Have you ever started a project and given up on it? In weaving, there are so many different places this can happen. You’re winding your warp and threads get tangled or you don’t like the colours. You get it on the loom and have wound the warp on backwards or messed up your heddles. You start weaving and snap a warp thread.
For the love of all things weaving…. don’t scrap your project!
I know everyone has a different learning style, but in my experience, you have to make mistakes to learn weaving. If you are lucky enough to have a teacher or mentor, you have an incredibly valuable resource that will help you when you get stuck. But sooner or later, you are going to be on your own and you are going to have to problem solve a whole host of issues.
There are things your manual will never teach you and things your teacher won’t teach you because they haven’t made the same mistakes you are going to make. Weaving is an exploration in patience and resilience and you need to start building both of those as soon as you possibly can!
Last weekend I started working on a new project and pretty quickly got stuck. Several years ago, I purchased a stash of cones off of a weaver who was clearing out her craft room and many of the cones are bamboo. I was really excited to weave with them (primarily I weave with cotton and wool) because they are soft and silky so I enthusiastically bought everything I could… even the colours I never use.
I decided I need to use up what I have in my own stash before I get any more, so I decided to weave with this mix of a muted coral/dusty pink, purple-ish burgundy, and a variegated mix of the two with a few other colours added in. Frankly, colours I wouldn’t normally use.
As soon as I started winding my warp, I realized that bamboo loves static energy. It’s winter in Canada and maybe that is a contributing factor, but it was a static mess to wind as a warp and even worse to get on the loom. Also, bamboo is beautiful and soft after you wash it, but on the cone, it is almost sticky and tangles very easily. The last metre or so of my warp was complete knots, so I ended up cutting off the mess at the end instead of patiently trying to untangle it.
Once it was set up on the loom, I started weaving what I had planned, and it was horrible. When you work with colours you don’t really like, what isn’t working is glaringly obvious and I just couldn’t get past it. So, I decided to share what I do when I’m ready to quit on a project once it’s up on the loom.
Here is my progress so far:
