53.  You have another folder with ideas for your dream “wet” (dyeing) studio.

54.  You are well-versed in the types of large/deep laundry sinks, how high they need to be to save your back during wash-out, and your preferred goose-neck faucets for said dream dyeing studio.

55.  From a soul on the dyers’ list, you purchase a dorm fridge to use in the wet studio area to store mixed dye so it’s not in your food fridge.

56.  You  salvage someone’s old microwave to use in the dye studio to heat up the blues when dyeing in winter.

57.  You look at batiks and hand-dyeds and immediately try to figure out “how’d they do that?”

Last one for now:  Stained clothes aren’t a problem… you over-dye them!  Those pale pool blue pants with the stain from a permanent pen?  No problem… work at the stain with OxyClean to lighten as much as possible, and dye turquoise!

And that’s enough for now…. this is Maine Quilts week!  I delivered some quilts yesterday, helped hang part of the show, and took a few photos, so hopefully in a couple days I’ll have “before the show” pics here, to be followed by Show pics!  Stay tuned…

and still no word yet on the fate of my hard drive… it is in the “Clean Room” at the lab in New Jersey.  They needed to order something special to get at the data (ominous).  I am determinedly optimistic.  I really am…..

OK, if I haven’t alienated everyone with that title, I’ll share the sad tale of my beloved Mac laptop. Sob.

Last Tuesday, Joshua was surfing the web, listening to Youtube videos on my laptop while I was in the kitchen.  Suddenly, it froze (this should have been a warning), but then it unfroze.  We resumed what we were doing.  After a while, I went to take a shower.  When I returned, Joshua was on the glacial desktop (where I now type this post, which I inadvertently deleted once already because the desktop is totally and utterly awful).

I looked at Joshua quizzically, and he said:  your computer froze up, so I had to force quit, and now it won’t start.  Not good.  I tried to start it up.  I got a gray screen with a file folder with a question mark.  Really not good.

I called AppleCare, thanking my stars that I followed good advice and purchased the 3-year extended warranty.  I got a real live human within a couple of minutes, and we tried everything he knew, for more than 20 minutes, including trying to re-install the operating software.

At one point, he prompted me:  see where it has the icon for a hard drive, click on that.  Umm…no….there is no icon.   Really, REALLY not good.

AppleCare guy goes away to consult with a supervisor.  Ominous.  He returns and says “we are authorizing you to have a warranty check and repair; the nearest authorized Apple Warranty Service center is in Augusta.”  That is an hour away from here…lotsa gas!

First thing in the morning, I call Abacus Technologies here in Camden, because I know their Apple guru, Jeff, is really good and I had thought they were Apple authorized.  They are, but they no longer do warranty repairs.  However, Jeff told me that although the hard drive / hardware issues are covered, data recovery is not.  Here’s the really awful part:

Due to the assorted crises that have come at me one thing after another for the past 18 months, I haven’t done a back up of my files.  Not even putting photos on CD, including of Joshua’s accident, graduation, Eli’s year, the last pictures of dear Yeti, nothing.  On my laptop, and now seemingly lost forever are all the photos, all my teaching files, my slide presentation, my address book, my calendar, all my contacts for future teaching gigs, all my documents, all the iTunes library (over a thousand songs amongst us all), you name it it was lost. My life is/was on that laptop, and it appeared to be lost for eternity.  SHRIEK!

The only good thing in all this is that I HAD saved my manuscript on a thumb drive…thank heavens!  It has been two years of work; at least I know that is safe…..

However, Jeff the Mac Guru says he might be able to save the data, but that should happen before warranty work.  All efforts fail, including trying to mount the drive to a PC even…after all if you can drag and drop the files….  SO the only chance to save my stuff is to send it away to the “Doctors of Mega Computer Death”.  Jeff said “you know those Clean Rooms you see on TV?  all white, guys in Tyvek suits?”  That’s your only chance.  Cost:  $800-2700.

After I got off the phone, I had a total, complete and utter bawling-out-loud meltdown.  Fortunately, I was alone in the house except for the cats and dog.  I had simply had it… after one family crisis after another, I didn’t need this too.

I only beat myself up a little for being a total idiot and not doing back-ups.  After all, I DO have an external hard drive in the house.  However, I was using it to back up the PC, and it can be formatted for PC or Mac, but not both.  And the bookkeeping was still on the PC.  Plus, I would have had to figure out how to erase the external HD (hard drive), re-format it for Mac, etc.  Since I find computer stuff frustrating beyond bearing (one misplaced comma and you can spend four hours, whereas someone who knows what they are doing looks at it and says “oh here it is”….), I procrastinated what with all the seemingly endless family crises and demands.

So, upon reflection, I called back and said do it.  Getting the photos alone is worth it, and saving 2-3 months of full-time work re-doing all my class stuff is a bonus.   And amidst all this, Jeff said there was no point in his having the computer all apart and then sending me somewhere a long drive away, so he’ll ALSO do the warranty work!  BLESS HIM! I’ll put the cost on my visa card, ask Mom for a loan if I need one, and just get on with it.

Moral of the story:  BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE.  Do it NOW.  Go buy an external hard drive.  Even on the PC it was easy to format and do the back ups.  A 500 GIG hard drive is now $140 at Staples online…. that’s about the price of developing 10 rolls of film.  Cheap at the price.

My Mac (and yes, even with this highly unusual hard drive suicide, I’d still do it all over again and buy a Mac, and working on the PC has reinforced that!) is now in a lab in New Jersey. Please beam “get the data” thoughts in the direction of the mid-coast of the US, please…..   I won’t relax until I know for sure they can save it, but since these companies can retrieve data from computers that have been through fires and floods, I am guardedly optimistic, she typed, nervously.  They also send it back on a new external hard drive.

Guess what I’m gonna do?  Hook that baby up to my laptop and try to back up EVERY DAY!  Sheesh I don’t need this!

So that’s why I won’t be able to blog quite as often or with pictures.  I’ll do a book review or two and see if I can find pics on the internet to upload for color….  and in the meantime, remember:  BEAM GOOD THOUGHTS TOWARDS NEW JERSEY THAT THEY CAN SAVE MY DATA!  Thanks, and now I’m off.  I WILL believe it will come back….

One year and one day ago, Joshua got hit by a car while riding his bike, and long-time readers will remember the saga of his getting evacuation by helicopter to the regional trauma hospital, six surgeries in three weeks, two transfusions, and lots of metal in and on his leg.  He had a seventh surgery in early November to remove the external fixator (the metal hardware on his shin).

Today, he is almost as good as new, with three truly wicked scars which will prompt story telling for the rest of his life.  When he is very tired and/or walks a very long way, he sometimes limps a bit, but he was able to wrestle with the 8th grade team!

We are so grateful he is alive, has both legs (without the excellent care he received, an accident like this even 10-15 years ago he would have lost the leg! shudder!), and that we are blessed and plagued by the usual joys of raising a teenage son in the 21st century!

I’d include a current photo, but the hard drive on my laptop committed suicide last week, and it will be a while before it is fixed.  I’ll try to keep up regular blogposts, but since I am currently working on a 6 1/2 year old dinosaur of a Dell, I may not be able to process photos… stay tuned!  And in my next post I’ll fill you in on the sad story of the laptop.  I think I’ll get the data back, but it’s gonna cost a fortune….more anon!

For now, we’re going to celebrate the fact that Joshua is alive and home for dinner with Chinese carry-out!

You may have noticed (or not, but I sure have) a dearth of quilty posts here the past many months. I really miss my studio and making art! Between family, exhaustion and a little working on my manuscript, I haven’t been able to create much. And the two pieces I’m working on now are for the Journal Quilt Exhibit this coming year, and can’t be shared (unless they don’t get juried in, or if they do get in, not until the show opens in Houston in late October–the hotlink is to the 2007 journal quilts… you can see mine on my website and on page 9 at the hotlink). BUT, I think I can share a little bit of the book samples I’ve been slaving over for my manuscript for Unraveling Threadwork (tentative title).

(Earlier blogposts about the book, in reverse chronological order, are here and here and here.)

Anyway, the book is about using thread on the surface of a quilt, so that covers applique, decorative stitching, free-motion stitching (at the quilt top stage) and quilting. Here I’m making samples of various ways to applique, including illustrating the need to reverse somethings …here’s the “reversed” S shape:

Here’s a mock up of the photo I’d like in the book on how to dampen the stitching to make removing freezer paper easier:

One thing I didn’t realize, but which makes sense, is that if you want the book to come out the way YOU want, you need to give the publishing company real guidance on the photos by doing mock ups. Of course, this is a LOT of work… you don’t just make the sample, but in my case put the camera on the tripod, set up the photography lighting, take several shots , select the worst and delete the extras, re-size the photos, then (when inserting into manuscript) relabeling all the dang things, and making sure the labels and numbers and whatnot correspond! Talk about time consuming…. so I’m only nearly a year late due to life etc.

Another pretty photo is to illustrate visual texture in cloth, from plain (nearly solid) on the far right, to LOTS of visual texture (on the far left…larger designs, lots of contrast in both line and value).

And on that note, I’m gonna sign off, do some reading, and hopefully get back to work!

While working on some samples for my manuscript the other day, Eli–already bored with summer and having read a book a day for nearly a week–wandered in to my studio. Poking about he asked, “What’s this?”

Well known to a select few and a mystery to others… it is a cord winder! After a bit of internet surfing I found it here (please note, I have never ordered from this store… it’s just the first place that popped up on the google search) and it is, apparently, called “The Spinster” (yuk yuk…not!).

There are several approaches. If you want a cord of all the same color, make a loop of a yarn or, as Eli did in these samples, knot two equal lengths of two different yarns (or more!!!) . Slip one end around something stationary like a doorknob or bedpost–it has to be something you can pull against. Slip the other end of the loop over the hook (on the right in the photo below). Then, you just wind in the reel, like on a fishing rod. This action twists the cord. When it is as tight as you would like, stop. The cord shortens as you wind.

The next step is easiest if you have someone to help you, especially if the cord is LONG. Figure out the midpoint and have your helper hold it and move away from the doorknob (or whatever) as you take the hook end toward the knob. Hold the two ends together and have your helper release the midpoint. The cord will instantly twist up into a rope.

Eli’s lower sample was made from a thick purple chenille and a thin gold yarn (about as thick as string). The second string is made of a sport-weight cotton yarn (the turquoise skein pictured) and a decorative / fancy yarn, the green. Isn’t that awesome? As a matter of fact, it perfectly matches some fabrics I’ve sorted out to make a totebag and some other goodies. Doesn’t it look delectable?

And, in the process of trying to find a website with the Spinster, I came across this fascinating site about making reproduction 16th and 17th century garments… I can see getting lost on that site for more than a few hours… I just love learning that kind of stuff! Happy surfing!