thinking about the edges

All the responses to my post about the selvedges on the berry wrap (for which many thanks) have made me realise how much is expressed in those few milimetres of cloth at the edge of the loom, and how we all see something different there.  So I’ve been thinking at the edge for a few days and some of my thoughts are these:

• A neat selvedge can be a pleasure in itself and it is one sign of a craft well executed, but…
• a lumpy selvedge doesn’t mean the craft is poorly executed because the cloth is more than just the outside edges (thanks to Bonnie for her comment about Randall Darwall).
• The outside edge does have a disproportionate impact on the cloth, however — disproportionate compared with any other few mm you might select, I mean — and those actions which make a good selvedge are also contributing to an even draw-in over the length of the cloth, a straight fell — and all sorts of things that have randomly popped into my mind over the last day or two and have popped straight out again, but generally add up to a hassle-reduced weaving experience.
• I am much more severe on my own selvedges than I am on anyone else’s.  In fact, it would never occur to me to be severe on anyone else’s selvedges, since I am too busy admiring the rest of their weaving.  My relationship to my own weaving is necessarily more critical, but I’m glad I took time to enjoy the berry wrap first.
• I am also quite lazy, and will only go so far to improve a thing.  I could do more to make my selvedges nicer, and I plan to try neki desu’s suggestion about sitting nearer to the worse edge; but I probably won’t start using a temple, at least not yet.
• The fact that I am a person and not a weaving machine is bound to introduce an element of quirkiness into the cloth I produce, and the pursuit of a machine-like homogeneity would be boring as well as fruitless.
• On the other hand, I don’t want to use ‘handmade’ as an excuse for avoidable sloppiness, especially when I’m expecting someone to pay for my work!
• Nor do I want to use ‘artistic’ as an excuse for not developing craft skills.  (Very interesting discussion on Peg’s blog at the moment — my heart goes out to Leigh’s stepson trying to write creatively without the building blocks of spelling and grammar.)
• Practice by repetition of the same exercises is not for me, so I am not going to perfect my selvedges — or anything else — on one type of thing before moving on to a new challenge.  A benefit of this, however, is that as I experiment with more complex things and then try something with a simpler structure, the selvedges on the latter turn out to be much easier than they were before.

“thinking about the edges” was posted by Cally on 15 Jan 2009 at http://callybooker.wordpress.com

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