not a shitty day all over, but a really, really, spectacularly shitty crafting day.
i had set aside a few hours today to warp my loom for the first time alone. (i'd done it only once before, in class, with a buddy to help and of course the instructor guiding us every step of the way and checking our work.) i had anticipated that it would be difficult, both physically and mentally, because i wouldn't have my buddy's help and i wouldn't have nancy the instructor there making sure i did this or that and checking my work and telling me what to do.
i planned out my project and wound my yarn, set up the loom and warping peg, and was all ready to do business. sort of. we didn't have two tables on the first floor, where i (unwisely, it turns out) planned to undertake this effort, so i clamped the peg to the arm of a chair. my initial frustrations (so many--our dining room, where i was working, has a litter box in it that at least one of our cats chooses to only *nearly* use sometimes, so the room itself is not exactly sweet smelling; the dining room is also full of my crap that i don't put away; and i hadn't turned the room air conditioner on before beginning, so i was hot and frustrated anyway) were compounded by my asshole cat jack-jack trying to play with the yarn. (he isn't an asshole because he likes to play with yarn. that's just kind of regular cat stuff. but he's an asshole. you'll just have to trust me on this.) i got him to stop that, and he perched on the chair that held the peg and seemed to sort of chill for a while.
the frustrations were increased because my instructions were from class and were definitely written FOR class. not for doing this on one's own with no one to ask questions. so i did some things wrong and wasn't sure about the correctness of other things. but i soldiered on and muddled through and all that.
when i was humming along and being VERY proud of how well i was doing and how pretty the warp was looking--i was using some denim-blue superwash worsted i'd bought at a fiber festival a few years ago and was also very smug about using up stash--and even smiling broadly at how joyful this whole process had finally become after my earlier frustrations, POW. the warps ALL snapped high in the air off the warp peg, and the chair holding said peg tumbled to its side, and i saw jack-jack leaping away into the kitchen.
now, the most likely explanation is that the tension from almost 200 (because yes, i was just a few inches away from being finished) worsted-weight warps became too much for the chair holding 10-pound jack-jack (note to self: not his fault that he weighs only 10 pounds OR that i hadn't put something heavy on the chair, like, say, a case of seltzer or something) and pulled it over, sending jack-jack flying into the kitchen for cover. but my frustration said, "dammit, asshole cat jack-jack! it is your fault that my warps just went into the air!" and i swore up a storm.
i swore up a storm while attempting to solve the problem of the no-longer-under-tension warps. i dragged some furniture around to try to find something heavier to anchor the warp peg to. i tried resmoothing the warps into place and looping them around the peg. i assembled my loom stand and put the loom on the stand and tried using the opposite end of the table as tension. eventually, i thought i had a workable warp. it would definitely be the ugliest, least even warping job anyone had ever seen, but i thought i could try.
i was being an idiot.
i went on to the next steps, again making mistakes because i didn't know some important things not written in the instructions (or maybe they're there and i just didn't understand or see them). but the thing is, those mistakes would have been a lot easier to undo had i not made 10,000 of them already and had i not been in the crappy-ass frame of mind i was in because of the pile of frustrations i'd already been experiencing.
but i had and i was. so those mistakes resulted in such a tangled mess of warps, some not even making it through the heddle any more, that i ended up throwing away the whole thing.
you read that correctly. i had to cut the yarn off the loom, gathered it all up in a huge, sweater-sized ball of beautiful denim blue, and stuffed it all into the trash can.
there was more; that's the reader's digest version, more or less. but the point is that i wasted hours i really didn't want to waste and hundreds of yards of yarn i also wasn't too excited about wasting, and ended the afternoon in one of those frames of mind that really requires a pint of ben and jerry's and a very silly movie.
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