Where Ideas Come From?

 

Here is a 'tease' - something I'm working on presently.  What is it?  My surname's first letter.

I am - or was - a production weaver, constantly looking for ways to work efficiently (and ergonomically, of course!)

I learned a technique about using pick up to extend the limitations of a shaft loom and once I saw the possibilities, I worked quite a lot (for me) with the technique.  I no longer have the pick up Bronson Lace piece I did for the Guild of Canadian Weavers level 3 since I donated it to the chemo infusion unit at the cancer clinic here in town.  

Since I had no idea what to do with it, and saw that other artists had donated pieces to brighten up the unit, I gave them the piece.  Is it there now?  I have no idea.  I have not needed further chemo infusions and that is not a place that I want to set foot in, if I can avoid it.  (Which I'm doing quite well, thank you for asking...)

When I started teaching more frequently I used the technique in one or two of my workshops, usually rendering the motif as a 'monogram' suggesting people could personalize their textiles by weaving the Initial(s) into the cloth using pick up.  

I had an alphabet that I had saved since I was using it quite a lot (some of the scarves have appeared here) where I wove words into the cloth.  Those were loom controlled because my AVL had 16 shafts.  The alphabet I was using (and I tweaked from a book) consisted of 10 blocks in height and woven sideways, made it possible to use a variety of loom controlled words.  Plus the computer assisted dobby, of course.

This one reads 'create joy'.  Others said 'imagine'.  Or other things I wanted to weave into my textiles.  I felt very 'clever' when I did it.

But there is NO secret about how to do this.  It is not, however, a technique suitable for a quick blog post, nor for a comment on a chat group question.  

So I'm currently weaving samples in Bronson Lace in which I will show how it works to pick the monogram up in that weave structure.

This is NOT a technique for newbies.  (Sorry - not sorry!)  As a weaver you have to understand certain things about weave structures, how they work, how they can be manipulated.

However, the article is scheduled for 2027 - so you will have some time to study up on, for example, Bronson Lace, so that when the article appears (if it does - many a slip betwixt cup and lip) you should be able to read through the text, study the profile draft, then understand enough in order to leap off the cliff and fly?

Weaving.  The craft that keeps on teaching.  And you can continue to grow and expand with it.

Hopefully people will continue to subscribe.  There are some extremely talented and very knowledgeable weavers who are writing for WEFT.  I am privileged to be included.  

How It Feels

 

burn, baby, burn....

One of the most difficult things to do is to explain how you are feeling to someone else when you have no point of commonality.

When I tell someone my feet hurt - how can anyone else know what that means?  Hell, I can't figure it out myself, how can anyone else work it out?

I've been reading as much as I can about peripheral neuropathy*, and inevitably they have diagrams showing the affected portion of the body coloured in shades of orange/red/yellow.  Based on the most common way most people who have this condition explain it - that it 'burns'.  So the diagram isn't wrong.  It's just...inadequate.

Trying to let my spouse know how it feels, I've used a number of descriptions.  To begin with, I told him it felt like I'd sat on my foot for too long, put the nerves to 'sleep' and it felt like they were 'waking up'.  But they never 'wake' - they just continue to tingle, twinge, *burn*.  To a lesser or greater extent, throughout the day.

I've been living with this...hell...for over 5 years now.  I gotta tell ya, it's about to drive me to drink.  Or something.

Various things have been suggested, and I have faithfully followed all of them.  For a while one would help - a bit.  Then it would get worse - again.

I had been taking gabapentin, largely to combat the SI nerve pain from the spinal column trapped in a disc.  But this foot stuff...was different.  Eventually it stopped responding to the gabapentin, and I begged for something - anything - else that was not a narcotic.  I can't take those.  I wound up on Dilaudid (artificial opioid) for a few years, until that simply didn't touch the pain I was feeling.

Eventually a pain specialist diagnosed peripheral neuropathy, and suggested Lidocaine cream, which helped.  Some.  I was told that Alpha Lipoic helped, so I got some of that, and it did help.  Some. 

Another pain specialist suggested Red Light Laser Therapy,  Which also helped.  Some.  But ultimately, the pain was preventing me from sleeping - the pain was way worse at night than during the day.  I started taking a nerve blocker, and had some relief from the nerve pain, but began experiencing excruciating muscle pain in my hips, glutes, and then down into the thighs, to the point I could barely walk.  We changed nerve blockers.  Same result.  It took over a year to go through all of the options, during which time I also fell and had a brain bleed.

And the pain never really went away.  The brain bleed was the shit cherry on top.

In desperation I tried topical ketamine.  Which helped.  But my pain doctor suggested I wasn't getting enough relief and I should try an infusion.  So I did.

Which sort of helped, but not as much as I'd hoped.  But being off the nerve blockers meant I saw some improvement on the muscle pain (hoping to increase that.)

The infusion hasn't kicked in properly - yet.  And may not.  I am poised on the brink of finding something that might actually help, or exhausting all potential treatments.

Because what I am finding out is that my body is experiencing multiple 'failures' in the way it works.

It was suggested I was not absorbing vitamin B.  I did the lab tests, and oh hey, look at that - I can't properly absorb vitamin B 12 - and poorly access two other of the B vitamins.  I'm now taking a different formula of a multiple vitamin B supplement - not a pain treatment (yet) - but a way to potentially heal the damage (some, at least) that has been done to the protective sheath of the nerves, causing the nerves to spark out of control, causing pain, inflammation and damaging the muscles that they are going to or running through.

On Dec. 27 I added another supplement that says that it is also needed for the nerves to get proper 'nourishment' and to help them heal.

Again, not a quick fix.  I've been taking the Alpha Lipoic, but perhaps the 'wrong' kind.  I need to dig deeper and find out more.

In the meantime, I was made aware of the level of anxiety I have been living with and that it might be a good idea to deal with some of the trauma I have been living with.  So Wednesday I will have my first appointment with a counsellor.  

I am beginning 2026 the way I mean to go on: try to heal this broken/bruised body, live a life with less pain and more 'comfort'.  I have noticed that it doesn't seem to matter if I weave or not, so I will try to weave for an hour a day if I can manage that.  At least get the dopamine/endorphin hit daily.

I will finish getting my studio re-arranged, then get back to the warp interrupted by the holidays and trying to clean up my studio, complete the article I started and then got stalled on.

In the meantime the next issue of WEFT continues it's way through the process.  Yes, I have another article in that issue, and frankly I am very pleased with that one.  I had fought my way out of the initial  brain fog of the brain bleed, and for the first time since I fell, started to see a bit of light at the end of the recovery tunnel.  I have no idea how much more I can - or will - improve.  But with the unwavering support of my alpha reader and the technical team at WEFT - well, I hope to continue to exploring how to construct cloth and hone one's knowledge and skills in weaving.

I didn't die on Aug. 28, 2024.  Guess I'm still here for a while longer.  Might as well keep doing what I love to do, amirite?

*peripheral neuropathy is a condition that afflicts a large number of people, generally progressing to worse levels of pain and disability as the person ages.  There are common risk factors, primarily diabetes, but also other medical conditions up to and including being treated for cancer by a chemo cocktail that contains Vincristine.  Which I had.  I had also some damage to my feet by practicing ballet, not just as a child, but as an adult student.  Plus some other things that may be causing trouble, the solution to what I'm dealing with its not straight forward and may never result in a 'cure'.  But as one of my health care team pointed out - if I don't try something, I will never know if it will help.  So I keep trying...

Endings, Beginnings

 

Yesterday I got the last warp inspected and repaired and into the washing machine and dryer.  Today I will press them.  

Weaving is a constant state of ending one project, beginning another.  

I had thought to get the next warp beamed, but what with one thing and another (Life Happens) I had not generated the threading for the next warp.  I had a plan thought out, but needed to polish it and make sure it was going to work.  

This morning I did that and polished it so that it is now weave-able.

The repeat is fairly large so I don't know if it is going to copy/paste nicely here or just be a blur or smudge on the screen.

It is my 'final' (for now????) warp in which I will use the energized 6 singles cotton for weft.  The temperatures dropped like a bucket in a deep well, and the relative humidity dropped with it.  The highly energized cotton became unruly (even more than usual) and a bit of a bear.  The penny finally dropped and I wound bobbins and put them into a humidor to steep and - while it wasn't 'perfect' - the yarn became a lot more co-operative.

The yarn is going a lot further than I expected and I doubt I will do much other than put a small dent in the last, final cone.  I may 'save' what is left (nearly a kilo) and do one more warp in the future.  Or I may donate/give it away.  TBD.

On a personal level, I am in a 'holding' pattern (holding on to the knot at the end of my rope for dear life), waiting - for appointments, for new meds to kick in.  I grit my teeth and keep going - if I can.

When things are so uncertain and feeling very unsafe, it may seem useless to keep weaving.  Keep creating.  But remaining *human* is the best thing we can do.  

To my mind that means to fight for everyone to survive these much too 'interesting' times.  I do that by using my imagination.  My knowledge.  To encourage others to do the same.  And above all, never lose sight of the humanity in all of us, even the ones that don't give a flying fig for others.

It is a balancing act.  I'm not very successful at it some days.  But for now, I keep on...

Puzzling

 

Many of my childhood memories revolve around working on jigsaw puzzles.  In our home, there wasn't a lot of room to devote to the building of a puzzle, so we were pretty much confined to 500 or 1000 piece puzzles, which we built on the coffee table in the living room.  These days, I'm still 'confined' to that size, but it is familiar, and a comfortable challenge (usually).

I came to the world of weaving well prepared to deal with multiple issues within a challenge.  To examine the various pieces.  Learn to recognize shapes, colours and sizes.  Work out the logistics of joining them up to create the pretty picture (because I prefer to work on puzzles with pretty pictures). and by sheer stubborness, eventually get them built.  (Not always.  If they are too much of a challenge, I will give up and switch to something less challenging and more enjoyable.)

Weaving really isn't any different.  There are multiple layers to the way cloth gets built, multiple pieces to the puzzle.  The weaver can (and frequently needs to) choose different pathways to get to where they want to wind up.

New weavers assume that there are hard and fast 'rules'.  Sorry.  There are hard *facts* - but then you add this consideration, that one, tweak your processes...and you can wind up making a very specific cloth for your particular purpose.

As a new weaver, you will not have the knowledge to be aware of those variations.  You will not have the facts at your fingertips.  So you ask questions.  Good.  Questions are good.

However, it would be nice if more brand new weavers would take a little bit of time and read about the 'facts' of the craft before they start tweaking the information they are given.

And then complain because what they are doing isn't working.  The designer of the project must have made a mistake.  And they are mad that the thing they chose to do isn't good.  It's someone else's fault for giving them bad information.

Um - when you chose to sley your reed at a completely different density from what the instructions specified, why are you surprised the results are...wrong?  Oh, you didn't want to do the 'hard' thing, so you did the 'easy' thing and it's not working?

You haven't bothered to learn the language, and get mad because people are not helping you properly?  

Personally I get chastised for repeatedly (and rather boringly, I admit) tell people to *sample*.  When a new weaver complains that they don't have enough yarn to 'waste' on a sample, I wonder why they are willing to waste the entire project by having it not turn out?  First of all, stop buying expensive knitting yarn.  Buy some weaving yarn.  Weaving yarn frequently comes in half pound tubes, or 6 ounce cones, sometimes even pound cones.  You might pay $30 for that pound, but you will have plenty to weave a sample.  Maybe even 3 or 4, trying various approaches.

New weavers buy a kit, don't follow the guidelines for epi/ppi, and complain the kit designer 'shorted' them yarn to make the project.

Personally, I gave up making kits - kits designed to create *two* colour gamps, then had a couple people bitch that there wasn't enough yarn in the kit I made to make four napkins.  I was called a 'rip off' artist.  What part of a kit that specified *two* square colour gamps ever equated to four square napkins?

By that time most of the people who actually *wanted* colour gamp 'samples' had bought (if they were going to) and I just...stopped.

I wrote a book that I wished had been available when I was just starting out, with the same sorts of questions new weavers have.  When I did a demo for my class at Olds, one student asked where they could find a book with that information in it.  I had to admit that no one book contained that information.  So I set about to write one.

I won't claim it is the Compleate Book of Weaving - but hopefully I sowed enough seeds for new weavers to learn more and then follow their own trail of learning.

This new year has just begun - with a bang.  I expect plenty of 'whimpering' to follow.  One person and his coterie of enablers has just done the unthinkable - except that he has been telegraphing his intentions for years.  So, while I am not surprised, I am sickened.

Resisting such actions is necessary.  Being aware of the ramifications is imperative.  And continuing to help the craft stay alive is absolutely necessary.  Weaving was one of the pillars of human beings surviving in the beginning.  It may become necessary again.  

For as long as I am able, I will continue to explore, experiment, and - hopefully - document what I have been doing.  If what I do isn't destined for WEFT, I will continue to share here.  There are over 4000 posts - so far - with many of them labelled as to topic.  If you can't find what you need, you can contact me directly.  But first?  Get a book.  Get several books.  Not 'just' mine - there are many many very good books (none of them generated - I won't say 'written' - by LLM/AI) available.  Some are out of print.  Mine are not.  They are available as usual, here.  All three titles are in pdf download or print.  They are printed in the US, so not subject to tariffs.  

Weaving is not difficult.  It IS complex.  

The life so short, the craft so long to learn...

Begin As You Mean To Go On

 

I was expecting to have a rather quiet day, but in my email this afternoon was the digital version of the spring issue of WEFT.  Of course I had to immediately stop and check out 'my' article...(ahem)

I have probably mentioned previously that when the brain bleed hit I was about halfway through weaving the samples and beginning to write the text for this article.  What I had been doing was a pretty deep dive into what happens when you take some fine threads, bundle them (*not* spin them) and then try to use the bundle in place of a spun yarn.  What was a fairly complex question turned into an even more complex job of taking a badly injured brain (the bleed hit my speech centre - hell for a teacher who has aspirations to write) and then try to comb through the sinkholes in my brain looking for my words.

It was enormous support from my alpha reader and then the technical team at WEFT that I managed to produce something that doesn't 'solve' the mystery of bundling vs plied yarn, but will - I hope - encourage others to approach the subject with a bit of caution.  Because the two 'yarns' do not behave the way one would expect.

So it was with some trepidation that I caught the article in the stages of being edited, tried to provide the information they wanted/needed, and have it make some kind of sense.  When it does not follow the 'myth' of being able to take 4 strands of 2/20 merc cotton and treat it as though it is going to behave like 2/5 merc. cotton.  Because it will not.

If you want to do this for certain reasons, be prepared to sample.  More than once, if need be.  Then make sure you wet finish your samples to find out the quality of cloth that has been produced by using a bundle of fine threads instead of a spun thicker yarn.  

Maybe it won't matter for your project.  But if it does...don't assume!  

The issue has been sent out to people with subscriptions for the digital version of the magazine and the print copies will be mailed shortly.  (It is a holiday season, after all!)  If you are interested in the depth and breadth of topics being covered, do consider a subscription.

For myself, having the magazine arrive today - the first day of a 'new' year - well, I was reminded of an old adage - begin as you mean to go on.

I'm still fighting with my body, trying to keep it going when it doesn't wanna.  I see a counsellor in a week, which I'm hoping will help with some aspects of living with chronic pain.  And I have begun a new supplement which is supposed to help heal damaged nerves.  Who knows, I might find myself in a more comfortable place in this brand, shiny, new year?  Eventually?

Doug has managed to bring home all my inventory from the guild sale events over the past few months, and I've pulled an order that I hope we can get into the mail on Monday.  Once the rest of the tea towels have been put away (on the shelves which *used* to hold the rayon chenille), I will be able to set up the small lever loom again.  Over the holidays Doug cut down a reed so that I can weave my samples for the next WEFT article with the reed I want to use.  I did one sample at 24 epi, but as suspected it was just too dense.  So, 20 it will be.  The samples are small, but will show a technique for weaving using pick up in order to increase the patterning capabilities of a smaller loom.  It's a technique I enjoy quite a lot, and I have tentative designs for the samples for the article.  

Tomorrow I will finish the current warp and dress the loom with one more tea towel warp, and whatever is left of the singles 6 cotton will be donated to the guild.  Or a weaver who really wants to play with 'energized' yarns.  TBD.

I had a lot of doubts about my being able to continue.  I was feeling like a burden to the WEFT technical team, and finally confessed my difficulties.  They were incredibly supportive.  And, since I DO still have things I want to write, I have signed the contract for this article, and hesitantly submitted an idea for the one after.  

I see so many new wannabe weavers, confused, dazed by the deluge of information that is needed to get comfortable with the craft.  

All I can really urge them to do is to learn.  Learn as much as you can.  Learn how to read the language of weaving, and the 'codes' that we use to convey concentrated bursts of information.  And please stop expecting perfection on your very first warp.  Weaving is a *skill*.  It takes time and mindful practice to master.

As I look forward into 2026, I have no idea what will happen to my health.  But if I can keep writing articles to document my explorations, and try to explain some of the 'mystery' of working with thread to create cloth, I will do my best to share what I've discovered.  

With the help and support of my alpha reader and the technical team at WEFT, I'm hoping I can continue creating content for a while longer.  Because I'm still learning.  And still fascinated by how threads rather 'magically' turn into cloth.

New Year, New Opportunities

 

It is really heartening to see the interest in weaving beginning to build - again.  Unfortunately new weavers have an obstacle I never had - LLM, AI, whatever it is called - in addition to the 'usual' myths out there about weaving, we now have the 'lying' machines feeding a massive amount of misinformation to the internet.

So, to new weavers, let me give some suggestions for how to learn.

If you don't have a guild or shop that offers lessons, check out actual books, written by actual weavers, who give knowledge from experience.  Right now there are a large number of books on the market that will give you the basics and some that are focused on a particular aspect of weaving.  The authors don't always do things in the 'same' way, but hopefully you will learn the language of weaving, and that's a good first step.  Asking questions on chat groups when you don't know what to call 'things' means you likely won't be getting the specific information you are looking for.

Ask older, more experienced, weavers for recommendations for books or websites, or online instructors.  Not every student needs 'a' teacher, so you may need to take a look around, talk to other weavers, find out who they feel gives good information.  Most people will give honest opinions.

Here is one that came to me over the holiday.  Since I didn't ask permission to use her comment I have not included her name:

Right back atcha! I recall a wonderful weaver commenting that she learned more in one of your workshops (Magic in the Water) than anywhere else she'd gone! I myself use many of the tips you gifted to fellow weavers in CB and I've passed them along to many others. Each one teach one -- wonder how many hundreds have been given a gift towards Efficient Weaving by you??!!!!

I have learned from many, many others.  Some things I incorporated into my practice.  Some provided a different attitude or approach that I found helpful to open myself to new techniques, new approaches.  Many taught lessons that I didn't expect but found very useful in my own practice.

Weaving as a practice, a skill, a pool of knowledge, is vast.  New weavers expect to be fed - in some cases - all the information they need to finish a 'perfect' project - without first acquiring the physical skills involved in dressing the loom and doing the actual physical weaving.  They don't have the foundation of knowledge.  Which is not a problem - they can acquire it!  But it takes time and practice and a whole lot of imperfect results before 'perfect' even shows up on the horizon.

And then there is all the myths that float around.  A new weaver hears something said by someone who appears to be more knowledgeable than they are, and they don't question it, they just accept it.  But as they acquire more information and enlarge their library of resources, they need to pay attention to the information in those resources.  And when they are told that (a statement that is not correct) they need to check further and find out what is the truth instead of saying 'well that's what my teacher told me!'  Your teacher was wrong if they taught you 'that'.

It is no shame to be incorrect in something.  But once you have been given other/more information, it's a good idea to own up to that and absorb the correct information.

I make no secret of the fact that I have (or had, I've given a couple books away) a dozen books on textile science.  Sometimes I spot inconsistencies, and sometimes the issue is *who* the book was written for - because the textile industry has different limitations from hand weavers.  So their tolerances are tighter than what a hand weaver can adjust and accommodate for.

So - get a book with a glossary.  Be aware that older British books will have some differences from US centric books.  This is normal, not a 'mistake'.  Regional vocabulary differs.  Take note so that when you come across these differences, it is a matter of variation in the language.  (colour, fibre, are not typos, but British spellings - don't complain that it is jarring to your US eye)

Learn the language of the loom, learn how to read drafts, learn the difference between a threading draft, a profile draft, learn how different weave structures work.  It's perfectly fine to replicate projects in books and magazines, but to really understand how weaving works, you need to study the actual knowledge required.  A weaver doesn't need to weave ergonomically, but for the sake of their body, they should at least be aware of repetitive motion injuries.  It's a lot easier to prevent such injury than it is to heal from developing one.

Be prepared to 'fail' as you begin.  This is not a failing but steps to becoming a weaver.  It is like any other physical skill - you don't start out at the 'elite' level; you need to work your way up to that.

So yes, I have online classes, and books.  But I also have free stuff like this blog, videos on You Tube.

I am happy to try to help, but it helps *me* to understand what your problem actually is - and for that I need to understand your question, not try to parse what you are saying by calling things 'thingees' or 'gizmo'.  Include a photo if you can and show me behind the heddles as well as in front.  Give me as much information as you can because weaving is complex and sometimes the answer is not in front of you but at the back of the loom.  Or you simply don't have enough information and what you need to do is to read the beginning bits in the book(s) to find out what the author is saying when they show you a draft.  If you can't read the draft accurately, you can't replicate the information.  You need the code, the 'key'.  And trying to explain that in a comment in a chat group is a level of difficulty that frustrates both parties - the student and the instructor.

Just one example that came up recently was someone saying that they were direct warping but the draft had multiple colour changes and how did they do that.  I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by 'direct' warping.  If you are using a rigid heddle loom, that's a different process than what I do to dress my standard floor looms.  Assuming they needed a rigid heddle loom weaver, I scrolled on by.

There is a quote that sums it up for me:

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Beginners need to expect to spend some time at the bottom of the learning curve.   It's uncomfortable, it will bend your brain, but that is the only way to learn.  Get comfortable making 'mistakes' and then fixing them, best you can.  

My resources are:

School of Sweet Georgia online classes 

Long Thread Media (Handwoven) classes

Magazines - have written for The Weaver's Journal, Weaver's, Handwoven, Heddle, now for WEFT

Books:  The Intentional Weaver, Stories from the Matrix, Magic in the Water at Blurb

And of course this blog - check out the list of topics for the posts I've labelled with that topic

Soap Boxes

 

bins of warps, not chained but just dropped into a bin

Bet you would be surprised at just how many 'soap boxes' I will leap onto at the drop of a comment. 

Or, maybe not, if you are a long time reader of this blog...

My top 2 are - of course - ergonomics and wet finishing.  However, I have others.  

Today someone asked about filtering the air of their studio.  It is something I have talked about for literally years, when my doctor suggested my shallow cough was the beginning of 'brown lung'.  Think 'black lung' - not coal dust but cotton fibres clogging up my lungs.

When I first brought the subject up, it was long before the internet, and most people I was talking to were 'hobby' weavers and I watched their eyes roll back in their heads when I suggested filtered fans and that carpet was a good preventive measure because it 'trapped' the cotton dust at floor level rather than a hardwood floor when every walk through the studio stirred the cotton linters up to float around in the air - and enter your lungs.

Eventually I stopped talking about it.  I realized most people didn't weave at the rate I did, or make even a tenth of what I did on any given day and probably it wasn't an issue for them.

I talked about ergonomics for a lot longer because it was obvious more people were running into problems with repetitive motion injuries, or sitting poorly, and having physical problems - especially as they aged.

For the past year and a half (since the brain bleed) I have asked myself repeatedly why I am still here, and since I am, what am I supposed to do?

I'm pretty quick to use myself as an example - sometimes a bad one, just because sometimes I *am* an example of 'bad' - and have spent much of this blog (when I realized I was not going to die in 2008) and being a warning about what 'bad' practices can lead to seemed like a good deed that needed doing.

At the time being able to reach out to lots of folk via the internet was still very new, and since I like to write, I decided that this blog would do as a platform to promote my special interests - weaving, and doing it as well as a person could do based on understanding the hidden information that was almost never discussed.

To that end, I have tried to provide the best information I can, and encourage people to learn more.  Understand more.  Filter the information that is 'out there' through their own experience and their own personal abilities and goals, factoring in their particular aims and objectives.

Because if you change one thing, everything can change.

So there are guidelines, general principles, but then everyone needs to apply them to their own personal circumstances.

When I began to write Magic in the Water, I was very unsure of myself.  I had a couple of private supporters - both extremely knowledgeable and both of whom encouraged me to keep talking about wet finishing, even to the point of reading my very rough draft because I wanted to know if I was actually conveying solid information, not just speaking from my own personal 'reality bubble'.

One of them read my very rough draft, noted a description to explain part of the process and commented that he had never thought of it, but I had captured exactly what the process looked like.  And he noted no errors of fact in the rest.

With that assurance, I felt I could go ahead and publish and present the best information I had been able to discover and not lead people astray.

Yesterday I obtained another potential 'helper' in my goal to reduce my pain.  It is not a 'pain killer' as such, but says that it helps support healing of damaged nerves.  It is not a magic bullet fix, but a slow, potentially healing action.  

Once again I am stunned and amazed that any of us actually survive.  If I thought weaving was a complex endeavour, it seems living is also a level of complexity that astonishes.  The more I learn about the body and the mechanisms that attempt to keep us alive, the more astonished I become.  Hopefully - if this new supplement works - in about 2 to 3 months I will have a significant reduction in pain - if that is actually my problem.  Is it?  A number of people assure me that it is part of the problem.  And frankly, I'll take a reduction in pain, whatever that looks like

In the meantime I need to carefully cultivate my tiny sprig of hope.  It came very close to not making it through the past couple of months.  But now I have a new plan, and it has a number of branches.  So I remain stubborn and hanging onto the frayed rope that is me/my life.

And trying to clamber onto one or other of my soapboxes and keep writing about the mysteries involved in taking thread and making cloth out of it.

Once again I thank the people who have reached out and given me support.  I told a friend the other day that the brain bleed was the shit cherry on top of all the rest of my physical issues.  I have begun to re-shape my approach to weaving.  I can't begin to sell everything I can weave.   So I gratefully thank those people who have shaken the pom-poms of encouragement for me.  We are tip-toeing into a new year, and no one knows what that will look like.  I will give a nod to our Prime Minister who flatly states that it may be a very challenging year.  We will get through it by supporting each other.  

Sending 'gold dust' out to everyone who needs it.  Keep creating.  When so many are trying to destroy, we can keep creating and building.  One tea towel at a time, if necessary...