Belated Thanksgiving Thankfulness: The Weavers Guild Dobby Group

I made a pretty towel on the Megado loom at the Weavers Guild of Minnesota, part of the Dobby Weavers Interest Group project.  The words say, “A balanced diet is chocolate in both hands.”

The Dobby Weavers like to have a project underway to learn something new, and this time the topic was weaving text.  I love being part of this group, even though I have managed to attend only one monthly meeting in the last couple of years.

I read the email list postings, and when work begins in earnest on a project, I am impressed by the expertise of the planners, and daunted by the technical problems they encounter.  This is my VERY ROUGH paraphrase of the way the messages tend to go, and my responses to them.

We are going to do this project.  It will be complicated, but we’ll manage.  Let’s discuss all of the possible drafts and how they should be programmed. 

Oh my gosh, I don’t even understand what they are talking about.  Delete, delete, delete.

We’re getting the warp on the loom.  Whoops, we made a mistake.  We’ll fix those hundreds of threads. 

Oh my gosh, I’m glad I wasn’t responsible for that.

We are weaving the first towels.  Threads are breaking.  There’s a problem with the threading at one edge. We’ll fix it.

Oh my gosh, I’m not going to ask to weave a towel at this point!

I wove my towel; it went fine.  I wove one, too, without a problem. 

Hmmmm…. maybe I could try it too. And then I did, and Judy Bratt was so generous with her time and hand-holding as I figured it out. By the end of the towel, I was even trouble-shooting computer issues on my own.  Super fun!

A HUGE benefit of membership in the Weavers Guild is the opportunity to learn from peers and occasionally, to participate in group projects. I am so thankful for the generous spirit of the members of the Dobby Group.

They are also generous with their woven items.  Each person who participated in the text project wove two towels, and one will be for sale at the Weavers Guild shop in December.  Cool gifts!  You could buy my other blue towel.

Here’s the towel I wove in 2015, about which you can read more here.