Balancing Act

The towels actually look more green in real life than in this photo, but the warp is cut off, the towels cut apart and serged.  I forgot I'd woven dish cloths at the front of the warp in order to use up the previous lots of linen so my friend will wind up with four new ones.  I don't know if she has worn any of her old ones out yet, but she may well wind up with a lifetime supply!  However, I am almost done with the fine single linen yarns I inherited so there may not be very many more heading her way.

Of course there are other linen yarns, I even have some single 12s - and know where to get more...  :D

While I wove today I ruminated on the classes coming up.  They were billed as being an introduction to weaving, no previous experience necessary.  As such I thought long and hard about how to make the experience as valuable as possible to the students and finally decided on the 'give them the fun part' to hopefully hook them on learning the 'hard' part (dressing the loom).  I will demonstrate getting the warp into the loom Saturday morning so they at least know the steps involved.

So the looms have been dressed for them with natural 4/8 cotton, with the threading being half straight and half (approximately) point progression.

The weekend will focus on teaching weaving terms so that future communication will (hopefully) go smoothly.  Everyone speaking the same language helps in getting information conveyed.

I couldn't find my glossary that I drew up when I routinely taught beginning classes, and rather than re-invent the wheel, I pulled up the 'definitions' that were included in Magic in the Water - two pages worth - and printed them out.  Not all the terms are there, but we will also go over a loom and point at and name the parts.

Then I thought about the things I feel are important - position and posture at the loom.  I will do the presentation I have done for years, both for guilds (at their request) and for the Olds program (part of the curriculum).  It is a lot easier to learn the ergonomic positions than try to unlearn unergonomic ones later.

Once that is done, I will demonstrate on one of the looms including hemstitching.  I might photocopy the diagram out of Shirley Held's Weaving to hand out on Sunday, but I'm hoping that everyone will be able to begin weaving before end of day tomorrow.

I did print outs of a draft with plain weave, then 12 twill variations.  Just one repeat of each, with a divider between each and then will suggest to people that they weave at least 6" of each so that they can get a feel for what the cloth will look like, how to read the draft, and get comfortable throwing the shuttle and beating as consistently as possible.

Sunday I will discuss wet finishing.

And I think that might be enough to plan for, leaving time for questions and further demos as needed.

The Olds level one is geared towards people who already have the basics, so they get blasted with a great deal of 'it depends' scenarios.  I warn them they will feel like they are trying to drink from a fire hose - and I am not wrong.

I think I'm about as ready as I can be.  Much of teaching this is being flexible and reacting to the needs of the students.  And those can be very difficult to anticipate.  Part of the fun of teaching.