… what you don’t know, you don’t know that you don’t know it…
I don’t remember who first mentioned this saying to me, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Given one of my life goals was to try to teach people about the craft of weaving, it was a good reminder that when teaching a large, complex craft, I needed to tell students what they didn’t know they needed to know.
Over the years I tried to distill principles into short, easy-to-remember ‘sayings’. The first was: Never use a knot where a bow will do.
Now, that may seem obvious but when you are learning something as big and complicated as how to dress a loom, you might need a reminder. Don’t tie a knot someplace to secure your warp if you will need to *unsecure* the warp later.
And yes, I learned that the hard way.
Not only can it lead to things you don’t really want to deal with – like cutting your warp when you meant to only remove a tie that had been secured with a knot instead of a bow – but just the extra time involved to remove that secure tie without damaging your warp.
Other object lessons revealed other ‘sayings’ including: it isn’t finished until it’s wet finished.
I was reminded about how many times fibres/textiles are used as ‘lessons’ in ‘fairy’ tales. Other cultures have their ‘myths, too – like using a ball of string to mark the path through a labyrinth so the ‘hero’ can get out again. Some versions of Hansel and Gretel have them using a ball of yarn, not bread crumbs.
So when new weavers, or wannabe weavers, ask for information, what they want are definitive answers, my general ‘laura-isms’ are not what they want to hear.
But since they don’t yet know what they don’t know, I feel someone needs to give them a head’s up on the kind of information they will need to acquire.
And no, I do not recommend any flavour of ‘AI’ because ‘AI’ doesn’t *know* anything. All they have done is scrape every book they thought might be ‘useful’ to them, and then the bot makes up something they think is an answer to your question/prompt.
Learning how to weave – or any other skill – takes time. Time and mindful practice. Paying attention to what you are doing, and what results. Are you happy with those results? No? Then try something different. And keep trying something different – different equipment, different processes, different body mechanics, changing your posture or, again, your equipment.
Not all looms are made for every weaver. Maybe you bought a loom that simply doesn’t ‘fit’ your body. And the answer is to find a different loom that will better meet your specific needs.
Another pithy saying: change one thing and everything can change.
Let’s say you have been weaving with cotton exclusively and you decide to make a nice wool scarf and you choose merino wool. Cotton and a merino wool are very different. While cotton has some elasticity, merino wool has a *lot* more and there are things you will find aren’t working very well, both in the preparation and in the actual weaving. That doesn’t make the merino wool a ‘bad’ yarn, just a ‘different’ yarn. And processes may need to be adjusted.
If you don’t know that before you begin, you may find yourself having to struggle to get your usual ‘good’ results. You may blame the yarn or equipment, when the element that was lacking was your lack of knowledge.
A lack of knowledge can be remedied by learning more. More than expected, perhaps, but learning about weaving is just that – a lifelong journey through the unknown, until it becomes better understood.
I won’t promise that one person can, or would even want to, understand every single thing involved in the craft. It’s just too large. Too complex. Too variable.
But it is a journey that I have been taking for 50+ years. And it still fascinates me.
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