change of plans

Yesterday I prepared a little andean woven band for a class demonstration today. It's a class my boss is teaching and he asked me to give a short explanation at the beginning of the session before we moved on to talking about the assigned articles. I trundled in this morning with a simple warping board and some cones of yarn.

At quarter to ten I got a phone call from my boss, sounding very out of sorts. He said his wife's car had broken down and he was running late. At quarter to eleven, he fumed into the office. "My car almost blew up!" he shouted. "I can't believe this! It was spewing smoke..." he spent the next half hour or so on the phone to AAA and car dealerships, and said "you'll have to take over class. I'm out for the day. Just give them a weaving demonstration, discuss the readings, you know."

Um. Yeah. Did I mention I'm not a professor?

So around eleven this morning I found myself with a one and a half hour class to teach, starting at one thirty. Thank goodness I'd already planned on the demonstration, otherwise I don't know what I would have done. Luckily I also found in my office cabinet various weave structure samples and some examples of cloth from the Andes that I've used before. How long can you keep non-weavers interested in weaving techniques?

As it turns out, almost an hour and a half. Explaining spinning to people who have never thought about yarn as something that needs to be made can generate a lot of questions in itself. Then there's warping-- what's a cross? Why do you need it? What's a warp? What's a heddle? I confess it's rather fun to talk about one of my favorite subjects. They had lots of great questions. The girl who usually dozes through powerpoint presentations seemed wide awake the whole time. At the end, as I was gathering together the examples I'd spread out all over the table, one of the girls asked me if I teach. Not often, I told her, but I've taught at some weaving conferences and given little workshops here and there. "What's the best way to learn?" she asked.

"Around here... probably the best way would be for us to get together and I'll show you what I know."

"Really? Would you do that? Because," nodding to her two friends, "all of us live in the same house and we really want to learn, we think it's totally cool."

Imagine that!

Comments

[claudia]

Nice work! Some boss you've got there....

;-)