Weaving...the final frontier.

Remember my description of how much I was enjoying learning to weave ?????

Well, fate has overtaken me.....



Yup, empty loom plus the world`s smallest piece of weaving. No, I didn`t finish my cushion cover. I screwed up BIG STYLE.

Eileen had said last week at Guild that she could do with some more of the wooden batons that you use to tension the warp on the rollers, and that she recalled she had put quite a lot into my warp and could I bring a few back if I`d finished with them? Oopps...I didn`t want to admit that I`d hardly got up to the first baton, let alone "a few". So I resolved to do some speed weaving before the next Guild meet...that`s tomorrow. Needless to say this did not happen so I decided the best thing to do to cover my shame would be to unroll the back tension roller thingie (sorry, can`t remember the proper names for any of the bits of the boring object) and filtch out a few of the batons...then rewind it.

Now anyone who weaves is doubtless going "Noooo!!!!" at this point. Not knowing any better, I did this thing. Then I discovered that if you take a tensioning device out of a warp...yes, you lose the tension. You can rewind it all, but as I discovered, you can rewind but you`ll never get even tension. 124 warp threads, all doing their own thing. It was a disaster.

Oh well, at least I hadn`t lost the shed...yet. Of course the most intelligent thing to do at this point would have been to take the whole sorry mess into Guild tomorrow and grovel to Eileen. I`m renowned for being the sort of person whose bloody-mindedness often triumphs over her common sense though. Ask my Hubby.
I kept trying. It got worse. I tried again. These warp threads were twenty feet long each, did I mention? You can get a lot of knots in 124 x 20 feet. Lots.

I decided to cut (I can hear your toes curl from here, Ms Weaver) my piece of weaving lose and retie the warp threads at this point. Hah...this was an act of desperation, I admit. Did it work? Did it heck. Did I break a shed stick at this point? Yup. Did I give up? Yup.

Did I cry? Are you serious? I rejoiced! The instrument of torture was dethreaded! No more weaving!

I saved the huge lengths of cut warp thread for my peg loom. I tied off the warp of half of the worlds smallest cushion cover too....amazingly I`d managed to weave almost a perfect square, 12" x12", so I may make it into a cushion yet. Or hang it on the wall to remind me never, never to try this again. Ever.

Oh, and what am I going to tell Eileen? Well, cravenly, I thought about telling her that the cat did it. Or one of the kids, or Hubby, or Santa Claus. But I`ve persuaded myself that the best plan is just to tell the truth and grovel a bit. She`d know I was lying anyway...she knows we don`t have a cat.