Looming at the back of my craft room is... well, my loom. It's a handmade 4-shaft counterbalance loom that was sold as surplus property by the weaving program at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona about fifteen years ago. I purchased it for a song from a former Prescott resident who was vacationing up here Out West three years ago. I haven't the faintest idea of how to use it. Yes, I have all the parts.
What do I want with a loom? It's a long story but I really do want to know how to weave... but how much of that skill I want to acquire is food for future thought. I have all the stuff and when I can figure out how to warp the thing I'll turn out a set of placemats, probably out of my own homespun yarn.
About six years ago I decided that I wanted to learn how to be a better spinner. I learned to spin in 1980, and for a long time didn't have the resources or the time to develop that skill. In the very recent past I've been working on better spinning, with the goal of eventually preparing, dying, and spinning enough quality wool to make something significant, either woven or knitted. Immediately, I want to spin a nice-enough fine wool to be able to successfuly knit socks from my own yarn. Much of what I've spun over the years has been given to master craftswomen, so that they can make something with handspun, but I've been keeping my yarns for the past few years. I think I'm a little bit shy about using it myself.
I've tried a number of crafts, to see what turns me on and find out what I can acquire some skill doing. I'm actually a really good cross-stitcher, a passable embroiderer, I do okay on quilting, and I can sew to an advanced level (but I'm no tailor). However, it's creating with yarn that cranks my tractor although I haven't developed the driving fascination with weaving that I caught on seeing wool spun into yarn in the sheep barn at the San Diego County Fair that hot June day in 1980.
One of the skills my mother passed on to me was the art of crochet. Mom made mostly afgans, but once she made my sister and myself crocheted ponchos out of neon-colored acrylic yarns. I don't know what became of the nuclear chartreuse sweater from the same era that I was forced to wear to school in those oh-so-painful junior high years. Until recently, I never finished many crochet items except small throws, a few bags, and purses.
Maybe it was the surfeit of scratchy acrylic yarn that discouraged me.
Mom tried and tried to teach me to knit (she wasn't good at it herself) and she asked her friends to try, but my hands just wouldn't cooperate. I had the best try to teach me, to no avail. I sighed as I enviously watched other spinning guild members turn out sock after sock. One guild I used to belong to decided that for a compulsory project we'd all knit baby booties, hats, and jackets for single moms in the community. I had to be the odd one out and hunt down crocheted patterns. Aaugh!
In January 2005, one of my friends and fellow guild members offered to try to teach me to knit if I'd try to teach her to spin, and it's been all downhill from there! F-- sat me down and showed me and showed me and made me rip it out and do it again and again and finally, after weeks of pounding at my thick brass skull (the one Mom accused me of inheriting from Dad) I got it. A whole new world opened up to me and I haven't put the needles down since. F-- can spin now, too, but she's still looking for an affordable wheel to develop her skill. She weaves, by the way, and has encouraged me in that craft as well.
What made the difference is that F-- didn't make a big deal out of finger positions. She showed me what the needles do, and what the yarn does, and let me work it out for myself from there. I don't like to knit in public much, because experienced knitters can seldom resist trying to make me hold my hands in a way they recognize, and it pretty much brings my knitting to a halt until they go away and I can return to my technique. Yeah, I knit funky but I knit, I create fabric, and that's the ultimate goal.
On second thought, the ultimate goal is simply to create.
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