The Dumb

I have a friend who occaisionally sets her Facebook status to: "***** cannot brain. She has the dumb." Apparently, I have also contracted The Dumb.

I have been working on a yoga shawl commission off and on for about a year now. It has been pushed back and sidetracked, and the client has shown remarkable patience. This is not a complex piece of weaving--plain weave, 20/6 silk warp, 20/2 wool weft--but the fates have conspired. Until last week, anyway. I cut the last section off the loom on Friday. Hallelujah!


The piece was commissioned at 40-48" wide. I have a 24" loom. No problem, we'll just weave strips and piece. All was hunky-dory. The pieces all came off the loom beautifully and I spent Friday afternoon and Saturday morning very carefully grafting the pieces. I would have defied you to find a seam! Then into the wash to full. Perfect!

And about 5 minutes into the wash cycle, The Dumb wore off. I realized that I had grafted using the wool from the weft. It made perfect sense as I was doing it. Grafting the weft with the weft yarn. Of course! Except, wool shrinks when fulled--that's how fulling works. I should know. I offer workshops on felted (or, more properly, fulled) knitting.

Mercifully, the goddesses were smiling upon me. The damage was minimal, suggesting, perhaps, that I had left sufficient slack in my grafting to compensate for The Dumb. Yes, there is a wee bit of ruching there at the end, but all it took was a little steam and a wee tug to straighten it out. Whew!

There were other symptoms, as well. Agreeing to meet someone who really irritates me for coffee and getting sucked into the ensuing drama. Going to the store for cat food and coming home with $100 worth of groceries, but no cat food. Volunteering to write a puppet-show script. Going out to the bar with my son and drinking the house red. And, of course, the ongoing inability to find a pair of scissors or an orifice hook when they are needed.

So now I am left wondering where I may have contracted The Dumb. I know I did not get it from *****. She lives too far away. Unless it is a computer virus, of course. But no, I think it is far more likely that it may have been the gal at my favorite coffee haunt who could not make change for $6.12 when I gave her $20.12. Or perhaps the woman who backed into me twice with her shopping cart at the grocery store--in two different aisles. Or any of the fools in this post. Or perhaps it came to me through my television--after all, American Idle, oops, I mean Idol, is back on the air!

So now I need to know: Is there a cure for The Dumb? Somebody save me before it's too late!