Three life lessons from the loom
I'm going to write about weaving two days in a row, but I have some thoughts that go beyond fiber-y things. First a picture.
This is the back of my loom. (I know any weavers out there look at this picture and immediately feel great sympathy.) Do you see those hanging pill bottles? Those are warp ends that needed to be added or repaired for various reasons. Pretty much everything in weaving is fixable, but in general, no one wants to have to do this. I'll show you one of the reasons in a moment, but I think an uncooperative warp has several things to teach all of us.
1. A distracted brain is never as competent as you think it is. I really and truly thought I was focusing on dressing this loom while I was doing it, but I also know I was pretty concerned about getting it done in order to have everything finished in time. Truthfully my focus was on finishing and not the process. Multiple errors in tyeing up the treadles and in threading could have been averted had I spent a little less time worrying about other things and a little more time appreciating the process. I know I don't multitask, but sometimes I forget that worrying is actually a task in and of itself.
2. Competency doesn't mean you don't make mistakes, it just means you know how to fix them. This warp would have been my nightmare two years ago. I had a broken warp end, a lately discovered need for floating slevedges, and a lately discovered threading error that required a temporary heddle. If all that sounds very technical, it's because it is. Two years ago I might have heard of these types of repairs, but I tried to be very, very careful so as to not need them because they sounded complicated and scary. With more experience my reaction isn't so much terror as resignation. I both know what to do and how to do it. This, I realized is actual competence. None of us is ever perfect, so knowing what to do to fix our mistakes, repair our relationships, do what is required to move forward is what really matters.
3. It's not a bad thing to want to do a good job. There are so many people out there on social media who give the message, either tacit or said out loud, that excellence is oppressive. Instead we need to be free to try and not get all perfectionist. Aiming for excellence and perfectionism are not equivalent terms. One says it's worth trying to do your best, to look critically at what you've done, then take the next steps to improve. It is a constant evaluation of what you've learned and what you could do better. Perfectionism says that if you make a mistake, there must be something wrong with you, so you might as well roll over and give up now because you weren't blessed with a certain set of skills. I think you probably already know which one is helpful and which is not. No one who is very good at something got to that point without a lot of practice. And if someone says they never practiced and were just born that way, well, if they offer to sell you a bridge, don't buy it.
You want to see what I spent an hour fixing today? It was the threading error that I discovered after I began weaving.
The error is in the blue stripe. If you look closely you'll see that the pointy part of the pattern, which you can easily see in the light grey stripe, is not so pointy in the blue.
The t-pin is where the warp end is repaired. You can't really see the threading error with everything else that is going on, and especially because it's in such a low contrast stripe. But I also know that the error would have eaten at me and possibly caused me to stop weaving this warp entirely because it would have made me unhappy to think about it. It was far better just to deal with it in the middle of the very first napkin and not have to think about it again. So that is what I did. I'll leave it up to you to come up with all the different ways just dealing with a problem when it comes up instead of letting it fester applies to everyday life.
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