silk warp on the table, waiting to be dealt with
A conference I attended as a new weaver had a keynote speaker who - it seemed to me - quite proudly announced that she never made mistakes. Now I really hope that what her message was about was that any mistakes that she made she creatively turned into something...great (according to her description, ALL of her weaving was..fabulous, fantastic, wonderful, perfect).
Since I've never been too bothered about making mistakes, that I consider making a mistake a lesson to learn from, I have never been shy about sharing the mistakes I make in order that others can also learn from them - if they wish. Or feel superior to me, but that's none of my business.
So after being very annoyed with myself yesterday for not just making a mistake, but spending far too long trying to figure out why I made it (the lesson buried in the mistake) I finally switched to problem solving mode.
My intention was to make a scarf. I'd twiddled with the math and the design over several days, then let it sit for a couple of days over the holiday before grabbing my notes and making up a cheat sheet to take to the warping board.
In the interim, after making many changes to the plan, I appear to have simply forgotten that the blocks in my profile draft were not meant to be a full one inch, but narrower than that. So my cheat sheet was made up to reflect full inches. Which meant the warp wound up being far too wide.
While I had enough yarn to wind the warp that I did, I did not have sufficient weft to weave a shawl width/length cloth.
So I went to the desktop, crunched the numbers one more time, made my profile draft fit the number of ends I was going to work with. The warp is still a bit wider than planned, but I can mess about with the weft quantities and do weft stripes to make the planned weft yarn go further.
While I always aim for perfection, I am well aware that there is little in life that is. Good is a perfectly good goal to aim for. Cloth that fulfills it's function? Good. A design that is interesting? Good.
A friend used to say that perfection kills good. I remind myself that I need to "Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen.
Wise words.
2 comments:
That keynote speaker sounds remarkably like our current US president. Everything he does or says is also great - or so he says. Me? I learn far more from my mistakes than when things proceed smoothly. And yes, I've made math errors years after I started, once again from moving too quickly and/or not taking all things (like your inches) into consideration. I, too, own up to my mistakes, and I, too, want to figure out why/how I made them so that I can, in fact, learn to hopefully not make that same mistake again. After all, there are so many mistakes out there waiting to be learned from. :-)
Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful post.
I don't mind mistakes, usually. Just got annoyed that it took me so long to figure out where I had gone wrong! :D And therefore wasted a whole bunch of time I could have been weaving. OTOH, lesson learned - when making multiple tweaks to a design, throw away the oldest sheets and only keep the latest. And write everything done. Don't assume I will remember!!!!
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