Mistake or Design Element?

 I have finished the second shawl on the purple-green warp, and as I hem-stitched, beading as I went, I saw two errors.  I'd noticed one before, the short floats on one side of one of the "oranges," but chose to ignore it.  The second, and I'm not sure you can see it in this picture, is that there are two warp threads next to each other.
  When I finished stitching and cut the second shawl off, I pondered the errors.  I remember when I was a member of the Tuesday Weavers, we would joke about errors, asking the philosophical question:  Is it a mistake, or is it a design element?  Another way to think about it is the perennial question:  If an error falls in the warp and no one sees it, does it really fall?
  Look at the topmost repeat of the pattern and see if you can see the mistake.  I see it right away, but when I look at the entire shawl, it disappears.  The two threads running together is much more difficult to see, nearly impossible, unless you happen to be hem-stitiching.
  So, after a day of agonizing--slight exaggeration; there was little agony--I decided to go ahead with the third shawl without fixing the errors.  Two already had them!  If anyone notices the errors, well, they are keen-eyed and fierce.
  The next colorway for the flawed, or over-designed, warp is the grey tencel back as tabby warp, and the sage green carpet warp I wondered about last week.  The beads I chose came out perfectly with the warp and wefts.  I'm not crazy about the purple with the sage green, but overall, I think it does all right.  And I'm to the point in this project that I'm thinking about what's next, as usual.  I have some lovely red and purple bamboo waiting in the wings, or what about the fire red and orange warp?  Or should it be dish towels?  Oh, the possibilities!



Comments

Theresa said…
Sometimes I just get paralyzed by the choices! I'm in the design element camp, firmly.

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