Lessons from the Loom
There is nothing earth shattering about learning life lessons from hobbies but I have been a little surprised by some of the lessons I have learned and am still learning. while weaving. This is the first in a sporadic series of lessons learned at the loom. I wish I’d learned some of these lessons earlier in life!
There is nothing earth shattering about learning life lessons from hobbies but I have been a little surprised by some of the lessons I have learned and am still learning. while weaving. This is the first in a sporadic series of lessons learned at the loom. I wish I’d learned some of these lessons earlier in life!
Mistakes: we all make them. We all hate making them. I hate making mistakes so much that I can be paralyzed. Or, I can be so afraid something might be a mistake that I do nothing at all. I don’t want to offend, I don’t want to hurt and I don’t want to look stupid! So it can be more comfortable to deal with the disappointment of not doing something than taking the risk of making a mistake.
I’ve made mistakes in my weaving. Little mistakes that don’t really matter like colours that didn’t work, beating too hard, poor choice of fibre for personal projects. And I’ve made some bigger mistakes: wrong beat for a piece for publication, forgetting the “checkers” in a checkered scarf, tension issues. Here’s some of what I’ve learned about mistakes.
Change perspective. Sometimes a mistake isn’t really a mistake, it’s learning how not to do something. The long term consequences of these “mistakes” are actually positive so they can hardly be called mistakes. We can’t expect to be perfect when learning new things, so be nice to yourself! A simple change of perspective can have a huge impact on how you feel about yourself. The picture on the right was supposed to be a double weave log cabin. A mistake in threading turned it into houndstooth instead.
This was completely taken apart and rewoven
If you’re walking down a path that is not leading where you want to go, turn around. If you keep walking you *might* get to where you want but it would have been much easier if you had turned back at the first sign of trouble. I am amazed at how far back you can go in your weaving to fix a mistake. I have actually unwoven a completed project, tied it back to the loom and rewoven! The crazy thing is I knew from about the first 6” of weaving that I was in trouble. But I keep going hoping that the finishing would fix the issue. It didn’t (of course). Turning back doesn’t mean giving up, it means recognizing there is a problem, going back to the point it was made, fixing it at the source then moving forward in the right direction.
This might look good in a picture but the tension was a disaster…I cut my losses
Cutting your losses is not failure. Sometimes you can turn a mistake into a positive learning experience, sometimes you can turn back and fix the mistake and sometimes there is nothing to be done but cut the project off the loom. This is not a failure, this is self-care! There may be a sense of sadness over the loss of beautiful yarn, time or money but the sense of relief is greater. In life, cutting something away and tossing it out of your life might be very painful and at the same time the best thing you could ever do for yourself!
Mistakes and What to do about Them
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.
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.
