Persistence

 

I think there is one more shelf on this rack - I couldn't get back far enough to fit them all into the photo

Latest photo of towels made since oh, March?

There were more.  Some have been sold, some given as gifts.  And of course there are possibly some on the other rack in the storage area.  The serious stash reduction actually began in November of last year, so it's hard to remember which I wove when - pre or post covid.

People sometimes confuse patience and persistence.  You don't need patience for something you enjoy doing, although you might need persistence.  Persistence for the times when you are tired, when you don't feel like doing much of anything.  Like during a pandemic and 'interesting' political times.

But I am nothing if not persistent.  And determined.  I have helped disburse enough weaver stashes (so far) that I am determined that Doug and friends will not be in the position of getting rid of an enormous pile of yarns.  Woven textiles should be a lot easier to get rid of, should there be much left by the time I shuffle (shuttle?) off to the Great Loom Room in the Sky.  And woven cloth takes up a lot less room than yarn on tubes/cones.

Persistence is not a bad trait to have, if you are going to do any craft that is labour intensive.  Persistence gets you through the less than stellar choices.  The brain blips.  The technical glitches.

Persistence is how you figure out what is going wrong, then allows you to fix them.  Or recognize them as not the best choice to have made.  Then something else needs to kick in - do you spend the time needed to fix it, or is it more economic to write it up to experience and just begin again, this time making better choices?

Learning how to distinguish between salvaging something and starting fresh is something each of us has to learn.  And we each get to choose which approach we take.

Because we are all different.  We have different financial situations, for one thing.  For me sacrificing a few dollars of yarn if it was going to take many hours to fix?  Easy choice.  As mentioned previously, I learned early that I could always make more money, I could not manufacture more time.  Much as I would have liked to be able to do so.  Or energy.  When something is sucking the energy out of you more quickly than you can generate more, maybe it is time to give up on that thing.

Yesterday I 'finished' the weak black yarn using it as weft.  There is a small bobbin and a small tube of yarn left, which will get used up as 'waste' yarn - in headers or as cut lines.  

I wanted to get rid of it before winter and our short daylight hours.  So I pushed myself to the loom and got it done.

Today I will begin working on the bits of green, weaving directly from the tube.  Because the cardboard tubes that Brassard yarn comes on fit into Leclerc shuttles.  And I'm lazy.  If  I can just weave from the tube, I don't have to take the time to wind bobbins.  If I need more yarn, there are tubes too full to weave from directly and then I will wind bobbins.

I have been asked to talk about my life as a weaver for a guild.  As such I have been thinking a lot about my journey the past 44 years.  I'm not sure yet exactly what I will talk about, but how the books came into being was one thing mentioned as being of interest.  Except that they are only a very small part of my career.  So I am at the 'simmering on the back burner' stage of developing an idea.  However, I cannot simmer for very long.  I foolishly suggested November as a good time to do this.  And I need to figure out Zoom, too.  

So pretty soon, now, any day now, I am going to have to work on the presentation - both the content and the mechanism of presenting it remotely.

Interesting times we live in...