Report From the Fell

 

tea towel with cut line woven in for easy cutting/serging

What goes into the creative act?

Things.  Lots and lots of...things.  Lots and lots of thinking.  

Many times the thoughts are barely conscious, hardly noticeable.  Many times I come away from the loom realizing that I'd been thinking about the 'next' warp the whole time, paying only surface attention to the actual, physical act of weaving.

Writing these articles for WEFT has created a great deal of grey cell crunching.  This warp was meant to be the beginning of the weaving for the next article.  Instead I had to make some changes on the 'fly' as things were not turning out the way I wanted them to do.

Somehow I made a threading error - but it only shows when I use weft of a high contrast to the warp.  I'm not a big fan of throwing yet more time down the drain when a simple 'cheat' will make it possible for others to use these tea towels, most of them never spotting the 'mistake'.  These will get designated 'seconds', not sold.  I have a rather large coterie of health care professionals and I like to give them a thank you in the form of a tea towel now and again.  :)

In order to get a colour that was saturated in the more-or-less correct colour, I decided to use one of the huge cones of 16/2 cotton for the weft.  Having just woven a bunch of samples looking at things like density, I had a pretty clear idea of what would happen when I substituted the open end spun yarn for the ring spun - and I was not disappointed when my speculation turned out correct.

Most of the weaving today was me, turning the idea of the differences between the two yarns, ostensibly 'identical' but knowing they were not, showing me that what I expected was what I was getting.

Now that I've sorted that warp out and it appears to be weaving nicely, it is time to turn back to the writing.  I've been worrying away at the article that is *nearly* finished.  Given my judgement is not great right now, it seems even more important that I have someone help make my way through the language.  Someone needs to make sure that I am saying what I *think* I am saying, rather than depend on my brain which still has sinkholes into which words will sink out of sight.

After a few days of 'spring' we now have snow - again.  Spring break up strikes again.  Oh well.  It was a nice day to stay in and get to the loom.