Musings of the Obsessive Kind

1a. I've bought the Stoorstålka "advanced" and "professional" kits after all, for practicing basic Baltic pickup with zero context.
( recent tries at weaving )

3. Weaving as a diversion has paused. The process of warping a second inkle attempt and weaving it off has shown me that my vast ignorance crosses understanding how something can function and getting one's fingers to do it at a strange angle. In sport-weight cotton yarn, most of my 2" = 5 cm band looks as neat and even as the stuff that Etsy-shop vloggers show themselves making on Instagram or TikTok; I'm a fumbling beginner with peripheral neuropathy only for starting and ending. Sew the ends under, and no one would see---but learning to make tidy starts and finishes is more than my current hands could endure.

I dipped back into weaving specifically to practice being a beginner at something. Having learned a few things since I was a knitting beginner (almost 20 years ago) regarding dexterity, mobility workarounds, how other people do various fibercrafts including forms of weaving, and how plant and animal fibers behave, the on-ramp for my hands-on weaving is quite short. Like, that's it, I'm already into an objectively intermediate stage, and my hands cannot do what would need doing there.


4. Crocheting has always been tougher on my joints than knitting, or rather, my best refinements over time of self-accommodation for each craft succeed better for knitting. Weaving at narrow output (tabletop, backstrap, inkle) demands less of any individual body part than crochet or knit because it's better distributed across many parts---but weaving wants specific actions that need fingers, not fingernail-substitution or the use of an external tool.

I can tie square and surgeon knots with my nails (lacking usual-range fingertip sensation), but the junk comm packets I wrote about a few years ago, whereby since #2020 my brain or central nervous system directs a limb to do something and it fails to report back timely, or CNS forgets momentarily that the limb exists---junk buildup is still a thing. Trying to weave more, doggedly doing more by eye, would mean accumulating more of a junk backlog than I have the capacity to expel (nap/resting self-accommodations). Weaving and laptop typing and food prep occupy the same bucket, just about. So, weaving drops out, at least for now.

(Knitting is still fine in moderation.)