Abbie Groves Creative

  The Basket Weave That Shrank, and Learning to Love Negative Space I'm involved in self-study for the Ontario Handweavers Guild Unit 1. I'm learning a ton, mostly via mistakes. I think this is how I learn in general, but also, how I just learn best. Unit 1 is comprised on the basic weaves including plain weave, basket weave and various twill structures. The third basic weave is a 2×2 basket weave, and it taught me the most so far. The first time I tried this sample, I beat it too hard - again...and I didn't fully understand the consequence until I washed it. It shrank the most out of any of my first four weaves. That's the thing about overbeating: the loom doesn't punish you immediately. The wash does. So, this round, I'm paying close attention to the negative space. The negative space is the space between the weave. This time with this sample, I am making sure there actually is some, and, harder still, making sure it's even . That sounds simple written d...

  A Five-Color Repeat and Abandoning the Shuttle I am engaging in a course of self-study for the Ontario Handweavers Guild, Unit 1. Here's a humbling one: I misread the instructions. Was not the first time and probably won't be the last. The project was plain weave with a five-color repeat. I read "five colors" and ran with it — picked five, wove each one in 3×3 blocks, and felt quite pleased. Except a repeat is a different beast. The point isn't five colors sitting next to each other; it's a repeating sequence that builds a rhythm across the cloth. Lesson one, before any weaving lesson: read the whole instruction, then read it again. The surprise of this one was a happy one. Carrying five colors meant managing the selvedge, and I made peace with going bobbin-only for three of the five — no shuttle. On an 11-inch warp that's no hardship at all, and I found I didn't miss the shuttle one bit. In fact, it was freeing in a way, to know that I was not tet...

  Plain Weave: Let the Beater Fall I'm weaving samples for self-study, specifically for the Ontario Handweaver's Guild Unit 1. The first basic weave is plain weave, the most fundamental structure there is. Simple, right? That's exactly the trap. The first time through, I beat the way I always had, which is to say, way too hard. I'd read that new weavers tend to overbeat, and reader, I am a textbook case. There's something in you that wants to pack it, to make it dense and certain. So, on the re-weave, the whole assignment I gave myself was just this: monitor the beat. Don't drive it home. The first few rows took real concentration; I had to consciously stop myself. But then something nice happened. My loom is a Norwood Cherrywood, and the beater has genuine weight to it. Once I stopped fighting it, I could let the beater fall and find its own place. The cloth told me what it wanted. Beginner takeaway: Your loom is a partner, not a thing to muscle. If your beat...

True Confessions - I have a basket of unfinished knitting projects.   Some of them have been sitting there for three years.... or more. A sweater in progress from 2022. A pair of socks that got boring halfway through. A scarf that seemed like a good idea in January but feels completely wrong to me now. For a long time, I felt guilty about those projects. Weren't they failures? What did that say about me as a person if I didn’t finish absolutely everything I had ever started? Shouldn't I push through and finish them? Do I need to finish all these projects before even considering beginning new ones? The creative culture I'd absorbed—especially online—seemed to suggest that abandoning a project was somehow a mark against me, a lack of follow-through or commitment.  But that's a dirty lie. The Cost of Finishing Everything Here's what I've learned: holding onto every project, refusing to let anything go, doesn't make you disciplined or committed. It makes you st...

Finding Joy in Your Craft: Why Clicks Don't Define Meaning When I first started weaving seriously, I had this vision of what it would become. I imagined a beautiful Instagram feed. A growing following. People that are excited about my work. I thought that external validation would be the thing that made the craft feel real and valuable. That lasted about six months before I realized I was exhausted. Not exhausted from the weaving itself—the weaving felt good, felt necessary. I was exhausted from performing the weaving. From thinking about how it would look in a photo. From counting interactions and watching metrics like they were the heartbeat of my practice. From feeling small when a post didn't perform well, even though the thing I'd made was beautiful and true. Grand Prix towel in plaited cobalt twill Clicks Don't Mean Quality Here's something I wish I'd known earlier: clicks and followers and likes don't measure the quality of your work. They don't ...

When Your Paint Betrays You: A Disaster in Shades of Blue There’s something wonderfully peaceful about a quiet morning with a fresh coffee, my brush in hand, working through a demo from a beloved book. That was me today — happily following along with Watercolor for Beginners by Könnemann , a little gem I picked up on sale ages ago that I keep coming back to. Everything was going smoothly. I was really in the flow and so was the water itself, doing what I wanted it to, with my paper at a 45-degree angle, watching that pigment do whatever it damn well pleased. And then I noticed something wasn’t right. A color I’d recently added to my set — a Winsor & Newton Pthalo Blue half pan — was leaving debris on the paper. Little bits, scattered across my wash like unwanted texture. Was I using rough paper? No. Barring that, my first instinct was to blame the paper towel. I’d been using it throughout to blot excess water from my brush, as well as blot rogue drips from the paper so it seemed...