Not many people can say that and mean it literally but I can, although I haven’t actually gotten to the weaving part yet. But the tangles! Oh yes. I know tangles.
It all started when my sister brought me skeins of white silk from Laos last year. The women in the village had done it all – raised the silk worms, then extracted the silk from the cocoons and spun it into thin – very thin – thread. Think dental floss on a diet.
The first step was to dye it. I used a cold water dye that I got at the art store – rusty orange – and threw in just a little bit of midnight blue, just because I can’t help messing with colors. It turned out beautifully – a rich, golden orange color. But when I pulled it out of the dye bath, oh my! the tangles, the matted threads, the gnarls and swirls, the kinks! I looked at it and had two thoughts: (1) the trash can (2) three weeks of untangling the thread. I couldn’t bear to throw it away so I set it out to dry and hoped that it wouldn’t be as bad as it looked.
Well, it wasn’t. Quite. I yanked on it (hard) to get some of the kinks out (praying that it wouldn’t break the threads) and then began winding the tangled skeins onto cones and miracle of miracles! it only took three days instead of three weeks. There were only a few times I rethought the trashcan option. Once was when I had long threads carefully separated, strung out on the floor of my studio and my dog, Sadie, heard a squirrel in the back yard and in a spasm of joy, tore out the door, right through my thread. That part did go in the trash.
The question is, why would I do this? Why does any crafts person spend such an enormous amount of time making a product that you can get on Amazon for a few dollars? Obviously it’s the process. I don’t know when I’ve experienced such satisfaction as when I finally got all those threads lined up neatly and smoothly, ready to put on the loom. I don’t have control over much in my life but I can control these threads. Or at least most of them.
Alexander Langlands, in his very excellent book Craeft, addressed this question of “why” when he says that craft is “a hand-eye-head-heart-body co-ordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our world.”
Is untangling thread really “craft?” Well, it was an absolutely essential part of the process and, as I said, it’s all about the process. Can I really make a narrow, thin scarf (about the best I can hope for) out of these threads? Maybe, maybe not. But if I do, I’ll know that it was “loved” into being.