Monday, June 1, 2009

What A Find

Well I’m back from ANWG in Spokane Washington and it was great. The weather was great, the location was great and my hotel was great. You just can’t do better than that.

While surfing the vendors and buying far, far, far too much and these are a few of my treasures.
Nine brand new Weavers Magazines! And to make it even better The Yarn Barn of Kansas was selling them at the original cover price! It was such a more than fair deal that I proceeded to spend the bulk of my money with them.
From Glimakra I bought a wonderful 8 inch temple. It’s the smallest temple that they make and it fills out my temple collection.

Although I went with the idea of only buying weaving yarn; I got pulled into buying 2 really exciting spinning fibres.
This one is called Latte and is made from dewatering skim milk and is 100% green certificated. Apparently it can be difficult to spin, but smells lovely and will be worth the trouble I think. It looks so silky and shiny.
This bag was one of those discounted items that really caught my colour eye; 50% Wool and 50% soy silk. Yummy!

While at ANWG I took seminars from Sharon Alderman: Snazzy Yarns How to Use Them Not Lose Them. Bonnie Inouye: Echo Weave and Anita Luvera Mayer: Fashion Show Critique. What a diverse group of weavers, with extremely polarized views on our craft. From Sharon Alderman I got a sense of a weaver who loves, and is very comfortable with her weaving. Her gentle lecturing style was freely peppered with tips and backed up with samples; like a big weaving hug. Bonnie Inouye’s seminar was explosive! She was so enthusiastic about her topic; and that came through. She was not sharing any ‘how tos’ but throwing out huge ideas and challenging us to pick them up and make them our own; WOW! Anita Luvera Mayer was so witty and honest it was so much fun. We got a close up look at all the fashion show garments and her personal feelings about each item, positives and negatives. It made me want to enter my weaving in future shows and gave a real insight of what makes a good garment different from a great garment. Holy cow she does love surface embellishments!
So I just had to buy this book on Braids. I haven’t read it thoroughly yet, but there is so much information that I can’t fail to learn embellishments.

I came back from ANWG completely stoked, ready to pick up Bonnie Inouye’s challenge; I can see Echo Weave in my future!

Weaving Words
Brillatine was a fine cloth of silk and cashmere.

7 comments:

Life Looms Large said...

Ooooh - vicarious shopping! I love it!!

That's great that you got pristine copies of Weavers!!

Another temple....perhaps it will inspire me to try mine!

Milk fiber to spin....wow - I've never seen that!

Sounds like you had some great classes....a great list of teachers certainly. I can see from their work that they'd probably differ pretty widely as teachers.

It's great that you feel inspired to enter some of your work in future shows. I was hoping to do that for this version of NEWS, but that hasn't happened.....so now I'm saying "In 2 years." Hopefully it will come to pass for both of us!!

That braiding book looks cool! I just borrowed some Kumihimo stuff from a friend.....it's a whole new world to me but I'm thinking it might be a beach activity for me and my nieces later in the summer. With the dual purpose of making purse straps and such with it when I'm not at the beach!

Glad you had such a great conference!! Welcome back!

Sue

bspinner said...

What great finds!! I can't wait to see how you like spinning the dewatered skim milk. Love the colors of the soy/wool blend. The Weaver's sure were a bargin.
I've taken a couple of Anita Luvera Mayer workshops. I wish I could be more like her daring and bold.
Sure glad you had a good time!!!

skiingweaver said...

Yay! How fun! Sounds like an excellent conference! Yippee! (Can't wait for Convergence next year...)

Sharon said...

That a pretty heavy hitting team heading your conference - oh my, lucky for you. That roving produced jealousy in me as it's been years since I've been to a vender show. Look forward to seeing how you apply what you learned. Anita Luvera Meyer - okay, I am really jealous.

charlotte said...

What a lot of great finds! This milk fiber sounds really interresting, you have to let us know how it is to work with it.

Trapunto said...

Wow. I should have gone. I'd have loved to hear Sharon Alderman and see Anita Luvera Meyer's work in person.

Your goodies look glorious! One doesn't often meet a lady with a full set of temples. There ought to be some kind of formal certification: "Temple Preparedness."

Cindie said...

Hi, so sorry I didn't run into you at conference - me not staying on campus makes it difficult to meet up with others at mealtimes and just meandering about. My seminars were great too and after conference we headed to Leavenworth for a few days on the way to the spinning conference, NWRSA in Tacoma - just arrived home from that 2 hours ago - had a blast and even won 2 blue ribbons on handspun handknit items in the gallery.