It's the Little Things

 

Today I finished that stack of scarves.  All that is left is to tag/price them.  Overall they turned out although I still see room for improvement.

Saw a meme on FB yesterday.  New dressage rider asking when you got better at dressage.  Answer?  Never.

And that isn't wrong.  Oh, of course one improves, with time and persistence.  But even as our skill grows, we see how there is still more to be done, improvements yet to be made.  Mistakes to be dealt with.

The other day a student emailed asking if I still made mistakes.  "Oh hell yes" was my response.  Just in this stack of scarves.  One has a treadling error.  Several are inconsistent in beat.  Are they 'ruined'?  Only good to be thrown out?  No.  Not at all.  Because the 'mistakes' that I see clearly are more than likely not obvious to most anyone else anyway.  

In the overall scheme of things, those errors are little.  Even smaller when working with fine threads.  Since I have trained my eye to see inconsistencies, of course I see them.  I can't NOT see them.

And so I finished that stack of scarves, sighed a little at how imperfect I still am, still working at becoming 'better'.  Trying to work out bugs in equipment and processes.  Understand my materials at a deeper level.

So these scarves will be offered for sale.  Some people will notice that they are not perfect.  Others will think they are 'perfect' as they are.

In the meantime, I'm getting encouraging emails from the Sweet Georgia team and already looking at ways to continue the journey of teaching.  

Because after doing lectures/seminars via Zoom for almost a year, there are things I don't like about how that works and they have more experience than I do, I asked for and got a recommendation for an app that I could use for on screen illustrations.  Sometimes a good diagram just arrows right to the heart of something that words alone cannot.  I'm just not sure how I am going to be able to set up in my cramped quarters to make it happen.  

It goes to show that if you really want to do something, there is generally a way to make it happen.  And sometimes it's just something 'little', a new way of looking at things, or in this case, potentially a new app for the ipad and a two camera set up.  

It's all very nerve wracking, truly, but little by little.  Just like with weaving.  One pick at a time.  One towel, one scarf, one more presentation, working the kinks out.

Sometimes it truly is the very littlest of things.  And not being overly hard on oneself because once again something isn't 'perfect'.  Good can be 'good enough'.

Time to set up the studio for the next warp.  And another try at being 'good enough', this time with even finer threads.