Breaking Point

At what point do you lose your patience?  We’ve all been there: you try and try and try, and everything that can go wrong just keeps going wrong no matter what you do.  That’s where I am right now.  Oh, hi readers, this is Beth.

I’ve tried shadow, or illusion, knitting, but this was my first foray into its woven cousin.  I researched the method, figured out my threading, treadling, and drawdown from a pattern I found in 1000 (+) Patterns In 4, 6, and 8 Harness Shadow Weaves, found a pair of yarns that I really liked, and even ordered some stainless steel yarn from Habu Textiles, which I intended to incorporate into the weft of the piece.  Look how shiny it makes the cotton (black) and even the wool blend (purple).

I was so excited.  I dressed the loom and started weaving.  From directly above it doesn’t really look like much.  Slightly interesting, but nothing great.

But when you look at it from an angle, like the side, the pattern pops out at you.  Fantastic!

This will obviously be a lot of fun, right?  Ha ha ha ha ha, no.

I had to fix a lot of careless errors (and “a lot” for me is more than one, so who knows how many it actually was, probably about 4 or 5) in my threading.  Not a big deal, everyone has an off day.  That was okay.

After about a foot of weaving, though, one of my threads broke.  I fixed it.

Another thread broke.  I repaired that one.

It broke again, in a different place.  I tied it back together.

A different thread broke.  I fixed that.

The first thread broke again.  I fixed it, and in the process of repairing that break, it broke in a different place.

I think this is an excellent visual summary of my emotions at the moment:

credit: Alexandra Douglass

My return on investment is so far from where it should be right now that I’m highly considering scrapping the entire project and moving on to the next one I have planned.  It’s not worth the effort if I’m going to spend more time fixing things than actually weaving, no matter how much I wanted it to turn out well.  And I think that is the lesson I will take away from this project.

Advertisement