Press Pause

 

A few weeks ago I was at a bank and spotted one of these 'easy' buttons on the desk of one of the employees.  I like the sentiment, but unfortunately even if I had one it would most likely be disconnected.

This week had 'pause' pressed on it as we tried to deal with some life issues, plus the loom not working reliably.  The thing about change is that it happens and we just have to learn to roll with it or adapt to it.

The loom MAY get fixed today.  We have made some adjustments suggested to us by Dave from Louet and a couple other weavers and the pegs to adjust the length of the cables arrived this morning. We are just getting ourselves functional - something that seems to take longer and longer the older we get.

The Life Stuff is coming together, the loom has had a thorough inspection, some cleaning and some tweaking and hopefully once the cables are adjusted it will happily weave for another 3.5 years.  Or more.  Hopefully.

During the time of pause I finally dealt with some things that had been nagging me so those are well underway, too.

The next step in the essays is to go through each binder, note the topics in that binder, consider if there are any 'holes' in the content for that category that really need to be filled.  Or not.

The essays are not intended to be The Compleat Thoughts on Weaving by moi, but things that are subtle and that some people don't observe right away because as new weavers they are completely overwhelmed with the breadth of the information that has to be learned.  There is little time to look deeper in many cases.  When things go pear shaped it's usually in the middle of a project (of course it is, you wouldn't be weaving if you weren't in the middle of a project!) and if you don't understand the mechanics or physics at play it might be difficult to see a solution.  Because there are many ways for things to go wrong, especially when your loom has lots of mechanical assistance.  It can be difficult to zero in on the cause of the problem.

Once again I am producing a publication that only a small niche of a niche community will actually be interested in.  Trying to interest a 'real' publisher is an exercise in futility.  They have large businesses to run, costs to be covered, printing a book has never been cheap and is even more expensive now that the pandemic has affected supply chains and material availability.

Plus we have the internet and 'vanity' publishers like Blurb who can provide the service (and deal with customers).  Blurb isn't truly a 'vanity' press - those used to make the author pay for all the printing costs up front, but I kind of lump them into that category because it allows authors like me who cannot convince a big publisher to print my writing to do it themselves with blurb.com taking point on dealing with customers, only printing out a copy when it has been ordered.

Just the way I like it, now that I'm 'retired' (for certain values of!)

Ultimately we don't know if what we have done is going to fix the loom.  We have made the adjustments suggested to us and right now what we have is Shrodinger's Loom.  It is both fixed and not fixed until I start weaving and find out which it is.  Fingers crossed...