The Little Things

 

In my self-challenge to use up stash, I'm working with a bunch of different rayon yarns.  The photo I posted yesterday was of a weft yarn that was a flake, but not a very smooth yarn, overall.  As such, the fuzzy surface of the yarn tended to obscure the weave structure.

This morning I changed to a different rayon flake.   This brand is a bit thinner but also a lot smoother.  As I wove I could more clearly see the design beginning to reveal itself.  The weft is a very dark, nearly black, navy blue and that coupled with the navy blue and forest green in the warp creates a background where the lighter value warp colours begin to show through, not unlike an oil slick on rain puddles.  I'm quite liking it.  Enough to do another one with this yarn?  Probably, but I will change the treadling so that it isn't identical.  OTOH, I still have buckets of other yarns I could also be using, so time will tell.

Over the years I have challenged myself, pushed hard to make my horizons more flexible, expand my knowledge.  When I chose to 'retire' I assumed I would jump back into more exploration, dig deeper into a bolder approach to weaving.  Hone my design skills by making bold decisions, leap off tall cliffs into deep ends of pools.

Instead I find myself enjoying the little things.  The subtle things.  Like a film of oil slick on a puddle of water.  These quiet little discoveries will never rock anyone's boat, but they are bringing me great satisfaction when they come, quietly, tiny gifts in a season that has been fraught with so many other things demanding my time and attention.  My grief over the state of the world.  My disappointment in so many people who just don't seem to much care about others.

My focus on stash reduction still challenges me, but in small ways, not grand ones.  Trying to figure out how to use up as much of my yarn as possible, largely so that my friends don't wind up cleaning up my 'mess' has begun to feel a lot more important that any deep dive I could do into a weave structure.  There are plenty of others doing the excavating, but only me using up my stash!

In the end, everyone needs to find their comfort zone.  At times I have found my comfort in stretching my weaving chops further, deeper, bending 'rules' until just before they broke - if I was lucky - or up until they did break - if I wasn't.  

But I always learned something.  

Over the past years there is one lesson that I have learned over and over again.  I am not perfect.  I will make mistakes.  I will have 'failures'.  But those failures matter little in the scheme of life.

This morning I saw a video from Tik Tok.  I don't belong to that platform but sometimes see videos shared to Twitter.  This one was someone talking about mistakes in textiles.  She talked about an example of sprang dating from something like the 1200s where the creator had made a simple mistake and not entirely centred the motif in the cloth.  And that every reproduction that has been created reproduces that error.  The person who originally made that piece of textile had no idea that their error would live on in perpetuity.  And that maybe we should all just ease up on ourselves a little when we are not perfect.  The illustration provided reminded me once again that no, indeed, I am not perfect.  And it's fine.  Another person talked about the fact that when we make a mistake we don't actually need to learn anything from making it.  And in return I shared that just yesterday I broke a warp thread.  What I learned from that was that I can still flub a shuttle throw.  Fix it and carry on.

And ultimately if that scarf survives for 1000 years?  That mistake will still be there and no one will actually much care.

Do what brings you joy, even if the result isn't 'perfect'.