I had to travel to Boston for most of the day before weaving class.  The bonus was I was there an hour and a half early so I picked a more complicated twill to work on.  This is an advancing twill done in 10/2 mercerized cotton.  I had been thinking about this one for the past week looking forward to weaving it and the moment when I finished most of the first repeat.  I love that part.  In your head you know what the draft is going to do but when you actually see it in fiber is magical for me.

I wound my bobbin, made myself comfortable in front of the loom and started to weave.  It didn’t look like I had pictured it.  The pattern wasn’t as defined as I thought it would be.  I questioned my use of the white weft.  I’d woven about 6 inches when my instructor entered the room.  I stopped to visit (this pattern required some serious concentration).  I told her I was having trouble keeping track of what I was doing – I honestly just thought my head was not in the game.  She went to reprint the treddling pattern so it wasn’t so small – I walked away from the loom for a few minutes.

When I sat back down I realized that I had been treddling the pattern as if it didn’t have tie-ups – damn it!  I had tortured myself for an hour in my excitement.  Soooooo, I put in a line and started over . . . at the same time I would have started if I had just come to class.

This pattern is quite beautiful when done correctly but I have to say I had to pay attention throughout the whole thing.  It wasn’t one of those patterns that you get into the groove once you’ve been through a few repeats.  I struggled with it the whole time.  I was sure I would have to come back to finish weaving my 27 inches but at 8:50 I wove the close and was done.  It was a relief really.

I always really look forward to weaving class as a meditative time.  This was different, probably due to the error in the beginning.  I can be compulsive in perfection, a serious curse.  Once the project went off the rails I had a difficult time refocusing.  I struggled through it and walked away thinking I will never weave that pattern again.  I’m still thinking that today so my grand plans for that draft will probably never come to fruition.  Of course I have grand plans for every single draft I see.  That’s been the real beauty of this round robin.  I get to weave what are really great samples, something different every week without the work of warping the loom.  It allows us all to really get a feel for the structure of the twills and what can be done to change them up within each project.  Even though the first 6 inches were woven in a crazy wrong way it still looked pretty cool, the pattern just wasn’t as defined.  Maybe this time a wrong was kind of right.