Time For Work.

[arontius]

.....The trouble with 'vacation' is that, eventually, vacation ends and you have to re-enter The Real World (tm). :-) I am NOT looking forward to getting up at 0400 tomorrow morning and making my way in to the Shipyard. But I don't think I'll be alone in that regard. I think a lot of us will be dragging through the day tomorrow. At least it will only be a three day week. That'll help a little bit.

.....Took a little while this evening to find everything and put it together. The work cell phone, the badge, the beeper. They were all in different places and took a little bit of detective work.

.....The 'to-do' list gathered dust the last couple of days. I just couldn't get motivated to do anything really on it. Mainly read books and explored on the computer. A couple of last trips to Starbucks.

.....Spent a good half-hour or so scraping off the beard-like thing on my face. :-) Certainly does not grow very fast, and was really starting to get to that itchy stage. Desperately need a haircut, but did not get the chance. I'm sure that I'll get at least one hint this week about looking 'professional'. But thankfully, with the change in Operational Officer, and the general rev-up of the work scene, I might escape notice until I can actually get it fixed. :-)

.....The new banner started getting dyed today. The Kingdom checkey pattern is done. The Baronial Populace section is done. Started the black and red blocked pattern on the next section, but basically stopped there as I need to decide on a color scheme I actually like.

.....The dye flows quite a bit differently than the silk paints did. The yellow was really nice and smooth. The red not-so-much so. It had some of the same blotchiness issues that the paints had in large single color areas. It'll be interesting to see if that corrects any when it is steamed and fixed into place. But the 'stiffness' of the silk paints does not seem to be evident in the silk dyes, so they may actually fly even a little easier than the painted silk.

.....I had red, black and yellow borrowed from Madrun, but may want to borrow a blue or a green. Some of components just would not look right if they were painted as planned, so I will have to change the color scheme somewhat.

.....The big wooden frames are not working all that well either. When stretched tight on the frames, any movement of the frames pulls the silk in different directions and can lead easily to rips and tears in the silk. Especially if your silk is stored on this frame over time, like mine is. Ideally, once attached to the frame, the banner should probably be completed in one setting. But I've never been able to clear that kind of space off of my calendar to do that. :-)

.....TBT came up with a nice idea. She sent me a link to a quilt stand on E-Bay. The stand sits off the ground about three or four feet. The fabric sits over the top and locking pieces hold the fabric snugly to the frame so that you can work at stitching. I could see this being used for silk banner manufacture pretty easily. It was made from plastic tubing, so I'm wondering if this is something we can put together ourselves fairly easily.

.....We'll get this banner done though before moving on to the next 'improvement'. :-) Another day or so of painting. Then some repairs. Then setting of the dyes. When will it be done? Maybe March or April. :-)

.....Tomorrow night is the January Business Meeting. Then planning and packing for Twelfth Night. We'll start the year going from zero to warp speed in a matter of days. Really need to clear the cobwebs out of the brain and get a new 'to-do' list going. That'll probably be on the agenda for tomorrow. Along with the monthly Baronial letter and a bunch of stuff for Twelfth Night itself.

.....Work re-starts on the same day at J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday though. January 3, 1892. Tomorrow will be 120th anniversary of his birth. Happy Birthday, Professor Tolkien! :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.

Comments

[pernell-camber.livejournal.com]

I used Kassandra's quilt stand with the long plastic clamps and I didn't have the tension on the fabric that I wanted, which I should have expected since it is designed for a thick quilt, not thin silk. Even if I padded the clamps the bias in silk would be a problem because the clamps only covered part of the frame. I saw my sister-in-law use pins and rubberbands to hold her silk to her pvc frame and I really liked the tension. For my next attempt I'd like to make a pvc frame and use rubberbands and pins for tension.

Silk Frame.

[arontius]

I'm glad you told me about your experience with the stand before we went out and spent the money on one.

Let me know how your PVC frame works for you, Pernell. I'm going to experiment with a large hoop frame as well to see if it will keep the tension acceptable. Although the problem with that approach is that you are ultimately limited in how much area you can work at any one time.

If many of us are experimenting with different approaches, sooner or later we're going to stumble upon a method that actually works well for us.

Thanks, A.

[pernell-camber.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping everyone keeps volunteering our experiences till we can turn out quality banners like Alayna.