Warping Progress

The pearl cotton is now beamed on and I am about two-thirds of the way through the process of threading the heddles. I would love to have the heddles threaded and the reed sleyed before we leave on Saturday to visit our daughter and her new baby. Time will tell what unexpected interruptions will occur.

Now that I am threading, I find that I see things as I thead that I didn't see when I looked at the draft. No, there are no errors. At least there are no technical errors. But I do see that the blocks are not always the size that I had wanted. I also see that there is this occasional single block with 4 threads where none had been in the design. Aside from the purely technical errors that I did catch, has my weaving software done something strange in the designing? And if so, why? It seems that when I have my software generate a threading from a block design, I will have to look much more carefully at the results.

If I were a painter, studying a painting to learn from it would not suffice. I would actually have to copy it to learn. This is a time-honored learning technique for painters. Apparently, doing the actual work of the threading enables me to see what I didn't see by just looking. Perhaps I can figure out how to improve my concentration when just looking. I'm not sure, though. Way way back in college when I wrote essays, I would do the last rough draft which preceded the final good copy, not on the typewriter but in longhand. The physical process of forming the letters and words made my critical abilities much more acute.

I think it would be interesting to take the block design I originally created and then enter in the threading manually. I could compare this hand generated threading with the computer generated threading. On the other hand, I have a suspicion that, once the fabric is woven, I may like what I have now better than what I had actually planned. But I would like to understand enough to plan these accidents! That is why I should enter the threading manually and compare the two. Doing that, I think, will further my understanding. I hope that laziness does not get the upper hand.

In many ways what I am really talking about is mastery. I mentioned mastery in my discussion of originality. I think for me that crackle is not only a marvelous tool for color but is also resistant to my attempts to master the structure in terms of understanding. I do understand the basics. But I do not understand the why's of many things regarding crackle. I am trying to move in that direction. Or, perhaps I might better say, I am trying to follow that path.