While Ingebjorg is an exacting technician, she changed her tune when the flossa work began and we struggled with just how to make our intended designs develop. “Errors are beautiful,” she noted as we fretted about missing a stitch, or miscalculating how dense or sparse a section might appear. And those errors that don’t turn out beautiful can be fixed! If you forgot to put in some knots you can part weft threads with your fingers and insert knots with a needle, or use the needle to pull out knots from an overly-dense section.
The actual weaving time was experimental for everyone and required many readjustments. Learning included frustration! Still, the students wove all day and returned after supper to continue.
The joy of taking a class is camaraderie with fellow students, plus the fact that everyone makes mistakes and faces design or technical weaving issues. We all benefited as Ingebjorg helped us sort out individual problems.
I learned early on the two shots between knots of flossa were too few to make the pattern square up. I changed to four shots between flossa knots and the pattern developed more as intended. I learned that tying knots over all the warp threads in the pattern area made the pile more dense than needed, and as my pattern progressed I skipped occasional warp threads. We started with three skeins of our background color, which we quickly determined were too few to weave the whole background. I began adding stripes to bring in other colors behind the pattern. This worked great, and the pillowtop, 18” square, seemed pretty integrated. But wait! Ingebjorg encouraged me to weave the back of the pillow too, and to do so I had to incorporate some drastically different greens. The plain weave striped pillow back turned out more interesting than I anticipated. The dwindling pile of yarn forced color choices I would not have otherwise made. What a great, great class!