One of the social media sites I belong to has a thread about weaving while sick/injured/disabled.
I have hesitated to say much because every person's journey is different. And mine has certainly been filled with times where I was 'confined' to 'light duties'. Now, being one of them.
I had such high hopes for the new procedure and it has not been particularly successful. So far. But I had been warned that I would be getting a light dose of the drug, initially, that some people find they get 'worse' before they get better, and that as I repeat the procedure things *should* improve.
But in the meantime, I've nearly caught up on all my long procrastinated light duties, and I am getting...bored. Vexed. Impatient. I don't feel like I can preach coping with the inability to weave right now when I am, quite frankly, not doing all the well with it, myself.
This morning someone emailed, wondering where they could get a copy of Magic in the Water. Talk about calling up memories.
I had to explain that the original publication was out of print, but that I had made a photos only version and was selling it on Blurb (link in the highlighted text below the image of the cover).
Why did I do that? Well, I had someone with computer skills I did not posses who could convert the file into a PDF - but that meant I had to take every sample (before and after) and get good quality photos. A friend came over to help me, knowing energy was extremely limited given I was in the middle of a course of chemotherapy (which contained Vincristine?). I set up a photographic area in my living room, used a cutting board to centre the samples directly below the camera tripod which was mounted facing down. This insured that each sample was taken the same distance away and centred in the frame. In the end the two of us did quite well, and powered through the process fairly quickly.
Then I had to take each photo off the camera, trim up the edges so that the cutting board didn't show (the width of the samples varied somewhat, especially after being wet finished), make sure they were clearly labelled to match the order of the samples in the book. In those days getting a gigantic file emailed was...challenging...and I may have saved them to a CD and snail mailed that to my computer person. Who created the PDF and sent the completed file back to me.
I then sold the PDF file, which once compressed, could be emailed.
By the time I finished doing that, I was far enough along in my chemo that I had almost zero energy left, but - because I had the help I needed, when I needed it - it got done.
And today, like some days, I got up to an inquiry if the book was still available.
You *can* still find (rare) copies of the original, with samples. Usually found in estate sales, or older weavers downsizing. But such opportunities are rare, and when offered for sale generally fetch very close to the original purchase price. Some people let me know they scooped up a copy for themselves because no one else knew how highly sought after it is.
I have been told the book is considered a 'classic' in the field. All I know is, when I wrote the thing, information on wet finishing for hand weavers was very scarce. General advice was to just 'wash' the textile.
But when I did my GCW master weaver monograph, I came to really begin to understand the mechanics of the process, and how variable it could be. Once again, something that looks 'simple'...is not.
It is not, however, something to be feared. Once a person knows the process, learns more about how to apply the variables, and get familiar how the cloth will change - at times dramatically, at others in more subtle ways - well, all I can say is...'it isn't finished until it's wet finished'.
Unless you don't want to - for reasons! But make that a conscious decision, not something you don't do because you are afraid of 'ruining' all the work that went into interlacing your threads.
Just saying...
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