Rework and Review.

'Nothing succeeds as planned'; one of my favourite quotations (from Joseph Heller).  You'll remember this piece...

It has been sitting on the back of the sofa, waiting for...actually, not sure what either of us is waiting for... but I noticed that some of the yarn was distinctly coming adrift.  This started up One Of Those Conversations in my head.  You know the sort, the apportioning blame sort... you aren't patient enough, you didn't do this well enough, you idiot...I'm sure you get the general drift.  Thoughts like that don't help.  Reader, I refelted it.  That helped. 

So...the review... because some of those thoughts, reformatted, are in fact quite useful.  Working out what the problem was, might help in the future.  It just doesn't need to be a judgemental, blaming process; rather, it should be a detached analysis of the piece and its problems.  So... what was the problem? 

Mostly, the thinner parts of the yarn weren't properly attached, so they pulled free of the backing.  The backing itself was difficult to felt through, partly because the cotton base was really quite tightly woven, and partly because there's a mixture of wool and silk fibres on the top.  And yes, partly because I didn't spend enough time on the felting process, so the thicker areas, which did felt reasonably well, were not as attached as they could have been.  The rework has solved all those problems, just by investing more time into the process.  I'm glad, because the fallback solution would have been to couch the yarn, and the problems I was having with the felting, would have been just the same with a conventional needle. 

We all need to rework, sometimes.  The trick is not to beat yourself up about it.  When you catch yourself doing that, switch to asking yourself questions.  Start with, what's the problem?  Stick with the facts, and the solutions, and get the work done.  And learn from it: I know I have.