Shoulders of Giants

Wall of Troy (or extended point progression)

Had another weaver phone this morning with a question.  She wanted to pick my brain, and it was a lovely conversation as we examined a technical question about a weave structure.  Or rather, an approach to creating designs based on a weave structure.

It is the kind of conversation I just love to have as two weavers explore possibilities, what has been done before by our forebears, how it might be used, applied to create 'new' designs.  We agreed that there probably is nothing much that hasn't been done before, but that we are simply re-discovering something that had been 'lost' - for a while.

There is very little under the sun that is truly new.  There is a group of folk who adamantly insist that ancient humans couldn't possibly have done amazing things - we must have been visited by aliens in order to have the Mayan Temples, Stonehenge. the Pyramids and so on.

I very much doubt our ancient ancestors were stupid in the way that these people seem to think.  They may not have had the same kind of technology as we do, but they used what they had and made amazing things.

Cave paintings using perspective - something people assumed really wasn't understood until much later.  Rendering sculpture in three D - ancient 3D sculptures of bison have just recently been discovered, dated to 14,000 years ago.  The various 'Venus' sculptures are certainly 3D.

Agriculture, both plants and animals.  Sericulture.  The harvesting and processing of bast fibres - linen and hemp, rami and nettle.  Thousands of years old.

Navigation by the stars allowed Phoenicians, Vikings and Asians et al to travel by sea.  The sea was not a barrier, but a highway, for those who could read the stars. 

Just saw a post where archaeologists were trying to figure out the purpose of a bone - obviously a tool, but they didn't know for what purpose.  A modern day leather worker explained what it was and that to this day they still use bone tools to burnish their leather because it is simply the best tool available, superior to wood, metal or plastic.

Just because we don't know what something is, doesn't mean that our ancestors weren't clever and could work out higher mathematics, medical care, writing, astronomy, architecture.  The Dark Ages may have been dark in Europe, but they weren't dark in other places on the globe.  Asia, the Middle East, Africa continued to thrive.

Thinking that our ancestors were 'primitive' and 'ignorant' says more about us than it does about them.

This is one reason I continue to commit to the Olds College program.  Modern day weavers need good information, not speculation or misinformation built on misunderstanding the principles of the craft.  For anyone who wants to learn, I frequently recommend books and teachers.  For those who learn on line - Jane Stafford's on line guild - exciting things are being prepared for 2020.  Janet Dawson now on bluprint, for a good introduction to learning how to weave.  I have You Tube videos for anyone interested in my processes.

There are books that were published in the early part of the 20th century that remain classics to this day - Mary Meigs Atwater, S. A. Zielinski, Elmer Hickman, Clothilde Barrett, and so on.  Some authors have chosen a niche of the craft and dug deeply into the topic.  Others have done more of an overview.

Request the books from the public library, find out if it is something you want to own.  Or if you are fortunate to have a guild library, they tend to be repositories of older books that are not commonly available now.

Long Thread Media has acquired the video catalogue that F&W Media had, and now offer those as on-line workshops.  (including my two)

There is information out there, but as someone has famously said, if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know that you don't know it.

Or this quote from The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong:  When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind.  Paul Veyne.  I will do a proper review of this book because it is, in a word, amazing.