January 1 – Year of Making 2023

I finally got to the weaving part! 💗
Colorful Warp on Loom

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Happy new year!

In true January 1st fashion, I dove into goals and resolutions this morning. I knew I needed a way to keep track of my making for 2023, so I lined and labeled a new January tracker sheet in my journal. I worked on the blog (yes, this dormant blog), and completed a little Canva work for my Etsy shop, before Fraize and I made lunch and then decided to get grocery shopping out of the way.

Back home, I felt anxiety. I wanted to do something substantial for the rest of the afternoon, but was hesitating on moving to the loom. I only recently purchased my Ashford 32″ rigid heddle loom. I’ve completed a couple of projects on it, but they were narrower, admittedly easier projects. This week, I had dressed the loom for a 28″ project – my widest weaving project yet. And in starting that process, I quickly saw I was in a little over my head. Warping the loom had been a struggle, requiring my husband’s help. I also made some missteps with tension while threading the heddle — bear with me; I’m still learning weaving terms. In testing out the longer 30″ stick shuttle, I realized I was catching a lot of warp threads from within the shed, and this was just practicing with an empty shuttle. I also don’t have a stand, and while the table I’m using worked great for a 16″ project, it’s lacking when it comes to a project almost the full width of the loom – I kept hitting my microphone stand, or getting things caught on other nearby objects.

So despite longing to weave, anxiety won. I procrastinated, trying to come up with something to draw. And about 20 minutes into bouncing around Instagram, looking at art, and playing with pens, I realized I needed to face the loom crisis.

By the time I got to the twining stitch, the sun was going down, and I was losing my natural light. It was fully dark by the time I finished the entire twining row. I was unprepared for how much longer everything takes when working on a wider weaving project, but now I have knowledge for next time. It was already after 6pm, and I needed to get dinner going, but it felt anticlimactic to leave the weaving for another day after getting this far. So with what time I had left, I awkwardly wound some cotton yarn onto the 30″ stick shuttle and got my weave on. Only a few rows though. And then it was 6:30pm and time to go throw together a salad and some potatoes.

So that was my first full day of 2023. I’m happy that I accomplished quite a bit, including fighting resistance to work on something daunting; and glad I pushed myself with the loom. Tomorrow I’ll reward myself with some line art in the morning as part of my revamped morning routine. I am aware that most days are not going to be like this, with a day wide open in front of me to do multiple things, so this was a nice way to wrap up the holiday week/weekend.

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