The first little bit of weaving I didn’t was a truly hideous combo of pastel purple, navy blue, and grassy green. After about 3” of it I realized how terrible it looked and switched to using navy blue yarn to make something less ugly. But I was left with an rectangle of useless and unattractive weaving. I was looking at it today feeling bad about the wasted materials and wondered if it’d come apart. The answer is yes, with only about 5 minutes of effort.
This might look like a semi-useless pile of too-short threads but I’ve recently watched a few videos on YouTube about Saori weaving, where weavers approach the craft in an artistic intuitive way. It sort of seems like the abstract expressionism of weaving to me. One of the things I’ve seen people do is adding little bits of waste thread into their piece as accents and flourishes. It’s pretty cool—it’s a way to turned trimmed ends and little bits like the threads from this failed project into something lovely and useful. As I think about reducing waste overall, as many people are, I think it’s worthwhile for me to think about art supplies that way too. So this way these bits of thread can end up in a new piece rather than the trash, or in an unused piece, stuffed in the back of a drawer. I feel better about that, both from an environmental perspective and an artist one. These supplies don’t end up being only a failed project, instead they can be reused in a more success creation later.