When Projects Go Awry

Day 186: I've decided to call this episode "When Projects Go Awry," although it could easily be titled, "Making The Best Of A Bad Thing." Y'see, a year or so ago, I decided to make a braided rag rug out of strips of old t-shirt fabric. I kept at it for a couple of weeks until my little rug was approximately bath-mat sized, trying to convince myself that I could keep going despite the excruciating pain in my repaired shoulder. I'd push through an hour per day...a half-hour...fifteen minutes...six inches...let me just get around the corner...but regardless of when I laid it aside or how many days I let elapse between stints of working on it, the agony in the damaged tendons and atrophied muscles would keep me awake at night, on the verge of tears from pain. It takes a bit to put me off a project once I've begun it, but I finally realized that I was not going to be able to complete the rug without further injuring myself. Bottom line: time to throw in the towel.

Still, I put the mat away in the form I'd last worked on it, and it hounded me every time I saw it in my crafts room. A few days ago, a friend mentioned that she wanted to weave some rag rugs, you might have seen a flash of light come on over my head. It seemed entirely reasonable that I could undo all my hard work and use the t-shirt strips for a woven rug. Not only that, it would give me an excuse to bring my tabletop loom out of garage storage. As my readers may recall, I've been rationing my stints at the floor loom to one colour sequence per day, drawing out the pleasurable work of creating a tablecloth, so setting up the table loom to weave rag rugs seemed like a justifiable deviation from my general rule of "only one of any fiber-art at a time" on the basis of scale (yeah, I know...that's stretching it).  It also gave me a chance to put to good use the two antique rag shuttles handed down to me from a friend's friend's grandmother. As projects go, this is a quick one. After spending a day unstitching and another unbraiding, I had half a rug done by bedtime yesterday even with the other weaving I had done as a matter of course. Now I need to sew more strips together so I can finish the job.

Reed And Shuttles

Day 114: My collection of weaving accoutrements is growing, and now includes two antique rag bobbins, a gift from sister-of-my-heart Mousie. They belonged to her oldest friend's mother and grandmother, and I feel very privileged that she managed to convince the friend to part with them on my behalf. I have been wanting to do some rag-woven rugs, but had no shuttles large enough to hold more than just a few yards of prepared fabric. On the other hand, the 15-dent reed behind them is brand-new and will be used for finer pieces similar to the table runners I'm presently making. The runners are warped at 15 dents using a 4.5" high reed from my table loom. My floor loom takes a 5" reed, so I had to be inventive. I started off by padding the channel with foam and cardboard. I did a test run and the reed stayed in place. However, after working about a foot and a half of the actual cloth, the reed jumped out of its track and was left dangling by the warp! I reinstalled it with only a minor amount of profanity, but for additional security, I wired it in. As a stop-gap measure, it works, but I realized that since most of my weaving is done with 8/2 cotton, I really needed a 15-dent reed which was made to fit the loom. Old or new, a weaver needs the proper tools.