When we left off, I was on a quest to finish the tallit with plenty of time for tying knots and sewing things on it, etc. etc. That goal has been amended, and now I'm on a quest to finish at some point before Saturday.
Progress has been made, though. As of November 7, the loom looked like this:
Two days later, it looked like this:
(we won't mention what my work pile looked like after I took better than half a work day to make the loom look like this).
Next we had the first pattern section in progress:
and now we are mired in the Eternal Sea of Plain Weave.
It is nearly impossible at this point to see how much is done and how much is left. If you take a peek underneath the loom, you can see the woven cloth rolled onto the cloth beam. You can also see that the beam prevents me from taking a ruler and measuring how much white I've got.
There are ways around this. My chosen method is the String of a Certain Length, which is the grey line you can see in the last two pictures. One end is anchored (temporarily) in the weaving at the beginning of the white and when I get to the far end of the string, I know I can stop weaving the plain stuff. I have measured and remeasured this string and written notes to remind myself how much ES of PW I have to endure and which knot on the string (there is only one, what makes me think I'll get it wrong??) represents the point at which I quit weaving white and start weaving patterns. None of this stops me from panicking that I have mis-measured or botched the math or that someone has mysteriously shortened my string and that I will weave a tallit that will be so short that it will look like a pocket handkerchief instead of a prayer shawl. This is the part of the project in which I have to have faith that I'm not a total screw-up. I can't measure and double check; I have to just believe that I'm doing this right.
It's driving me crazy.
It makes sense, though, that a prayer shawl should require a little faith. Right?
It's still driving me crazy.
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