Mistakes

Of course, like most people, I make mistakes all the time.  A second helping of dinner that sounds so wonderful only to leave me feeling bloated and over full, for example.  Or thinking that ringing phone will be my daughter when it's really a customer who has never called me before.  Or taking the wrong exit off the freeway.  It doesn't take long for me to find mistakes in my life.

Mistakes are everywhere.  But the ones that make me completely crazy are the ones that I shouldn't have made.  Wouldn't have made if I had been awake.   If I had only been thinking about what I was doing instead of letting my mind drift. 

So you make a stupid mistake.  What do you do about it?  You apologize for it if that's appropriate.  You fix it or not depending.  The finally, you learn from it.  Hopefully you won't make that particular mistake again.  I need to take stock of the state of my stomach before I have seconds.  Recognise that the ringing phone might be my daughter but it might not be.  All mistakes are chances to learn something you probably need to learn.  Pretty "pollyanna" of me, I know.

When it comes to mistakes in my weaving I generally get angry and frustrated.  I have made all sorts of weaving mistakes - like threading the warp without making sure it goes over the warp beam.  This one needs to be fixed or the loom won't work properly.  Or the treadling error you don't find until you have woven another couple of inches.  This one I will rip back and fix or not depending on how obvious it is and what I'm weaving.  A scarf?  Maybe it won't be seen.  A kitchen towel?  Probably I'll go back and fix it.  Or not counting properly and have the warp way off to one side of the loom.  This one I'm going to have to live with because I'm not cutting all that organic cotton yarn off the loom just to be rewound properly in the center.

 

This brings me to today's mistake.  I was weaving along on my run of kitchen towels when I ran out of white yarn on my bobbin.  I pulled out the tube of white and filled four bobbins and went back to my weaving.  After about 3 inches I noticed the colors were different.  My original color was very white and the new yarn was a creamy off white.  That's when I looked carefully at the tube of white.  Well, crap.  My kitchen towels are cottolin which is a cotton/linen blend.  The tube I had picked up was 100% cotton.  The two are NOT interchangeable.  So I had to cut out the 3" of weaving and reweave it with the proper yarn.  And I had filled up the last of my bobbins with the cotton so I had to grab another package of bobbins out of our inventory.  The entire process took me about 45 minutes.  That is 45 minutes of weaving time lost forever.

I know that 45 minutes isn't really very much time.  I can easily spend that much time playing Candy Crush and not think I have wasted my time at all.  But this 45 minutes began when I was sitting at my loom weaving.  That really gets my goat.  I wasted weaving time not some random 45 minutes during the day.

I left the cotton yarn on the bobbins, by the way.  They will be used for that organic cotton run of towels that is off center on my other loom.