Mistakes and What to do about Them
Sometimes Mistakes Happen
Have you ever been so caught up in the actual doing of a project that you aren’t really paying attention to the details? Everything is flowing smoothly. Than you step back to look at what you’ve done, and BAM! There it is. A glaring mistake and you’re thinking “how in the world did I miss that???” Now you must decide what to do with it.
I was very happily weaving away on a scarf and it was going beautifully! I’d figured out how to place the pickup stick so the selvage threads were always picked up, the beat was even, everything was perfect. Until I stopped for a minute and saw THE MISTAKE. It glared at me. I glared back. I called my daughter over and asked if she could see it. She could. If her lovely (but untrained) eyes could find it, so could everyone else. I glared at it some more. I had to make a decision.
Some people say that mistakes are “design features” or they prove that an item really is handmade. Others say if you want perfect buy machine made. So, what are we to do with mistakes? Sometimes I do leave mistakes. 1 extra pick in a log cabin pattern will never be noticed. Sometimes the fibres involved don’t allow for correcting mistakes unless it is caught immediately. Mohair, for example, is very difficult to unweave. Sometimes unweaving will damage the integrity of the finished project. Sometimes the error will be easier to fix after I’ve removed the project from the loom. But mistakes are mistakes. And it’s okay to make them. It’s also okay to decide to leave them. Sometimes though mistakes need to be fixed.
I glared a little more at mine then got out the scissors. I could have unwoven the work and saved the yarn but in this case, given the fineness of the warp, the stickiness of alpaca, and the length of the mistake, I decided that cutting out the weft was the best option. It hurt a little to snip the weft threads. And I was terrified I would accidentally snip the warp.
It was worth it. Mistakes that look small on the loom tend to grow after finishing. This one would have glared at me every time I looked at that scarf.
