I wish you could just head to the store and buy as much patience as was needed for any given project or situation.  It would be a heck of a lot easier than trying to muster up your own patience…especially when one doesn’t have very much to begin with.

I have boatloads of patience in my chosen career, but apparently it doesn’t transfer over to my extra-curricular activities.  Take this new hobby of mine ~ weaving.  Like with anything new, you are all gaga over it and want to see things made before your eyes instantly.

But weaving (like knitting) brings your ego crashing down to earth with its realities.

Setting up a loom for weaving is a lengthy, time-consuming ordeal.  For my latest project (my Mexican inspired table runner), it took about 4 hours just to wind the warp threads.  8 colours, each 3 yards long by 70 *ends* (70 individual pieces of warp threads that are each 3 yds long).  Enough to make a 3″ wide stripe vertically on the loom x 8 coloured stripes gives you the width of the table runner (this is before finishing, you have to make things longer and wider to account for shrinkage).

Once the warp is wound, it is time to get it on the loom.  Which is another labour intensive function.  This takes approximately 6 – 10 hours, with many breaks in between to un-knot your back and neck muscles due to sitting awkwardly on the floor threading each piece of yarn through an eye in a metal heddle.  70 threads x 8 colours = 560 threads in total.

After all the time consuming work has been done and you have gone to your chiropractor to get things put back where they belong within your body, it is time to weave.

So you think.

I wove a header and notice instantly that something wasn’t right with one of the threads in the red section, I was missing a thread that was supposed to go up while its neighbouring thread went down when the first peddle was pushed. CRAP.  To compound things further, at that very moment, one of the warp threads snapped at the tie on point of the front beam.

%$#*&!

For the love of Pete I grumbled.  Well this is getting off to a fine start now isn’t it?  Pissed off, I pulled the newly woven header pieces out, untied the offending sections of warp, yanked it back out the reed and then pulled them one by one, out of the eyes of the heddles and re-threaded them back in their proper order.  I was off by one in the pattern sequence.  Instead of 1,2,3,4 in one section I did 1,2,3,3.   Not at all desirable and would effectively have made a visual gap down the center of the red stripe section.

2 hours later, I was back to where I started with the header section woven and ready to start my project.

I literally used up every ounce of patience in me during this ordeal so hopefully there are no more screw-ups for the remainder of the project.  Maybe Costco sells patience in super-duper-sized buckets.   I sure could use some.