The Same Things, Over And Over
My journal entry for May
April showers bring May flowers, but this spring has been the driest since the 1970s. Our lawn is brittle and yellow, but at least the nettles are thriving in the shady plot behind our house. I’m researching nettle dyes and nettle yarns and planning a whole host of garden-based, textile-related activities for the summer or when I next have some free time.
Time is never on the side of the textile artist, or anyone who makes things by hand. My husband is learning this, as he’s spent the last two years restoring a small wooden sailing yacht. He’s finding that inside every task on the Boat To-Do List are a dozen smaller tasks, a matryoshka nesting doll of little jobs, and each one must be completed before you can move onto the next. It makes it difficult to plan, really, because you don’t know how long something will take until you’ve worked through it.
My strategy for managing this conundrum has been to get up earlier and earlier in the morning. In an ideal world, I would start work at 8am, eat lunch at 12 and finish for the day at 5, with 8 solid hours of weaving under my belt. In practice however this rarely happens, because I have to do other things aside from weave, and also because 8 hours of weaving is more gruelling than it sounds. I might have one day where I weave for 8 hours but then the next day I’ll only manage 2. It’s not that it’s physically demanding (although it can be) so much as mentally taxing. The commission I’m currently working on is both extremely complex and very repetitive, requiring both intense concentration and a Zen-like acceptance of the process. It’s not the best combo for someone like me, an over-thinker and a fretter. I find myself reaching for my phone too much because I’ve remembered I need to text someone back, or answer that email, only to doomscroll on Instagram instead.
Still, I’m learning. I’m prioritising for when most productive on the loom, and I’m trying to work with myself rather than against myself. Instead of scheduling marathon weaving days that stretch long into the evening, I’m working in short, focused bursts. And although I’m pivoting into making most of my income from weaving this year, I have also scheduled a few new tapestry workshop dates and continued selling my leftover rug yarn on my website.
So often my first instinct is to narrow my professional focus onto just one thing. But this month, the loom has taught me that doing only one thing relentlessly, for day after day, is a sure fire way to make yourself resentful and miserable.
One of the hidden problems to solve when you are making things by hand is not the challenge of how to make the thing itself - it’s the challenge of how to keep going to the end. Creative work, more often than not, is repetitive and tiring instead of exciting and new. Maintaining focus and a steady rhythm is often half the battle.
Alongside tinkering with my working rhythm, I’m also tinkering with the business overall - and pivoting from making most of my income from teaching to making most of my income from weaving. I’m struck by how much of the process of building (or rebuilding) a business is like practicing a craft. Just like when you weave a brand new tapestry design, or restore a wooden boat, it’s a long slow process full of smaller jobs lurking inside larger jobs, all of which need to be completed before you move onto the next.
I originally envisioned sharing more of this process with my audience, and so I documented the process as I went. Of course, when I read back over my notes for the month, I realised that I’m basically just doing the same things day in day out, and it will be a long while until I have any actual results to show for it. The writing that’s interesting to read is the writing that narrates a change - you start in one place and you end up in another. Right now I’m in the same place and I’ll be here for a while, so what’s there to say?
The funny thing is that, after writing a whole post about how I don’t like to write about weaving, a lot of my writing right now is about weaving. As I’m spending more time at the loom, working on commissions and on personal projects, I’m finding I have more to say. It’s an encouraging sign that I’m on the right track - that the craft that I chose years and years ago is still exciting to me.
I wrote most of the above yesterday, and this morning the rain has finally come. The garden is getting a much needed drenching and birds are chattering happily in the hedges. I’m about to close my laptop and sit down at the loom. Maybe later, I’ll harvest those nettles.