I told my husband that I wasted three hours weaving the other day, as I realized my moose was not unfolding as planned. He was sympathetic–more like aghast. In contrast, I have come to accept these things with grace, unless the “learning experience” is one that has happened ten times before.
After weaving a wide border of krokbragd bands, I began to weave a moose in pick-up danskbrogd. I had charted out a design on graph paper, and I had tested the paper-versus-warps sett in a previous piece. Carefully I counted as I wove the legs. I marked a red line on the pattern as I progressed.
As it turned out, I was feeling a bit too smug about my seeming success…
On the wasted-time day, when I was weaving the body and the bottom of the head, I realized that the proportions were way out of whack; the head did not reach far enough to the right side of the piece and the body was going to be way too tall for the legs. Altogether, it just wasn’t working.
The next day, I decided it had to be fixed/altered, and resigned myself to much unweaving. I started by cutting out the moose from the graphed pattern. I ended up altering too–shortening the tallness of the body a bit and raising the antlers from the head.
I then matched the outline to the woven piece to see how far back I would have to unweave.
After I unwove, I traced the outline directly on to the warp threads–obviously, what I should have done from the BEGINNING. And when I get back to the moose, hopefully he will be revealed more proportionally.
I had a super-fun visit to my studio today from Sally Orgren, editor of Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot, and her husband Alex. He commented that the best way to think about it is that now I got three more hours of fun out of my materials. I hope I don’t have too much extra fun as I finish weaving the moose.
Moose are elusive. Jayne from Maine