from the pages of a notebook

i have always had a slight obsession with notebooks and constantly have a far too abundant supply of empty sketchbooks and exercise books, and those that do get filled very rarely see the light of day again once written. this space may change that relationship as here unedited (you'll have to believe me on that one) are the jottings i made on vacation after finishing the cloth just before departing. it is an attempt to view the process from the beginning. and i may regret not editing it...call it an exercise in post something textuality...or something

"the length is finished. well, almost. i remain to wash and sew in the ends, so in cloth terms it isn't complete. throughout the whole process i have been mildly nervous about the whole thing unwinding, undoing itself and returning to its just-past-original state of tangled multi-coloured thread. i'm finding it no small miracle that it hasn't happened and that i now hold in my hands veritable cloth.

at every stage i was learning what to do and how to do it. with warping i quickly discovered my maths isn't that great...four warping posts does not a warp make! and lacking a suitable horizontal surface of sufficient size, the only remaining option was a door. again my spatial awareness failed me - a rather trepidatious knitting needle ended up being taped unceremoniously to the door to make up the numbers for (the) posts. i learnt how to make a warp in two sections when the needle came unstuck and my heart was almost sunk.

rather than choose a basic warp - one or maybe two alternating colours - i somehow settled on a more improvised approach. using the three colours, ecru, magenta pink/cerise and orange, ignoring any references to fruit salad sweets that crept into my head, i began to wind the warp. that was after raiding the knitting needle bag again to fashion a spool rack from four needles and a wine box.

making the warp was like dancing and painting. hundreds of regular movements that were guided by a shapeless notation jotted on the reverse of a cereal box and stuck to the door...round over under down over under round under over up round over under...picking up one colour after another, consciously putting an order in between the choice of three, trying to imagine how they balanced each other over the width of the warp - a not enviable feat as all that can be seen is a collection of threads. and whilst all this rhythm continues , attempting to maintain the same pressure, the same tautness across all threads. that reminded me of painting, the brushstrokes determining by their quality and regularity the visual outcome of a colour or combination of pigments.

and so not having written down the order of the threads, i relied wholeheartedly on my memory. thankfully better than my maths"

ok. i can only say i was reading a lot at the time and had evidently swallowed various parts of a dictionary of pomposity. but you get the idea...next stage, getting the warp on the loom. after two days of dancing around a bunch of pegs attached to a bedroom door, it was a rather welcome horizontal relief.