Send news items and fiber events to Tim Prins by the 25th of the month for inclusion in the next month’s newsletter.
Guild Calendar
Saturday & Sunday, November 9-10, 2024 – PHG Fall Sale
10:00am – 4:00pm, Multnomah Arts Center,7688 SW Capitol Hwy. (503) 823-2787
Thursday, November 14, 2024 – October Meeting
Multnomah Arts Center + Zoom, 7688 SW Capitol Hwy. (503) 823-2787
All meetings are free and open to the public
10:00 am Day Meeting – Auditorium
9:30 am – 10:00 am: Set up, social time and library browsing time
10:00 am – 12:00: Meeting
7:00 pm Evening Meeting – Room 30 (Senior Center)
6:30 pm – 7:00 pm: set up, social and library browsing time
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm: Meeting
Thursday, November 21, 2024 – New Weaver Forum
10:00 am – 12:00 pm – Zoom
Need help or advice on something you’re working on, or just want to help others with their projects? Come join us Thursday morning to get answers to your questions and talk about how to approach weaving challenges.
See the website for study group meetings.
President’s Message
Fall back November 3rd, time is flying. Over the last few weeks, our Guild has had a successful WeftOver sale under the guidance of Kay and the help of so many volunteers. Our board had a half-day planning session with a SCORE volunteer facilitator. Our Fall sale is November 9 -10. The Spring Sale and PHG Retreat are being planned for 2025. Our workshop and program chairs have great speakers/instructors planned for members. So many things, so much to learn and do.
As mentioned, the board held a planning session. The idea was we would come up with a strategic plan or a road map or goals and objectives for the year; where should the board focus their energy. If you have ever participated in a planning session, you know the event happens organically. The conversations go where they will and the results may not be where you planned to go but go where the group wants or needs them to go. What I learned, as a new member and new board member, is we do a lot well and there is no reason to really change the basic running of the guild (the exception is google docs, don’t get me started!). One theme that was evident was the desire to improve our member engagement/relations. The discussion ranged from improved or more frequent communication to opportunities to involve members in their areas of interest, to provide avenues for new or interested weavers to learn the craft. Unfortunately, the session ended before we could flesh out ideas. I would welcome your thoughts. If you would be interested is chatting about how PHG can improve member engagement/relationships, feel free to reach out to me noragessert@yahoo.com. We recognize that we can do more, we just need your ideas.
On a lighter note, in the session I learned that my fellow board members, that create such amazing work, and I assumed (never assume) worked HOURS daily on their weaving, don’t. As I embark on my weaving journey it was heartening that my periodic, fits and starts on projects is the norm not the rule. I did move all my current projects into my living room so I can’t ignore them and went through all of my yarn to plan my next project on my big loom. The result was I think I need some yarn for a baby blanket I plan to make. After all the yarn I bought at the WeftOver sale, how the heck can I need more?
Nora Gessert
Upcoming Programs
November Meeting & Program: Photographing & Styling Handwovens, by Elaine Palmer
Two 1-hour presentations, guild members are encouraged to watch both as each hour’s topics are discussed in more detail.
We photograph our handwovens for many reasons: to catalog our personal work, for submission to juried shows, to post on our websites or websites such as Etsy, and for printed publications. This talk discusses design and technical considerations when photographing and styling handwovens for different media. The talk includes discussion of studio lighting, outline vs. simple environment, and styling techniques Elaine used when photographing handwovens for the Weavers’ Guild of Boston’s 90th Anniversary book, Interlaced. There is also a discussion of how to shoot for Etsy and layout considerations when designing direct mail collateral and on-figure photo shoots. There will be a short demo of the lighting technique and styling at the end of the evening presentation.
(no supplies are needed)
Elaine Palmer has a BFA in Graphic Design from Kent State University. She was an on-figure and product Photo Art Director/Product Stylist/Producer during her professional career art directing on-location and in-studio advertisements and catalogues for 30 years for companies such as Eddie Bauer, Hang Ten, and
Nordstrom. As Sr. Producer managing all flat photography for the in-house photo studio for Nordstrom.com, she produced the first Nordstrom Style Guide for freelance stylists to ensure proper and consistent Nordstrom branding. Elaine moved to Amherst, MA, in July 2008 after living and raising a family in Seattle for 27 years. In 2013 she completed a four-year weaving course at Hill Institute. She enjoys weaving tea towels on her computerized 16S Toika and graphic images on her Ideal Glimakra converted to a single-unit drawloom. She and her husband relocated back to Seattle in the View Ridge neighborhood in 2021. Her professional experience as a Photo Art Director working in the fashion industry was an asset in photographing and styling handwovens for the Weavers’ Guild of Boston’s 90th Anniversary book, Interlaced.
Upcoming Workshop
January 10 & 12, Designing Woven Fabrics – Design Criteria, presented by Janet Phillips
Registration for the Designing Woven Fabrics – Design Criteria workshop is open. The online workshop is taught by Janet Phillips from the UK and scheduled for 10 am – noon on Friday January 10 and Sunday January 12, 2025. Learn to design original 4-shaft twill fabrics. This was one of our top 5 rated topics in the recent workshop interest survey, so we are happy to have it on our calendar. There is a HARD REGISTRATION DEADLINE of November 27, 2024 (this is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving). Please note that the final workshop cost depends on the number of registrations. Want more details about this fun and informative workshop? Just click the link above.
We currently have 7 spaces remaining in this workshop (great news for those registered, the workshop has enough registrations to run). I have been contacted by non-members who are interested in attending this workshop. Registration will open to them in early December. So, if you are interested, register soon to insure your spot!
Hope to see you there (online) in January!
April 11-13, Sewing with Handwovens workshops with Linda Kubik
We are hosting TWO Sewing with Handwovens workshops with Linda Kubik in April. We have a one day Homemade vs. Handmade Techniques Workshop on Friday April 11, 2025 at the Mill End Store in Beaverton. And, a two day Quintessential Northwest Vest workshop on Saturday and Sunday (April 12 & 13) at Ruthie’s Weaving Studio in Portland. This was our most highly requested workshop topic in this past summer’s interest survey, so we are happy to be able to host these workshops.
Please see the links for pricing and details.
Happy weaving and learning!
Any question should be directed to workshops@portlandhandweaversguild.org.
Guild News
WeftOver Sale a Huge Success
A huge thank you to everyone who helped make our Weftover Sale a success! We appreciate all who contributed yarn, books, and equipment, as well as everyone who came out for the sale. The guild made 1,905.85 in sales!
Special thanks to our enthusiastic volunteers who assisted with setup on Friday, sales and cleanup on Saturday: Linda, Christine, Vianne, Meadow, Janice, Mike, Dan, Robin, Nora, Kay, and Eric. Many hands truly make light work! We’ll be happy to accept your bits and pieces again next October for our next Weftover Sale.
Fall Sale
All spaces for the fall sale are spoken for! There will be a space for the guild to display/demonstrate.
Please continue to advertise the sale as much as possible and please send images to Jackie for social media posts. Let’s have a GREAT sale!
Sat/Sun, Nov 9 & 10, 10am – 4pm both days. Multnomah Arts Center
See you all soon, Judilee
judilee.fitzhugh@gmail.com
Demonstrators Needed for Fall Sale!!
We can use some volunteers to demonstrate at Handwovens for the Holidays, November 9 & 10. Even if you don’t have anything in the sale, please consider helping out. Many customers have questions about weaving in general and what kind of resources the guild offers. Help promote weaving and other fiber arts in our community. Bring your own small project to work on or use one of our small looms. Click on the link below to sign up for a shift!
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/60B0948ACA929A1F85-52805991-handwovens
Help PHG win another award for an ANWG booth!
At each conference of the Association of Northwest Weaving Guilds, individual guilds decorate a 10×10 booth according to a theme; see information at https://anwgconference.org/guild-booths/ for the next ANWG conference, which will be in Yakima, Washington June 16 through 21, 2025.
For our booth this year we’ll weave items inspired by local buildings or landmarks. Tapestry weavers can be very representational, others of us more abstract. I wove a dish towel inspired by a building that I drive by frequently that has very interesting colors. Imagine a scarf based on Big Pink, the U.S. Bancorp Tower; the sky’s the limit! Actually, a weaving based on a Portland sky would be just fine.
I’ve agreed to chair a committee and welcome other guild members to join me in planning the booth. I’ll attend both of the November guild meetings to talk about ideas for the booth.
Janis Johnson
Website Update
Greetings from the website team. We’re working on the redesign for the PHG website, and we think you’re going to like it.
In anticipation of the launch of the new design we wanted to note a couple things:
- Lynne Fitzsimmons is helping out with the usability side of things. She’s posted a survey for folks who have interacted with the website. You can use her survey to help with that side of the design. It’s available here: PHG Website Usability Survey
- We decided to no longer post meeting recordings on the website. Going forward, if you miss a meeting and want to watch the Zoom recording you can email Nora to get a link to the recording. Recordings will only be available for 30 days, after which the recording will be deleted. Recordings of previous meetings will not be available after we move to the new website. (We hope to have the new site up for the December meeting.)
- We’d love to use photos of your work on the website. If you have a photo of a project, particularly of woven yardage, you can send a copy to Dan.
2025 PHG Retreat Registration is open!
The dates are February 27, 28, March 1, & 2 and will again be at Camp Cedar Ridge in Vernonia, OR. See below or follow the link for all the information and to sign up.
Gathering of the Guilds / Spring Sale – Participants Wanted
The Gathering of the Guilds (GOTG) / Spring Sale will be April 25-27, 2025. Last year was a great event and PHG actually made about $200, our goal is to break even as we see the sales offered by PHG (Fall and Spring) as services to our members who want to sell their art. There are two ways to participate; rent booth space (and we have options for sharing) or be part of the PHG guild booth.
The cost of the booth will remain the same for PHG members; $450 for 10×10 and $675 for 10×15. There is an increase in electricity and parking; details are being finalized. Our registration website will go live November 4th with information on GOTG and costs.
Hoping to see our 2024 participants and some new folks in 2025. Any questions, reach out to Nora Gessert noragessert@yahoo.com.
Help Wanted for Meeting A/V Setup
The guild is looking for someone to take on the A/V setup for our monthly meetings. We’ll provide training and documentation. You’ll need to provide some time to learn the system and then come early for meeting setup, a little bit of muscle to carry the equipment to and from the closet, and a modicum of technical know-how. Experience with Macs is a plus, but if you’re comfortable with computers this shouldn’t be too challenging.
Contact Dan for details and a copy of the documentation if interested.
P.S. You do not need to setup BOTH meetings. If you can only help with one meeting a month that would be a big help! We hope to have a few folks trained so there’s a backup in case someone is sick or out of town.
Introducing the New Weaver Forum
PHG provides a wonderful community to weavers and fiber artists, but for those new to the craft it can sometimes be intimidating to look at our program topics. New weavers are often looking for a place where they can gather with other new weavers and learn from each other, and from a friendly artist who’s been at it for a while. To help address that need we’re introducing the New Weaver Forum. These sessions will be held on the third Thursday of each month, initially via Zoom. If the interest is strong enough (and we think it will be) we’ll look to add an in-person meeting space for the group just as we do with our study groups.
Our second session for this new group will be held Thursday, November 21 at 10:00. If you’re a new weaver we hope you’ll join us. If you know of a new weaver please help spread the word and let them know. The Zoom link can be found on the PHG website in the calendar.
Latest ANWG Newsletter
The Association of Northwest Weavers Guilds has posted their October 2024 newsletter. Check out the creative ways other Northwest weaving guilds are getting their members together for fiber activities. All ANWG newsletters are available here.
Library News
Last month was the guild’s annual Weftover sale. I told myself that I wasn’t going to get anything, my stash was large enough. That didn’t hold when I found some wonderful colors in 20/2 cotton. I did manage to limit myself to that one size. Not only do I get to shop for myself at the sale, I look for equipment and books to add to the guild’s collection without busting the budget.
I maintain a list of books that were not purchased for the guild when they first came out. My priority each year is purchasing the new releases. I pick a few of these at the end of the fiscal year to use up the budget. During the sale, I found a book that has been on my list since 2017 in like-new condition. I excitedly snatched it up.
This book I found is Frances L. Goodrich’s Brown Book of Weaving Drafts by Barbara Miller. I didn’t remember much about it other than it had overshot drafts. This book is more than a book of drafts. It chronicles the life and work of Frances L. Goodrich in her own words to bring women together for meaningful work and opportunities for social enrichment in the southern mountains of North Carolina around the turn of the 20th century. Miss Goodrich was not herself a weaver or dyer. She was an enabler. I’m in awe of the efforts she would go to collect information and equipment. They would need to take a wagon over mountain roads. Traveling by horse, she would visit the mountain homes collecting the sources, stories, dye recipes, and history of various drafts. She would then transcribe them into her scrapbooks so that they would not be lost to time. She would take the drafts, which were in the weavers’ personal notation, and transcribe them into her standardized notation. The history lesson is awe-inspiring.
The largest part of the book is given over to the drafts. There are the reproduced pages from Miss Goodrich’s original brown book in her own notation. Luckily, the authors of this collection have moved the drafts into the computerized notations that we are all familiar with. The original drafts were written for the counterbalance looms that were prevalent at the time. The computerized drafts have been arranged for the jack looms that are now standard in our studios. This is not a book where you can pick it up and go straight to your loom and thread. The drafts have only a single repeat which you may need to mirror, add borders or otherwise adapt to have a suitable project. The text provides the best description of how to treadle tromp as writ for overshot and twills that I have read.
Even if you are not interested in weaving the overshot drafts, I would recommend picking up the book and reading the history and marveling at the body of information that Miss Goodrich accumulated through her travels and hard work. It’s amazing to think of how much effort it would have taken. We take it for granted that we can find anything we need on the internet. We can order something and in a few days, for many items, it will show up on our doorstep. If we need a draft, we have thousands to choose from in books on our shelves or on sites such as handweaving.net.
Browse PHG’s library collection.
The Rental Equipment and the Small Equipment Library pages have been updated by Amber, our web administrator, to show our equipment acquisitions from the last year. We now have a Karakumidai which was generously donated by Ladella Williams daughter, Amy. The Karakumidai is used to weave karakumi which, in simplest terms, are flat Japanese braids.
I also would like to thank Jacque DeBell and her husband, John, again. When they delivered the new library shelves this summer, John inspected our closet. When he looked above the door where I had piled many boxes of yarn waiting for the Weftover Sale, he looked at the shelf and noticed that it was leaning down. (I only looked at the space on top to see how much more I could get up there.) He decided then that he would reinforce the shelf after we had gotten everything down for the Weftover Sale. He was able to reinforce it last week. He assures us that it is now strong enough to hold a person. I have yet to try it.
I also want to give a shout out to Nora and Cindy who man the library desk during the morning meeting. I greatly appreciate not needing to attend both meetings.
–Robin
Bulletin Board
Damascus Fiber Arts School
Tapestry Talks
For less than the price of a burger these days, you can join the Damascus Fiber Arts School for their monthly Tapestry Talks. One Saturday a month, an invited artist will give a presentation about their tapestry journey.
Our Upcoming Talks will feature:
Sue Weil, on using pulled warp to great effect – Video only until Nov 25
Tommye Scanlin, on using textile methods to mark time – Video only until Dec 26
Michael Rohde, on exploring ways of turning ideas into weaving Nov 16
Join us each month–it only costs $10–by signing up on our website.
Create Your own Workshop
Can’t find the exact dates or topics for your tapestry needs? Looking for a Beginning Tapestry Workshop or something else? We can help. Find a few friends, then contact us with a proposal and possible times/dates. We can organize a workshop just for you and your friends. Email inquiries to: damascusfiberartsschoolinfo@gmail.com
Lecture Tour Videos
See previous Summer Lecture Tours for 2020 and 2021. You can view Vimeo videos on various subjects. Some of the lectures are:
Mary Lane: Mark Making in Tapestry
Amy Belgan: Creative Journey to Tapestry
Barbara Burns: Tapestry Influences and Work
John & Marilyn Harrison: From our Farm Flock
Barbara Hitzemann: Dyeing Wool with Seasonal Plants
There are many more. To see a complete list and view the videos go to Lecture Tour Links – Damascus Fiber Arts School
Looking to Buy or Sell Weaving Equipment or Materials?
Check out the Items for Sale page.
Fiber News and Events
Clark County Open Studios
November 2-3, 2024. Preview November 1.
Clark County, Washington
Includes our own felter Patty White. More info: https://artstra.org/open-studios
Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat
February 13-16, 2025
Tacoma, Washington
More info: https://redalderfiberarts.com/
Conference of Northern California Handweavers
April 24-27, 2025
Pacific Grove, California
More info: https://www.cnch.org/conferences/
Fiber Fusion Northwest
June 7-8, 2025
Monroe, Washington
More info: https://www.fiberfusion.net/
ANWG 2025 Conference
June 16-21, 2025
Yakima, Washington
More info: https://anwgconference.org/
Black Sheep Gathering
June 27-29, 2025
Albany, Oregon
More info: http://blacksheepgathering.org/
Handweavers Guild of America
Textiles & Tea
Tuesdays
The Handweavers Guild of America, Inc.’s (HGA) exciting new program, Textiles & Tea, takes place every Tuesday at 4 PM (ET). We’ve invited some of the most respected fiber artists in the field today to join us for an hour long conversation where we will discuss their artwork and their creative journey. Make a cup of your favorite tea and join us as we talk about fiber, creativity, inspiration, process and so much more.
Rental Equipment
PHG has equipment available for rent to current PHG Members. Click here for more info.
PHG Board and Chairs
Please click here for a list of PHG Board Members and Committee Chairs.