Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Well, That Was A Hell Of A Day

It started off lousy, got good, got lousy again, got good, and then got lousy again. The last lousy, however, was not my fault.

Or at least not more than half my fault.

We passed around a sign-up sheet in weaving for the warp-boards, because we have three boards and eighteen people. The increments we signed up for were am, pm, and evening. I signed up for this evening. Apparently Chelsea didn't understand the sign up system, because she signed up for warp-board number 2 (co-incedentally the one I signed up for) at 8:30 - except that she signed up for that time in the pm box. So I signed up for the evening, thinking it was free. Got to the weaving studio at six, and guess what? Someone had left their warp on the warp-board so that it was well-nigh unusable for anyone else. I waited around, hoping whoever it was would come back from dinner and chain off so I could use it. Nothing. All the other warp-boards were claimed, and all the other times I could come were also claimed.

Now, being the fundamentally-un-cruel-if-pissed-off-person that I am, I didn't want to take all their hard work off the warp-board, because that's like three hours' work (or at least that's how long it took me). I also didn't have any time to screw around and hope they showed up (as I said, it's a long process). So I turned the warp-board upside-down and started warping, just overlapping their thread on the bottom most rung (this is really hard to explain to people who've never seen a warp-board before. It's a yard by yard square of wood with pegs sticking out at regular intervals around the edges. You wrap you warp around it in a systematic and very confusing manner in order to end up with the right amount of warp threads in the right pattern to dress your loom with before you can start what one normally thinks of as the weaving process.) Suffice it to say that it was a really long, really awkward process, in which I had to keep stopping and redoing and stopping and redoing, made ever more difficult by Chelsea's yarn. About three quarters of the way through, who should walk in but Chelsea, who says she signed up for 8:30. She did. Just in the wrong place, where, surprise surprise, I didn't look. She wanted to finish her warping, but couldn't, because I was in the way, and I wanted to finish my warping, but I was finding it difficult because she was in the way.

Neither of us was happy.

I only hope the rest of this weaving thing is not as stressful. It's almost sure to be complicated.

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