Finishing the Cloth

This week, I have the absolute giddy-making honor of reading with Gina Chung in an online reading made possible by Jeremy Broyles, author of Flat Water, and hosted by Mesa Community College on Thursday, March 28, at 6 p.m. Arizona time (that’s 9 p.m. Eastern). The reading is free and open to all—come through! Link here.

Finishing the Cloth

I’ve finally gotten the scarves off the loom. They’re each six feet long with a bit of fringe on the ends, in black and gold tencel warp, with gold and silver tencel weft. The pattern is Gothic Cross II, from Marguerite Peter Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book, aka The Green Book. Davison’s book is a venerable trove of traditional weaving patterns—including a handful that have the words Pennsylvania Dutch in their titles or other Pennsylvania place-name references—and my copy was added as part of the general bounty of items my loom’s previous owner passed on to me when I bought it from her.

At the end of the planned weaving, I had some leftover warp, so I wove not-quite-a-yard with a delightful ocean-blue weft, a piece of cloth for which I have no current plans beyond admiration. Perhaps a small bag, someday, or a notebook cover, but for now, all I want from it is for it to be beautiful.

When weaving, coming to the end of shuttle-throwing isn’t the end of it. Weaving in the loose ends from bobbin changes or breakages is a key part of the process, and all cloth should be wet-finished according to a variety of washing/pressing processes that align with the particular properties of the fiber and the end-use of the fabric. As these are scarves for decorative wear made out of tencel (a cellulose fiber), this is mostly just a matter of gentle washing in my sink and drying. The biggest part of my finishing process was managing the cat-damage from two years of Roo’s favorite way to get my immediate attention: sticking his claws on the cloth beam.

This was a bittersweet process. For this particular project, I’m glad I can’t undo every snag.

As you can see, this isn’t ever going to be perfect. But some of it eased much more than I thought it would, and watching threads slide back into place at the nudging of my blunt needle and some strategic tugging on the bias felt good in the simplest of ways. This has long been one of the reasons I find making things so satisfying: here is the progress. Here is the result.

The result is still full of obvious imperfections and the marks of learning in a way that can’t be edited out (or at least in a way that’s beyond my own skill to mend, after the fact). In the image above, not only are there the claw-marks, but also one place where I mis-treadled my pattern. In weaving, the design is made by raising and lowering particular threads in the warp in a particular order, made possible by the shafts of the loom (or a very patient weaver with a pick-up stick). These shafts are controlled by treadles (operated with the feet, on a floor loom) or levers (operated with the hands, on a table loom). The clarity of the pattern depends on the weaver keeping track of what row or pick of the pattern they’re on and raising/lowering the correct warp threads for that row. There are a few places in these scarves wherein I clearly mis-judged where I was—likely when interrupted by certain attention-seeking cats—and didn’t quite notice until I’d woven quite a ways past and couldn’t be bothered to back-track¹ .

In writing, we’re taught to hide our work: the drafting, the revision, and everything that can have no other name but mistake. Many of us talk and write and think extensively about the process from start to finish, the necessity of the mess-in-progress in order to arrive at the result we want, but, unless we’re using our drafts as part of a craft talk or as a component of some other project, most of us don’t show anyone the process. We certainly don’t leave anything that strikes us as “mistake” in the final draft on purpose.

In writing, especially in writing fiction, I think often of John Gardner’s “vivid and continuous dream”: the writer’s imperative to do nothing that will throw the reader out of the world of the story. This is is part of how I learned to recognize the writing that I love best: writing that immersed me in a world and gave me no reason to leave it. Not one incongruous word choice, not one faulty rhythm to haul on the reins and drag me off course.

The occasional mistake in my fiber arts, though, are how I recognize what is handmade and homemade about what I have done. On the mittens I am still wearing this week, the cables are a little off-center, and the afterthought thumbs are a mark of my impatience because I was knitting them at a family event a few years ago and didn’t want to stop knitting and wait to look up instructions for a thumb gusset later² . That makes them my mittens, and sometimes it reminds me of what I’d do differently next time, but they’re no less warm for all that.

This week, the universe gifted me with a gorgeous, insightful review of Heading North, written by Kasey Peters and housed at Full Stop. I hope you’ll take a moment and read it because the review itself is a masterful display of the form.

A little newsletter housekeeping: I’m going to shift Loomings to a monthly schedule instead of a biweekly one, so I can concentrate on the new manuscript. There might be a special feature here or an extra update there, as needed, but the newsletter will, of course, remain free.

Reading Recommendation:

I know I have been teasing Nicola Griffith’s Hild and Menewood for ages, but in the vicinity of spring break I re-read Hild and then dove headfirst into Menewood, which I like some kind of book-ravening beast and now immediately want to re-read both novels together again to savor the spectacularly gorgeous writing. No one does immersive storytelling the way Griffith does; when I was thinking of Gardner’s “vivid and continuous dream” above, I was already/still thinking about these novels. (And they must be read together.) Griffith inhabits the world of 7th century Britain completely, shaping character, landscape, and worldview through metaphor and diction that brings the multilingual, multi-faith, and multicultural truth of the time and place into being. Griffith works metaphor within small moments and across the breadth of two novels so seamlessly readers don’t realize they’re being woven into Hild’s worldview, her capacious power of observation that is so insatiably curious and endlessly attentive that others read her knowledge as divine portent. Like the tablets turning in a woven band—something that features in many scenes, as it should, given the setting—the author’s hand is clearly guiding it all, but in the reading, it feels as much like magic as someone unfamiliar with the craft might read tablet weaving itself³ .

1  A partial defense: several times I did backtrack, only to miscalculate where I actually was in the pattern, which led to more wonkiness. In a concession to what Roo did to the weaving-in-progress and my own learning curve, I decided I wasn’t going to worry about it.

2  Where my maternal grandparents live, there’s no internet and no cellular service at all.

3  In “Possibles,” I showed some of my own tablet weaving and in that post from April of 2022, I’m also crowing about Nicola Griffith’s work, but that time it was about Spear, her queer Perceval retelling, which I also reviewed for Ploughshares blog.