Ignore the darker blue on the right hand side – it is the shadow of the woven web above onto the web below.
I’m kind of ‘famous’ for the phrase ‘it isn’t finished until it’s wet finished’. The internet will make certain people ‘notable’ because of something they say, and I’m (face it) a kind of a broken record with that one.
There are people who ‘get it’ and adopt ‘wet finishing’ when they mean the very first time their web is subjected to water, and then there others who insist it’s just ‘washing’.
At times I have tried to gently ‘correct’ people, and yet some are open to that kind of guidance and others…are not.
And for some, it appears it *is* ‘just’ washing. They see no need to change. Bottom line? If they do at least ‘wash’ their webs, they have wet finished it because with some fibres, that is all it is ever going to look like.
OTOH, there are people who insist that ironing is a ‘hard press’ when it very clearly is not, but no matter.
Yesterday when I was getting this warp started (more stash reduction – the things you ‘find’ when you start digging) I was only really needing surface attention and I was looking at the web on the loom and thinking about wet finishing. And finally I settled on a comparison of weaving to baking.
What is on the loom is the ‘batter’ for a cake. But cake is not batter. Or, should I say, batter is not cake – until it has been ‘finished’ by being baked. Batter has taken the ingredients in the pan and through the conversion of baking it, it is now cake, not batter.
The same can be said of cloth. On the loom I have all the ingredients of what will become cloth – once it has been wet finished.
There are several posts on this blog – check out the ‘wet finishing’ label on the list of topics. Get a copy of Magic in the Water and get more information. Take my online classes through Long Thread Media or School of Sweet Georgia.
Whatever you call it – do the last step and turn your collection of individual threads into whole cloth.