I finally got to weave at the centre, but I spent the best part of several days just sitting and watching while the oldest employee fiddled with the cords on the treadles and lamms that were being set into the frame of what had been a jacquard loom. I am very bad at sitting doing absolutely nothing watching a very slow and repetitive task being carried out by someone else.

I am almost convinced now that if I acquire a floor loom, it must be something that caters to the gadget queen in me… As a hobby weaver, I’m not sure I want to spend days in just setting up to weave. So that means that expensive to buy and expensive to ship foreign loom. Then also, sometimes it is like a brief glimmer of light in dense fog, and I wonder if I need another loom at all. After all, I don’t live in a land of hobby weavers who’d gladly take a white elephant off my hands if I find out it’s not for me. There isn’t a market for highly polished highly priced looms…

But then I come back home and read the forums and the fog closes in again.

Unfortunately the warp I’ve been given to work samples on is painted for ikat. Not good for showing textural patterns.

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The other thing I noticed is that the figures in a government office are like toys that only move when you’re watching. You leave at the end of the day and come back the next morning, and things are exactly where you left them, and the people are picking up where you last saw them. I think there’s a term for such reality, but it doesn’t feel like real time.