New Warp, Fresh Page

 My most recent rug is finally off the loom.   It is my first attempt at the outline weave.   There are some mistakes but all in all I am pleased.  It is taboo to disparage your own weaving so I will display it proudly and take what I have learned from this project and move on to the next.

It is the same way with my writing.  When I finish a project I must send it off into the publishing world.  Hope I have done my best and hope my best is good enough for an agent or an editor.  I will always think I might have done a better job.  But I always hope to apply what I have learned from my most recent project to the new work brewing in my imagination.

I am a slow weaver.  Like my writing, my weaving sometimes gets pushed aside for other chores and responsibilities. Or I might sit in front of the loom as I sit in front of my lap top, trying to find the design of my project with false starts and rewrites.  I need to take out an inch of weaving to correct an error.  In the same way I might need to delete entire paragraphs and begin again.

 A new fresh warp waiting to be filled with color and design is exciting and it is scary in the same way a clean new page waiting for the first words of a new story or essay is both exciting and terrifying.  Both a story and a woven rug must have a well planned beginning, middle and end.  I like to have a pretty good idea of where I am going before I begin.

I the Navajo tradition,  Spider Woman turned the clouds into cotton which became the warp which receives the weft which is the sun's rays.

A blank page is ready to receive a story woven from my imagination and sometimes some research, my experience and all that is around me.

For my new project  on the loom I hope to use some of the fibers I have died myself with vegetable dies from wild carrot, walnut shells, sage brush, and rabbit brush.  I plan to go back to the more common flat weave and to make this my best project yet.  One with the right amount of tension and even edges. It is the largest rug I have attempted.  It may take me a year but I look forward to pride in my finished work.

I have several writing projects on my desktop now but the scariest one is a rewrite.  I have opened up a new page in Word and plan to tear the original work apart.   I will use critiques from writer friends and my editor, and I will dig deep into my own imagination to give the story the fabric and color it needs to to make it come alive for the reader.

While I don't expect my rug to appear at a Navajo rug auction, I do hope my picture book project will one day be on library shelves.