Spinning Yarns and Weaving Tales: Part 2

Printer-friendly version

This is a tale with two beginnings and here we come to the second beginning.

Back in college I was a film student, but I hung around the art majors.  There was something magical about the process of hoping to make a career from art.  I worked fulltime at a laundromat with a girl who was an art major and majored in textiles.  At the time, to me, textiles was not an art, it was not even a career choice, but Ande knew what she wanted to do when she grew up.

Ande and I were never particularly close even if we ran with the same crowd, and knew the same people.  She was a granola cruncher, a naturalist with simple world views and simple expectations.  I wanted to change the world, she wanted to buy a farm, set up a loom and weave.  Back then, I knew about looms and weaving, but I never could figure out how they got the same pattern on both sides, or a color to start and stop without showing on the other side.  Ande explained it to me.  I can't recall what she said, but she made an impact on me nonetheless.  Memories of this little granola crunching, a`la natural, frizzy headed girl with little to no ambition came back to haunt me when it was suggested we try weaving with a loom here at the manor.

So the beginning of this tale goes back nearly twenty-five years.  It has taken me all this time to really learn to appreciate simple:  simple conversations, simple living, simple work, simple dreams, simple values, and a simple life.  Ande knew that then.  We lost contact with each other, but in my mind she is out there somewhere, weaving on her loom surrounded by a myriad of cats.  I see her raising llama and alpaca and goats and sheep for their wool.  I see her having spent the last twenty-five years perfecting her craft and now making a living selling rugs and linens at an upscale, artsy-fartsy boutique in the nearby college town.  Happy as can be.

The loom brings back memories of simpler times.  That is what I want my residents here at the manor to get from their experience with the loom and weaving.  Recently several of us  pulled the loom out for an afternoon weaving lesson.  I explained to them that I had gone to the library and gotten some books on weaving, that I had looked them over, and to my surprise learned that you had to know more about weaving than I do even to begin to read this basic book.  Simple, it seemed, was still too advanced for us.

I saw a swatch of plaid material and wanted to see if I could figure out how it was made.  It was a simple Victorian Christmas plaid, a red, a green and a natural.  It’s amazing what you can discover when you really start looking at things.  I get the weirdest looks from people, who must think I’m half-mad for studying a plaid swatch so intently.  But I digress.  I was able to learn that they used the same colors for the warp and the weft and they used them in a specific sequence to create squares of colors.  I was a genius.  How simple.  My favorite design, plaid, was within my rudimentary abilities to make.  Maybe next time I’ll tell you why I’ve come to love plaid, but that’s another story.

As you may remember, the first times I tried to thread the warp, it was a disaster.  But this time, I had a plan.  A simple plan.  I counted my heddles, 46.  I designed my plaid warp to fit.  10 red, 6 natural, 10 green, 6 natural, 10 red.  I decided I would weft 10 red, 6 natural, 10 green, 6 natural, 10 red and have this beautiful plaid runner that we might finish for next Christmas.

Well, guess what I learned after my first few rows of weaving?  It takes more weft to make a square than it does warp(*).  So my plaid is rather rectangular and not very square at all.  It is not turning out very well, it takes everything in me not to rip it out and start aver again.  I can see what we did wrong and I think I know what to fix it...I guess we’ll soon see.

(*) Editor's Note: This is true for weft-faced fabrics, such as the one shown here.  Balanced fabrics take equal amounts of warp and weft threads to weave square, and warp-faced fabrics take fewer weft picks than warp threads to weave square.