weaving personalities

No, we're not aspiring to become Cosmopolitan magazine with its famous tests, but Madelyn van der Hoogt has developed a weaver's personality assessment. I've taken it, and it's fun and sure to generate some interesting conversation during social time at your next guild meeting. Here's Madelyn to tell you about the quiz.

I hate warping! I love warping! I like to weave with very tight tension! Loose tension is the only way to go. I love to sample! I never weave samples. I love computer drafting! I don’t want to make drawdowns, I just want to weave. Four shafts is all you ever need. You can never have enough shafts.

How could the same craft provoke such strong, but opposite preferences? Weavers can almost come to blows over issues like whether it’s better to warp front to back or back to front.

Color/texture weavers like this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because weaving is somewhat unique in its appeal to two completely opposite personality types (unlike, say, chemistry or teaching pre-schoolers). I’ve thought of the two opposite personality poles as the structure/pattern type and the color/texture type. You could probably guess your type by what specifically drew you to weaving in the first place. If you were fascinated by seeing a loom, wondering how it works, or you pondered the designs in airplane upholstery, you are probably a structure/pattern type. If you longed for angora rabbits, went from them to raising sheep, then from sheep to alpacas, and started weaving because you have so much yarn, you are probably a color/texture type. If you see an exquisite scarf and wonder how many shafts it took to weave? Structure/pattern. If your first question is "Is it silk or Tencel?": color/texture.

It’s good to know your type for many reasons. I think of the color/texture weavers as pretty lucky. It’s easier for them to disguise their addictions. They will be collecting a lot of yarn in their weaving lives, and you can sneak yarn into the house, bit by bit, hiding it here and there, much more easily than you can hide looms. By identifying your type, you also know a lot more about how you learn and what you need to learn. Structure/pattern weavers (of which I confess I am one) are control freaks. They like to explain things, and they usually teach the guild workshops. They make computer printouts of complex drafts instead of weaving. Color/texture weavers, on the other hand actually have something to show at Show and Tell besides computer printouts. They bake the best cookies.

	Structure/pattern weavers like this.

If you’re a stucture/pattern weaver, you are usually afraid of color. If you are a color/texture weaver, you don’t like drafting or taking workshops on structure. It helps to know this about yourself so you don’t blame yourself for what doesn’t come naturally. One of my favorite ideas is to pair up a structure/pattern weaver with a color/texture weaver to plan a project. The structure/pattern weaver designs the draft, the color-texture weaver chooses the yarns and colors.

If you wonder which type you are, come to weavingtoday.com to take the Weaver’s Personality Inventory Test. (It will be in my blog.) And if you think you are somewhere in the middle of these two polar opposites, remember that from whatever place you start as a weaver, you move toward the center in your weaving life.
See? Doesn't that sound like fun? (Maybe we should be more like Cosmo. I can see the headline now: "How to put the sizzle back in your relationship with your loom!") OK, my mad daydreams aside, y'all come over to Weaving Today and find out your weaving personality. And if you'll share your results, I'll share mine. ;-)