It Works, Or It Doesn't

Reflections on a weaving project of 4 years

This month I decided to hit pause on the longest weaving project of my career. I’ve been promising everyone in my life that “things would calm down soon” and that I was “nearly done” for months now, but I think it’s finally time. It’s been four years, countless late nights, thousands and thousands of hours, blood, sweat and tears, all poured into this one thing.

You might be surprised to hear that I’ve been working on a single project for so long. You might be wondering what it is. Is it a collection of monumental tapestries? Is it the entire carpet of some billionaire’s mansion? 

No, it’s for an online course. 

I launched my first online weaving course in 2019. Back then I was so unsure of my technological skills that I shot the whole thing on my iPhone and formatted it as just pictures and text. In 2020 I grew more confident and in the long solitary days of lockdown I filmed two courses (Rug Weaving On An Upright Loom and Geometric Weaving) back to back. In 2021 I continued to tinker and add bonus content to each one, and in 2022 I embarked on two further courses (Rug Weaving On A Floor Loom and Rug Weaving On A Mirrix Loom.)

This year has been more tinkering, more bonus content and more finishing off. Somehow every time I make these courses I forget how much work goes into them. I always try to do too much in too little time and inevitably something goes wrong. A hard drive breaks, my laptop dies. The uploads aren’t showing up. The verification codes aren’t coming through in time and students are locked out. 

At a certain point, I stopped feeling like a weaver, and became a videographer. I got used to weaving with the camera’s watching eye hovering at my shoulder, and getting up every few minutes or so to move the tripod and change the angle. Weave a few rows, get up, move, repeat. I sat so long in awkward positions that I now have constant twinges in my knees. 

In theory, with a pre-recorded online course, you make it once and then you can keep running it, recouping your investment of time and labour and love. But for me, I never felt like the courses were truly finished. I was always going back over them, adding more, tweaking slightly. At some point, when you’ve been working on something for so long, you begin to completely lose perspective. With each video I scripted, and shot and edited I kept thinking “Next time I film this I’ll do it better” as if every year forever after I would be hunched in the studio filming over and over the same online course. 

A few weeks back, my boyfriend gave me a pep talk. (I know, he’s becoming a recurring character in my Substack, but I have to give credit where it’s due.) 

“Look,” he said. “Online courses are either going to work for you or they won’t. Making another course or redoing a course isn’t going to change that. Why don’t you just stick with what you’ve got and see if it’s actually making you money. And if it isn’t, you can do something else.”

It works, or it doesn’t. There’s a clarity to this statement that brought me back to my senses. No one is helped by me endlessly fretting and tinkering - not my customers, not my loved ones and certainly not me. And despite my constant paranoia about the courses never being good enough, my students seem to like them. Hey, some people have even signed up for all 4. Every now and again an email will pop into my inbox - someone has finally got round to starting the course and they’re loving it, or a student will share what they’ve been working on in the community group and my heart swells- it’s been worth it. 

So this summer I’m cancelling the plans I had to start work on yet another online course (Geometric Shapes In Three Dimensions - I’ll come back to you someday!) and I’m focusing on the courses that I already have. I’m not promising to give up tinkering entirely, but I am choosing to be confident in what I’ve produced. In the end it doesn’t matter if I could, in theory, in some future time and place, do a better job. What matters is what I’ve made, here and now. 

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Are you someone who tinkers forever, or are you one and done? If you have any tips for not obsessing over what you make, let me know in the comments below 

And if you’re interested in finding out what I’ve been slaving over these past four years - check out Balfour & Co.