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(Jenny found herself totally engaged in Lizzie’s account of her encounter with the professor and the offer of an “apprenticeship.” This was by no means what she expected to find. Obviously, this was connected somehow to Lizzie’s further adventures, and she had her suspicions about Professor Cormier. She took another sip of lemonade and kept reading.)
The next morning, Lizzie awoke with a kind of buzzing in her head. It wasn’t a sound, really. It was as if there was something just beyond her hearing, like a radio signal not quite tuned in. She almost felt as if she could turn a little knob just slightly and it would come in clearly.
Per her instructions, she had thought about the questions she needed answers to before turning out the lights to go to sleep. She decided to go eat breakfast and get right to work. Perhaps it would resolve itself when she got into the rhythm of weaving. She had heard that weaving was a relaxing activity, once someone was familiar with the process.
The night before, she had completed the persnickety task of carefully hammering the finishing nails into the spaces she had precisely marked off on the top and bottom of the frame. She carefully staggered them above and below the line so they wouldn’t create a crack in the grain of the frame. When it was done, she was pretty proud of the neat rows of nails. A simple thing, but absolutely necessary to the proper use of the loom.
Something about that thought tweaked at the thing still humming inside her head, but she ignored it. She went to the cupboard Professor Cormier had told her held the choice of fibers available to her for her project. She had already considered what might make a good first design. She wasn’t really an artsy or crafty person, so she concluded that perhaps a dresser scarf would be fun to make and would be easily accommodated on her new loom.
She found some cotton carpet warp thread that looked like a good color and decided to match it as nearly as possible to the same color with the weft yarn, and then she realized she had no idea how to calculate how much she would need for her project. She needed to watch the film before she would be able to proceed at all.
She had a good idea how to put the warp on the loom, but she didn’t know how wide she would have to make it to get the desired width for her project. It was obvious to her that there would be some width-wise shrinkage in the weaving process. But how much and what the proportions needed to be, she had no idea.
Again, the little background hum that persisted in her mind surged and receded. She shook her head and took her notebook into the screening room. The film was already in place, so she turned the projector on and started the film. She took notes assiduously and stopped the film often, being careful to turn the lamp off each time so as not to melt the film while she jotted down her thoughts.
By the time the film was done, she had several pages of notes. It had all seemed so simple on the surface. Just weave the weft in and out across the warp enough times and you came out with a finished product. She’d had no idea how many calculations were necessary to know how much yarn would be needed and how wide to make the warp or the technique necessary to create a finished piece that wouldn’t look like a kindergartner had done it. She also discovered she had been missing a piece of equipment.
After shutting down the projector and then rewinding the film and replacing it on its proper place on the film rack, she ran up the outside stairs to her little flat and got a dinner fork out of the utensil drawer. Turns out she would need it for batting down the yarn after pulling it through the warp threads.
When she got to her worktable, she consulted her notes and made the necessary calculations to know how much warp and weft material she would need. Fortunately, she had plenty of both. Also, the film had given her the idea of creating a colorful border on either end of the scarf. The warp and weft of the main body of the scarf was a cream color, and she would use a royal blue for the border.
Now she had to string the warp; back and forth and back and forth she strung. Before she had watched the tutorial, she would have immediately started the weaving process. But now, armed with that knowledge, she carefully went back through the warp threads, individually tightening them until they didn’t have so much give. This was a bit painstaking, but it would allow her to create a superior end product. By the time she was finished, she was shaking her head. This was a lot more complex than she had ever suspected. She was beginning to have an inkling of some of the lessons she was going to learn from this, and the humming in her head softened a bit more.
When she glanced up at the clock when the warp was finally tied off, she was shocked to realize it was past lunchtime. Where had the time gone? She put the remaining warp thread to the side and decided she would take the next steps after lunch.
As she ate, she contemplated how badly she would have messed this project up after having made a good loom if she had not taken the time to watch the film. Suddenly she realized she had developed a sense of respect for this seemingly simple process that she had not even considered before.
She hardly noticed eating her meal; she was so absorbed in jotting down her observations. As quickly as she could, she cleaned up her lunch mess and headed down the stairs eagerly. Her attitude towards the project had definitely changed. She still wasn’t completely sure how this applied to physics and science, but it had taken on an importance of its own. It was now a challenge, and Lizzie never let a challenge stand in her way of learning something new.
When she got to her workbench, she grabbed the dowel and some more warp thread and began threading the heddle. It worked like puppet strings. When she had threaded the heddle and raised it, every other warp string was pulled up at once, creating a tunnel to send the yarn shuttle through.
Now she took the shed stick and wove it through the warp opposite to the threads the heddle was attached to. Now, when she turned the shed stick on its side, it made a new tunnel for the opposite weave of the warp.
She wound some yarn around the shuttle, enough for several passes back and forth of the loom.
But she wasn’t ready to start yet. The final step was to create a special padding that would keep the yarn straight while she was weaving. She took two very straight pieces of cardboard, an inch wide and as long as the loom was wide, and wove them into the warp, pushing them flush along the nails the warp was strung on. This would keep the bottom of the weave straight as she wove and would stabilize the warp as the shuttle passed back and forth.
Whew! All of this and she hadn’t woven a single strand. But if she had left out a single step or forgotten a single one of the tools, she would have been able to weave only something that would have fallen apart as soon as she removed it from the loom or soon afterward.
Before she began to finally weave, she consulted her notes one more time, just to be sure she hadn’t left anything out, and realized there was something she hadn’t taken into consideration. The loom was too tall and wide to weave with it on her lap. She needed some way to stand it up at a decent height so she could weave from a seated position. She considered. This hadn’t been in any of the instructions she had seen.
It occurred to her that there was a presentation stand folded in one corner of her work area. Had it been put there intentionally? Whether it had or not, she shortened the legs so the ledge the presentation pad would have rested upon was located about knee height and set the loom on it. The ledge of the stand was wide enough to support the bottom of the loom, and the lip on the edge of it would hold the loom securely in place. She positioned everything so the light from the skylights above her shone on her work. This would be fine. She also had the ceiling lights when the sunlight ran out, but she knew that real sunlight was much better for seeing details. She let out the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Even if she had only a few hours before supper, she could get a good start on it now.
She let her thoughts drift as she fell into the rhythm of weaving. At first it felt a bit awkward, and she realized that even knowing the process didn’t actually mean it would be easy to do. Push the shuttle through the opening made by the shed stick. Turn the shed stick flat. Bubble the yarn across the warp. Use the fork to batten down the row of weaving. Then raise the heddle while guiding the shuttle through the new tunnel made across the warp. Bubble the yarn across the warp. Batten it down with the fork. Again, and again. Over and over.
By the time she had a couple of inches of the royal blue weave above the spacer strips that would form the border of her project, she realized she needed a break. To her shock once again, the hands of the clock seemed to have moved way too far while she had been absorbed in her work, and the natural light was beginning to fade.
It would take some time to change thread color, which was a process in and of itself. For now, she would get some supper and she would spend the evening with a good book. She felt she had earned that much.
She made herself some canned vegetable soup and some bread and butter and went to her bookshelf. Professor Cormier had added some of his favorites. One of the titles intrigued her, The Hobbit. What was a hobbit, and what did that have to do with science?
She took the slim volume off the shelf and began. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit....”
