Truths and a Lesson

After 30 some years of weaving you think I’d know better. This is what I DO know.

Your mother was right, “Haste makes waste”.

Shortcuts almost always get you in trouble.

The six ‘P’s (Prior Preparation Prevents Pretty Poor Performance--I’ve often inserted another word here for “pretty”, you can guess what it might be) help insure good results.

So, what you ask, was my “crime”? Not testing the color fastness of a yarn I used to weave a sampler for my upcoming rigid heddle pattern book. The reason I’m so disgusted with myself is that I should know better. What would have been a perfectly wonderful piece, ended up with splotches from yarn that ran. Because I was in a hurry, eager to get weaving, I didn’t take the five minutes (max!) to boil up some water, pour it into a white cup, and drop in a length of the offending yarn to see if the water stayed clear or turned a lovely (yuk!) shade of pink.

Here again, I come back to my mantra, “sample, sample, sample.” Oh, it gets you out of so much trouble. And take it from me, if you don’t know the yarn, if it’s red, purple, a dark color, or of uncertain origin, just take a moment to test it in some hot water—and make a cup of hot tea while you’re at it.

Messing Around

Don’t let a little warp at the end of your project go unwoven—there are ideas waiting to happen in those last 12”. I just discovered this—again!—as I was finishing up my “Orange Pillow” project that will be featured in the upcoming weaving issue of Craft: Magazine! I tried a different weft—but offset it with a couple of rows of contrasting color. I then experimented with a different float pattern than I had been using. I used several strands of white wool and then I felted the whole thing, clipping the floats after washing.

Ideas I’ll use: the single line of white, the three rows of yellow dividing two sections of color, the varied float pattern, though I’m not sure what kind of project these ideas will show up in. Remember, the idea is to mess around, just try things out, don’t think too much. React. Play.

Record Keeping

You think you will remember. But you won’t. I’ve learned this the hard way. I go back and look at a piece of fabric I just took off the loom and I say out loud to myself, “What WAS it I was doing there?”

So this is what I do. I use a cast off spiral notebook and write as I work, recording warp and weft, epi and ppi. I staple the yarns to the first page and identify them if I know what they are. I record everything as I weave. I keep the notebook and pen close by and stop every time I make a change. I number each pattern so that later I can mark these on my sampler if desired. It is especially useful to use hang tags at the edges if the sample will be used for teaching purposes.

Tunes
I can’t help myself but Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song” still just sends me—think of playing this for your honey on Valentine’s Day.

Learning As You Go

I’ve been weaving since 1971. If my math is correct (always a question), it means I’ve been at it for some 36 years (some years more than others). Over that length of time, you learn a few things. And keep learning—and this is what I love about weaving. Just a week ago as I was working on some samples for my class at Eastern Great Lakes Fiber Conference (October 5-8), I discovered quite by accident—great discoveries often happen this way, not to presume that I’ve made an amazing innovation, something that I’ll use henceforth.

I’ve made much jaw music about sampling. Bottom line: you sample to gain information. Eight inches is a good width for a sample, because it lets you know enough about how the fabric is going to behave in a larger piece than a narrower sample will tell you. I was warping with Harrisville Shetland 2-ply but ran out of the color before I’d achieved my 8” worth of sample width. To finish out what I needed, I used two other dibby-dabs of leftover yarn. What I discovered in the weaving was that these colors gave me more information about how the weft interacted with the warp.

Here are some of the samples from that warp. For easy reference, I’m storing them in clear plastic three-ring binder sleeves so that both the front and the back can be viewed. (Sometimes the “back” side is more what you have in mind than the “front” side.) Opposite the swatch is a page with the warp and weft information, draft (for harness looms) and threading guide for (rigid heddle looms), as well as my weaving record for that particular sample.

Keeping good records is critical. Even though you may think you will, you will NOT remember what you did. (I continue to learn this over, and over, and over.)