Mending

 

I love weaving.  

I love all of it - the dreaming, the designing, the physical processes.  I like the 'tedious' bits as much as the rest.  Because without doing all the 'bits', there is no weaving, no cloth.

Learning all the limits, up and down the spectrum of what is possible.  

I must confess, I'm not a fan of the 'mistakes', but they are part and parcel of the process, and mistakes *will* happen.  The 'trick', if you will, is to learn how to fix them - when they can be - and leave them if they aren't going to adversely affect the cloth.

So yes, I've had my share of 'mistakes' over the years.  But I never let making a mistake be career ending.

Because weaving, like life, is full of lessons and we learn from our mistakes.  We learn what a mistake of that nature looks like, how it will affect us, when to let something go, or slog on 'fixing' the mistake when it is needed.

Yesterday I spent an hour or so inspecting and repairing the 18 towels ready for wet finishing.  The kinds of 'mistakes' that needed repairing are best done before wet finishing (although floats/skips *can* be repaired afterwards, it's just easier to do it before).

I put on some music, put on my 'extra' lights so I could see (dark blue on dark blue is kinda hard to see) and carefully went over each towel, fixing broken warp ends (yes, I flub the shuttle and break ends) and floats/skips.

When a new weaver tells me they can hardly wait until they don't make mistakes anymore I bite my tongue, although at times I can't stifle a laugh.  Being experienced just means you recognize a mistake and know how to fix it.  Or know when it can be left.

Yesterday I wove the header in the new warp and looked and looked at the cloth.  It looked 'wrong' and appeared I'd made several 'mistakes' threading - although I had been really careful.  So I went back to the draft and carefully examined the draft and no, there was no mistake.  This weave structure is...complex, I guess I'd say, and the light reflects off the warp and weft floats differently, which makes the cloth more 'interesting', but also tends to make it look like there are problems.  When I carefully looked at the drawdown in Fiberworks, focussing on the details instead of the overall appearance, I could see more clearly why it looked 'wrong' in the loom.

And of course, in the loom it is still 'raw' and after wet finishing, many of the 'wrong' things will resolve, as the threads shift and move and take their final place in the whole.  Because right now, reed marks are distorting the cloth, too, and those will be gone after weft finishing and pressing.

So I set my concerns aside and will carry on, knowing that I cannot judge the cloth yet, before it is finished.  I have to trust my instincts, my careful scrutiny of the draft and have faith that it will all fall into place in the end.

And if not?  They are tea towels.  They will still dry dishes...