(I’ve been sitting on this post for ages, trying to take new photos with better lighting. Since it’s February, I’ve given up.)
My friends and I talk about yarn the same way normal people talk about food.
“I broke my diet again, but the MadTosh was too delicious to resist.”
“Eh, it’s little bland, but the texture is unbelievable!”
Perhaps not coincidentally, one of my more frequently used comparisons of weaving and knitting is as follows:
Knitting is like cooking. You’re always moving around, keeping track of five things at once, and it makes me immensely frustrated. (Note that this aspect of knitting is less true the more I practice. I’m getting better at the juggling act.)
Weaving, on the other hand, is like baking. All the hard work is at the beginning, and once everything is set up and running smoothly, it’s only a matter of time before you have a delicious finished good.
I suppose spinning is equivalent to making tea, all soothing and repetitive. And bobbin lace… is confectionery?
Sorry. I’ll quit torturing the metaphor. Here’s a guinea pig.
When winding a warp, it’s very helpful to use a stand to hold your cones or tubes of yarn upright so that you can pull the yarn off the cone smoothly and at an even tension. However, these stands can run fairly steep in price, and even more economical alternatives aren’t always readily accessible.
Solution?
Locate an empty CD spindle.
Or empty a full one, if necessary. This is weaving time! Priorities!
Next, remove the lid and plonk on your yarn.
That’s the stuff.
There are a few disadvantages to the Spindle Solution, but nothing too dire. First, there’s no built-in tensioning device for the thread, but holding it carefully seems to work reasonably well. In a pinch, I imagine that you could feed it through some sort of freestanding hook, but so far I haven’t found it necessary. Second, a CD spindle is very lightweight, and can be dragged around if you’re not feeding the yarn straight upwards. A couple of clamps can take care of this, or (less elegantly) something heavy– like a weaving book– laid across one side. Of course, if you’re working with more than a couple of cones at a time, further creativity might be called for.
Also, it’s kind of ugly.
Decoupage, anyone?
—
Update! Update!
Since I posted this entry, I came up with another option:
It’s an expanding mug rack, intended for wall use, just lying flat on the table. I’m considering screwing it into a flat piece of wood for even better stability, but even as it is it’s pretty decent.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a seasonal sort of person. My life and memories thereof have always been clearly ordered by the different seasons of the year, or at least, the seasons as they occur in the rather pastoral little corner of the world where I grew up. I left home fairly young, but I think the place where you grow up is pretty well rooted in your psyche. The city where I live now does have all the seasons, and in abundance, but they come later and change more abruptly. It’s the delicious in-between times that I miss: the mists and the fog of early spring and late fall, the lime-green rainforest of new leaves and the bite of the cold morning air as you step outside.
This year, in lieu of leaves, I have roving.
The real transition to spring takes place here during the last week of April and the first week of May. As you might have gathered already, I get a bit sentimental this time of year: a degree of sadness tempered by an inevitable burst of energy.
Somehow, that energy has gone and manifested itself in the form of new craft projects.
When it takes you three days to put ten ends on an inkle loom, you know there’s a problem.
Between a stockpile of silk for my spindle, a lengthy waiting list for my looms, and numerous needly things needing attention– on top of, you know, a job– one could almost suspect that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.
That little row counter is looking at me accusingly. I know it is.
No, I’m just irrationally frustrated by how slowly things are going. I’ve been spinning and weaving for less than a year, so looking at it in perspective, of course I can’t expect to be efficient or even reasonably proficient yet. That doesn’t seem to stop my brain from zipping ahead to the next project well before time or budget (especially budget) permit. There are so many things I want to do, especially when it comes to weaving. One of these days I want to really Get Serious and study weaving techniques methodically, but I’m a bit afraid to start– and as long as I keep coming up with new side projects, it’s not going to happen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not complaining about getting to spend some quality time with my favorite fiber. This silk is a little outside my usual color spectrum, but it drafts like butter, and it’s so soft that I’d love spinning it no matter what the color. (Note: upon reflection, I don’t think you can draft butter.)
So, how to cope? Spring might seem like the time to try something new, but for all that, I’m thinking that it’s time to slow down and go back to some old projects: the tapestry on my studio desk is looking awfully sad and abandoned.
Have you ever felt in over your head with your own hobbies? It’s easy to talk about something like weaving as “just a hobby”, but these things have a way of entangling themselves with your self-image and your expectations of yourself. Not to mention your self-control. I’d be curious to know what strategies you have for managing it all.
I’ve mentioned, probably too often, that I’m not much of a knitter.
My Henslowe is coming along, but it’s not happy about it.
I’ve been fascinated by weaving for as long as I can remember, but didn’t actually teach myself to weave until quite recently. In contrast, I learned to knit many years ago, when my mother taught me to make tiny ski hats. Her knitting didn’t exactly follow a by-the-book approach: more along the lines of “just decrease when it’s time” and “use whichever needles you can find that match”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that– learning to do things by feel gives you a better sense of underlying structure than does following a pattern to the letter, but it’s not the systematic approach that many (brilliant) modern knitters learned.
Accordingly, I’ve often felt a vague sense of inferiority in the knitting realm, not helped by my own lack of dedication. I tend to come down with knitting like a stomach bug: once or twice a year, unpleasant while it lasts, and mostly forgotten once over. When I come back a few months later and pick up the needles again, I’m invariably frustrated that my abilities haven’t magically improved in the interim. (When I mentioned my trouble with Henslowe to chopsticknitter, she was entirely sympathetic, until I showed her the absurdly simple pattern. At which point she observed that considerably less attention was being paid to the shawl on my lap than to, say, our conversation, my tea, and the weather.)
In general, I think I’m a bit disconcerted by textile techniques in which the whole project literally hangs by a single thread. Until the whole project is done, it’s a challenge to relax for fear of making a mistake. (For similar reasons, I’m a much better baker than I am a cook.) With my woefully slow-moving needles, knitting is the most troublesome of such techniques, even though it’s easier to correct mistakes in knitting than in some other single-string techniques. If you’ve ever tried to fix a mistake in tatting once a ring is closed, you will recognize this headache:
But even if you can undo knitted fabric without having to cut it apart (usually), it’s completely unrewarding to rip it out over and over again. Which is what I inevitably wind up doing– or else I decide to live with a mistake and it haunts me forever after. (That said, chopsticknitter also encouraged me not to rip out the lace section of my Henslowe despite the, well, personal touches that found their way into the pattern. Thanks to this helpful advice, I’m nearly finished and think I’ll find it quite wearable.)
Compared to knitting, I find the learning process of weaving much more rewarding, and with every new technique I learn I find that I’m exponentially* more willing to put in the time to study and correct mistakes.
In a welcome moment of peace amidst the knitting wars, I finally got myself an inkle loom (from this shop).
I quickly put on a test warp and am finding inkle weaving to be a pleasant and relaxing experience. I’d never tried this kind of weaving before: my plan for this loom had been to use it for tablet weaving as an alternative to a backstrap, but I’ve also become interested in the idea of pick-up patterning. Though, being freshly burned from the knitting, I thought I’d better master the basic mechanics of this little guy before starting anything fancy.
I guess simple weaving isn’t comparable to complex knitting, but even so– weaving is so much more my thing. I’ll keep struggling my way through the knitting, but I suspect I’ll be much happier if I keep a security blanket (literal or figurative) on the loom.
There’s not much craft progress to report today, but I have some more linguistic trivia for you.
Handwoven scraps and samples.
As you almost certainly know, for most of the industrialized world, handspinning and weaving are specialty crafts and hobbies more than a central part of daily life. But textile production has been a driving force behind human innovation and industrialization for millennia, and that left a mark on our language. Common words like “textile”, “cloth”, and “fabric” come from old, old roots, and have relatives that may surprise you.
For instance, the word “textile” has cousins that we use all the time whether or not we work (or play) with fabric. It can be traced directly to the Latin word texere “to weave”, which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root*teks–. This root was inherited by the Indo-European languages, where it took on various forms and meanings. Among its older and more obscure descendants, we have Old High German dahs “badger” and Sanskrit taksan “carpenter”. Others that might be more familiar include modern English “text”, “technical”, and “architect”. For my French-speaking readers, this is also the origin of tisser “to weave”.
(In case you’re still curious, the word “cloth” came to English through the Germanic branch from another Indo-European root, *gleit-, which had a meaning along the lines of “to cling to”. Like “textile”, “fabric” came through Latin, but from Indo-European *dʰabʰ “to fashion, to fit”.)
Okay, I got sucked into the Wiktionary web. The word under discussion is supposed to be “textile”, if you’re confused. Anyhow, a few members of its family tree jumped out at me:
Latin texere: weave; plait; construct with elaborate care
Greek techn:art, craft, practical skill
I like thinking that our crafting terms are related to words with these cheerful connotations. Of course, so are the words “tissue” and “technophobe”, but let’s take what we can get.
Now, it’s back to the workbench. Spring is on its way, and I’ve got two of my favorite things on my mind: trees and miniatures. A tiny treehouse may be in the works. Where’d I put the superglue?
(Sources for this post: Merriam-Webster.com, wiktionary.org, myetymology.com, wordsmith.org. Fact-checking is never discouraged.)
I am constantly surrounded by a variety of projects in different stages of completion. As much as I try to be conscientious about finishing them, I’m never certain which ones will make it all the way from idea to finished item and which ones never make it past a conceptual stage. The frenzied and involuntary planning mindset that strikes me with a brand new idea is always the same, but sadly, its priorities are often out of sync with what reason would recommend.
A pile of scrapped plans.
When I ordered my nice new kantele, I was planning to construct it a gig bag, a light case to carry it around. Although I had plans and a parts list, this is one of those ideas where time and budget actually made it more practical to purchase a pre-made bag. (For one, I don’t own a sewing machine.) As much as I enjoy creating my own things, I can’t make everything myself—otherwise I’d probably have built the harp, too.
Yeah, I’m all talk.
I console the yearnings of my creative soul by pointing out to it the appealing embroidery on the yoga bag. As far as my dreams of luthiery go, well… I have no consolation, although I did build a plywood lyre for a long-ago Latin class.
Other projects get lost along the way, and find themselves mired in a state of potentially permanent incompletion. I find it a bit distressing to have these lying around my studio and usually find something to do with them, but there are a few that still sit waiting to be put to use. Short, flawed samples of tablet weaving come to mind.
They do make wonderful cable ties!
Another class of projects is that of the almost-finished. The failing here is in discipline more than in craftsmanship.
My first rag rug. One day soon it will be hemmed. Honest!
But there are indeed finished projects, with all of their various levels of success.
I won’t lie: I liked this one.
It’s satisfying to finish a project, but that’s not always why I make things. I love exploring ideas and testing hypotheses, improving my skills and learning as I go. Since the only deadlines and objectives of Crafting Time are my own, I’m able to follow a whim and see what happens. This occasionally means rebelling against the more organized part of my mind that grumbles and demands an orderly step-by-step approach. Sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Thus, I’ve abandoned the long-awaited tambour project. Anyone who enjoys this sort of hobby has to be willing to let go of a non-starter. I suppose that in the abstract there’s no shame in letting go. Of course, it’s not really that easy to give up! So instead of cutting the project off the loom, or simply tossing my efforts in the samples bin, I took the warp in a new direction.
When my crafting buddy came over last weekend, we had planned to spend the afternoon spinning away. Instead, we gravitated to the loom, then occupied by some uninspiring white plain weave. My friend was not yet a weaver, so I handed her a shuttle, and the next thing I knew, she was weaving away like a duck in water. (If ducks wove. What a dreadful simile.)
Since we only had a few minutes for an impromptu lesson, I did the hemstitching and finishing, but the rest is chopsticknitter‘s excellent work.
I taught someone to weave! At least a little bit. It was very very exciting, and my friend’s enthusiasm inspired me to make better use of the warp than simply stabbing at it glumly with an embroidery needle. After she left, I quickly wound some of my handspun onto a bobbin and threw it through a plain-weave shed, just to see what would happen.
Nothing fancy. Actually pretty sloppy. But I’ve decided to devote the rest of the warp to experimentation, and I’m back to my usual excitement about weaving. So I’ve learned two things: that teaching someone a craft you love is delightful, and that in certain circumstances, abandoning a project gives you the creative kick in the pants you need. I’ll let you know what comes of it all.
The Fibermouse 