Sorry
about the hiatus. It’s been cold-ish here the past two weeks and, except for
gainful activity, I retreated inside to spend a good bit of time with my loom. While
warmly warping and wefting, it occurred to me there are many similarities
between weaving and gardening.
With
both crafts, it helps a lot to have a plan before leaping into action. If what
you want to accomplish is simple and straightforward—such as one-note
containers or single-color plain weave—sometimes winging it works: more often
it doesn’t. Because of a certain, ahem, predisposition on my part to preciseness
(I’m anal as hell), I prefer designing every project in two dimensions, to
scale if at all possible.
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| A simple one-color, balanced weave project... |
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| ...or plopping a bunch of hens-&-chicks in a pot doesn't require a lot of advance planning. |
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|
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| But some simple-seeming weavings... |
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| ...or color-blocked pots of violas benefit from some prior thought. |
Not that
a lovely drawing ensures success on the loom/ground. Landscapers who slavishly
follow beautiful, curvy, landscape-architect-rendered drawings often find
themselves in plant-replacement nightmares punctuated by increasingly menacing
phone calls from unhappy clients. Back in the day when Tim and I took on
new-construction installations, we learned early on that any paper plan is
purely advisory. In the real world, things evolve. In the real world, the grand
design emerges over time. Still, it helps to have some idea of where you’re
going before you rev the engine and back out of the driveway.
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| Garden plans evolve from establishing the "bones" of a space... |
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| ...to filling in the details. |
Both
weaving and gardening require an openness to rearranging elements on the fly. Translating
some approximation of your mind’s two-dimensional conception into
three-dimensions pleasing to the eye determines the ultimate success or failure
of any design. Trust your instincts while you’re working. They’re never wrong.
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| Weaving plans also evolve. Observe Take 1... |
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| ...and Take 2 for the same piece. |
In some
ways, though, weaving feels more intense than gardening. Lose concentration for
a few passes on the loom, and the pattern and/or selvages show it. Not that
gardening is mindless, of course. Even weeding requires a modicum of attention
if you want to be sure you haven’t plucked out all your dad’s asparagus plants
about 43 minutes before they bear. For the first time. Since he’d planted them
three years previously. (See November 11, 2011’s
“Looking Back” for the whole sad story.)
The
ultimate goal of any endeavor—weaving, gardening, painting, golf—is a result. If
at first you don’t succeed, figure out what went wrong, and try, try again. Screw-ups
just mean you’ve had an opportunity to learn something. Tim has taken as his
mantra an adage that says an individual has to paint a mile of canvas before he
starts to get really good at it. The number grows to 20 miles of yarn when
applied to weaving. We’ve killed thousands of plants over the years figuring
out how to garden in North Carolina. So stick with it, whatever “it” is for
you. At the risk of sounding unbearably sanctimonious, if you love to do it, it’s
worth doing until you do it well.
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| This is how the garden turned out... |
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| ...and here's the final incarnation of that weaving. |
Three “it”s
in one sentence! Must be near time to plug in the pictures and thank y’all for
dropping by.
Thanks for
dropping by, y’all.
Kathy
