Photo by Nancy Olszewski – all rights reserved

I was totally stuck the other day – couldn’t think of anything to weave or any reason to weave it. It led to a bit of a funk and I was pretty vocal about it. In sympathy and support, my daughter suggested thinking about a butterfly. And then my friend Nancy took the absolutely stellar picture you see there.

The idea and inspiration were great – I wish I had come close to actually meeting the challenge. What you will see here is a lovely journey down a totally wrong path with a correspondingly disappointing result. The best laid plans and all that…

It is possible to take an entirely wrong path with weaving. Each project requires quite a bit of planning: what should the final product be? dimensions? fiber? colors? what structure? how dense? Looking back, I can see where I did a really wonderful job of making the wrong decision at each decision point. I do have an excuse – I was seduced. Or maybe call that an explanation because I did know better. Let me explain.

A butterfly’s wing looks like an advancing twill, trust me. (or check out this one, or this one, or even this one.) I know that now and, to be honest, I knew that then. However, that very day I received a book in the mail: The Stubenitsky Code. The book describes a cool way to plan for intricate designs with twills – the ideas seemed endless and the concept fascinating. I was hooked and inspired. Plus I had ordered a bunch of black cotton to go with the yellow cotton I already had in my stash. My butterfly also had hints of blue and orange so I planned a blue and orange stripe pattern. I didn’t want the towels too big because the design was kind of complex, so 20″ in the reed seemed reasonable. I even managed to design based on a butterfly-like shape. What could go wrong?

Ha! So, remember how I said a butterfly’s wing looks like an advancing twill? This is not an advancing twill. It could be pretty but it doesn’t look like a butterfly. I know, I don’t have to be literal in my interpretation, but I did have an idea and this wasn’t it. Interesting, yes. Experimental, yes. Challenging, quite! but not what anyone would think of as a butterfly.

Also, that blue and orange? ICK! The colors I chose just didn’t work. I plunged ahead (throwing good planning after bad?) but really I knew all along those colors were wrong. And too strong. To be more ideally suited, they should have been closer in tone to the underlying yellow. Instead of getting the essence I was selecting a match – bad plan.

As a side issue, the pattern was also very difficult to thread with many opportunities to reverse pairs of threads. I won’t bore you with the details, but after the first towel I cut about 20 threads and re-threaded them.  All those intricate twill patterns (see circled areas in the weaving picture on the left) can easily go awry if one reverses a pair of threads.

What else could go wrong? Well on a purely mechanical level, the pattern requires the loom to lift multiple (heavy) shafts with each pick which was bad for both it and me. It kept throwing off the treadle/shaft hooks (causing the wrong shafts to lift) and I hurt my back treadling heavy shaft combinations at awkward angles and jumping up and down to re-hook the treadles.

To add insult to injury (ha!), my little dishtowels were too little! I knew that too – and I could have added to the design and made them wider. In fact, the design really wanted to be bigger. Just another 80 threads would have made all the difference. You can see it in the picture on the right – the stripes should be outside that pattern repeat. 

In the end, I did make 4 dishtowels, 2 of which were marginally satisfying. I simply didn’t listen to myself because I was infatuated with a new idea and I forced a fit that wasn’t there. Oh, a few things did go well. I really like the hems. The feel of the cloth is soft and absorbent. And, as a Stubenitsky pattern, I learned a lot and I even like it. Well, without the ugly stripes and maybe in different colors entirely, but I still get a kick out of it and perhaps someone else will like those stripes. I don’t have the desire to hit the butterfly theme again just yet, but the next time I do, it will be a scarf, it will be an advancing twill, and the blue and orange will just be hints. I’m pretty sure I even have the right yarn.

In the meantime, I have put this effort behind me and I am hitting the road for our church-cottage on the east coast of Canada. I’ve packed enough fiber to keep me busy for a year (it’s all about options, right?), warped both looms for my return, and selected some serious knitting for the 3500 mile care trip. See you on the other side!

Sandflats at Low Tide