Wednesday, January 16, 2013

One knot at a time

I am a weaver. I take fiber and make cloth - one strand at a time.

As a weaver, I select my yarns, mostly by texture, creating my own colors in the dye vats. I wind each yarn into a ball, so that I can easily measure it.

One strand at a time, I measure my warp yarns. This current warp has 242 yarns, each one 8-yards-long. More than a mile of yarn, 5,808 feet. It's easy to snarl up a mile of yarn. You have to handle it carefully. One step at a time through all the processes.

I chain up my warp yarns as I measure them into loose braids. Then I lay them over the front bar of my loom. One strand at a time, I draw the yarn through first the reed, then its correct heddle and then I tie it on to the back beam. 242 knots, tied in sequence, one knot at a time.

I don't weave because I have to to cover my body or to stay warm. I live in the real modern world, and could buy things at stores. I weave because it feeds my soul. The rhythm, the regularity, the order, the whole body dance with the thread. I am a weaver.

And right now I see that I need to be a weaver with the rest of my life. The great snarls of projects on my desk, the tangles of things needing sorted, the bits of fluff that really belong somewhere... I need to take each piece of paper, one at a time, put it into a workable form and gather the forms into a chain of events. Then I need to thread them through my computer, my pen, my calculator and begin tying them into finished projects.

One knot at a time. I can do this, I am a weaver.

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