The Warp Has Opinions

Third session of the rigid heddle weaving class and I think my wrists filed a formal complaint somewhere around the forty-minute mark. Not a complaint about pain, more the specific grievance of being asked to do a thing they don't yet know how to do quietly. I registered for this in October and spent the first two sessions mostly arguing with the heddle about tension. Tension in the structural sense. The yarn sense. Also possibly the other sense.

The thing nobody tells you about weaving, or maybe they do and I just didn't retain it the way I retain things I learn by doing them wrong four times, is that the warp is a commitment before anything happens. You thread it and you're already in a relationship with it. The weaving is just the conversation.

the specific face of understanding something and not trusting it yet

By session three I have exactly one short rectangle of fabric in cream and a rust-colored wool I found in the bin of singles at the back of the room. It is not very good. The tension shifts in the middle where I got distracted. I am keeping it.

three sessions in. the loom is winning on points but I am still here.

The class is Tuesday evenings, which means it shares a night with climbing. I moved climbing to Thursday for the fall session without quite registering that I'd done it until I was already on the bus. That's probably information about something. The instructor has the particular patience of someone who has watched many people discover that making is harder and slower than watching someone else make, and she doesn't hurry the discovery. I appreciated that more this week than the previous two.

The cord on the windowsill at home is still the only making I'm in the middle of in any ongoing way. I'm not sure what to call this yet, whether the weaving becomes a thing or stays a class I took in the fall of my thirty-eighth year. The rectangle of cream and rust doesn't know either. For now the heddle and I have a standing appointment and I'm showing up, which is probably how it begins, and probably also how it doesn't, and I can't tell yet which this is.