I just took my first weaving project off the loom and I am so very proud of it. It is too short to be a scarf, not made of cotton so no use cut into tea towels, and quite lumpy and inconsistent in tension on the end where I started. Half way through it suddenly gets nice and even and consistent so I can tell I got better at it as I went. Woohoo!
I think it’s really helpful for me to try new arts and crafts to keep me from getting too precious/anxious about making stuff. When I feel I’m good at something it becomes harder for me to get going on it as I think I’m afraid of doing a terrible job and then having to what… examine whether my deeply held image of myself as a writer/artist is valid? And while I secretly hoped this first piece of cloth would be just perfect I was neither surprised nor disappointed that it isn’t. It was really fun cleaning the loom up with my mom and watching YouTube and Instagram videos showing how to weave, it was challenging getting the warp on the loom, it was puzzling starting to weave and figuring out what was going wrong, and it was fun when I knew it had started to go well. It was also really meaningful getting the loom, which my dad kept for so many years, always seeing the potential in it, working at last.
I don’t know why writing feels like a risk—I mean, it’s not. If I write bad poems alone at home literally nothing bad will happen to me. I don’t know why writing a bad poem feels like a threat—why a writer can’t write well some days and badly some days and have it all come out in the wash. Doing something new like this highlights that for me—making something for its own sake and for the fun of it is a great creative space to be in.
Plus I have this too-short scarf now! I made cloth! Pretty cool.
