Art as exercise

I started off the evening pondering if I could claim an hour or two of rhymically flexing my right calf as exercise. But Ilya says no, and I had to admit it was a wee bit flimsy even if I included some arm movements too. Spinning just isn't very aerobically demanding, alas.

Instead, I visited the Big Loom for the first time in months. Turns out, the situation wasn't as dire as I remembered. I decided to leave the dropped left selvage, and it actually ended up looking better or at least less fuzzy than the right one. Less fuzzy is good when you're working with tencel, which is supposed to be very smooth. And something was clearly up with the tie up, but I liked the results, so I just went with it. And it turns out that even in an air conditioned house, working the Big Loom is completely unexaggerated exercise (unlike spinning). Every shot requires stomping and throwing and beating, so I ended up with a bit of a sweat. As I told the lady at the weaver's guild who said that every time her doctor tells her to exercise she just weaves faster, I truly believe that weaving is exercise. You just happen to get pretty textiles at the end of it too.

Unfortunately, in the middle of set I discovered that the number three treadle had gone down to only one shaft, which was clearly wrong, since they're all supposed to have four tied on (this also contributes to the work factor - must take up weaving satin so I can make sateen and only have to lift one at a time...

Aside for non-weavers - the idea with satin is to make as smooth a fabric as possible while still having structural integrity, so you weave with as few interlacements as possible, by lifting 7 shafts and lowering 1, say. With satin, you're mostly seeing warp. When handweavers want to weave satin, they usually do it "upside down", and lift one shaft as opposed to 7 because it is vastly less work. However machine woven satins are crammed in so hard that the backsides of commercial satin don't produce sateen, so don't look for it at the fabric store.)

Where was I? Oh right, fixing the tie up. Turns out, a number of the ties had fallen off, so the pattern was ...not the one planned. But it was really cool. However, I wasn't sure how to recreate it, so I went back to the actual official tie up, which I'd been doing earlier, until the tie up had fallen apart. So, so far the whole thing is kind of a sampler of this particular threading with a whole collection of different tie ups.