I Meant To Do That
I am still weaving away at the dimity yardage. Life is busy and complicated at the moment, so I run out to the barn and fire as many shots as I can – run back inside to answer emails and calls, throw some soup on, direct some family traffic and then run back out. I am hoping I can finish weaving the yardage (only 3 more yards to go) and sew the skirt before holiday madness, christmas cookie weight and winter doldrums make me lose interest in sewing clothes.
You can see a little of the texture showing in the next shot.
The other (brain dead after 9:00 pm) project I am working on is plying some 1/28 cashmere on my spinning wheel. It is really beautiful stuff, and all kinds of projects dance through my head as I ply thousands of yards of sweet cashmere.
Finally, I encountered a serendipitous series of events that made me happy and inspired recently. One happened in Boston as I was house hunting with my sister who is moving to Beantown after 25 years in NYC. We were walking with a realtor when a tiny little boy came zooming toward us on roller skates, hit an irregularity in the pavement and took a scary fall right on his little face. I was just starting forward to help him, when he popped up like a little puppet and said, “I meant to do that!” and zoomed away apparently unhurt. Then in Madelyn van der Hoogt’s workshop on deflected doubleweave, she was speaking to a participant and said, in effect, that the most important thing one can learn as a weaver is to claim (good) weaving accidents as one’s own great ideas. And finally, in the same vein, I was tech editing a project for Handwoven (which you will get to read soon) which centered on a color discovery that was a consequence of a heart-stopping mistake. All of these made me feel that my somewhat loose approach to weaving might just generate a few, “I meant to do that” moments.
