Brain Dump

 

diagram from The Intentional Weaver

When I launched The Intentional Weaver, a few people said they would like a 'brain dump' of my thoughts and processes.

Um, no, no one wants *that*!

I came up with the above diagram to try and explain how my thoughts constantly zip from one bubble to the next, always going through the centre filter of intended cloth.  

What kind of cloth am I trying to make and how will the changes I made in one bubble or the other affect the finished cloth?  Each change will tweak the final results, but in a way I want it to, or not?

But I had done my best to lay out the content of each of those bubbles in as orderly a fashion as I could.

Now I am dealing with putting together Zoom presentations, largely using Power Point.

Doing a slide deck of static images, snippets of text, trying to link them up coherently in a process that is dynamic?  Yeah.  Challenging.

But I figured I could do it for my former students in part because they had already had in person thought process sharing, were used to my 'voice', my way of speaking, my approach to teaching.

As I got further into the process, I realized that I could also do this for people who did not have that relationship with me.  And so I opened a study group. When that filled, I started another.  All will have the same Power Point presentations, but I'm quite sure each will differ based on my thoughts du jour and the questions that are asked.  

I didn't want people to blithely join a study group or enter part way through, so I chose to make the groups 'hidden' on Facebook.  The recordings of the Zoom meetings get posted to You Tube, unlisted.  That means no one can find the group or the videos using a simple search.  They have to be a member of the group on FB, then the link to the recording is only posted in the group.

So far I've done two presentations for my previous students.  Late last night I checked views for each.  The first one has 49 views, the second has 36.  Now, obviously I'm not interested in getting thousands of views, but in a group of 60, that many views tells me that my decision to take the time to post the recordings is something that is adding value to the experience.

Now if you ask 10 weavers what the solution to something weaving related is, you'll likely get 27 answers.  Because the correct answer will depend on the particular circumstance.

So I urge everyone who wants to 'master' the craft of weaving to learn as much as they possibly can from as many different teachers they can.

In the meantime, I have to go get ready to Zoom again in 90 minutes.  That means getting the laptop ready, logged on to the internet and Zoom.  Set up the space where I do the presentations.  Gather the things I want to show/share.

I will dump as much of my brain as I can on the subject of our 'common' materials in 90 minutes.  Listeners will have to sift through the results to find out what they need to pay attention to.  And then they can review at a later date to pick up more.  Because we can only absorb so much information before our brains tend to shut off further input while it processes the first bit.

There is still space in the Saturday group if anyone is interested.  First Zoom is next Saturday if you want to join in.