Sunday, April 9, 2017

Learning Curve


All this yarn is part II or maybe III.  It is a research project with two other fibre people where we have each brought our skills, our knowledge, our expertise, to make something that is greater than the sum of it's parts, insofar as we are all benefiting from the interaction of our various areas of interest and expertise.

I know I bang on and on about how everything changes when you change one thing.  In order to make meaningful discoveries, it works best (for me) to make incremental changes, observe how the yarn reacts, then tweak what I am doing.

While I may have been weaving for over 40 years, I long ago learned that I wasn't going to learn everything there is to know about the construction of cloth because there are so many variables.  One person would be hard pressed to try every fibre in every format, every loom, every weave structure, every finishing technique, every density in all of the above.

But it was that very un-knowing-ness - the vast scope and range - of cloth construction that excited me.  It continues to excite me. 

Yes, some of the 'experiments' have been 'failures' insofar as they didn't produce the results I was looking for.  In fact, this current round of 'samples' is barely the tip of the iceberg, scratching the surface.  Whether or not the three of us will continue to explore this area of making cloth or not, only time will tell.

But in the meantime, I ride the roller coaster of learning and try to enjoy the ride up and down and around the curves...

No comments: