A year and a half. It’s probably not the longest I’ve taken to finish a craft project, but it’s got to be the weaving project that took the longest time to do. And mostly because I lost interest, dithered, procrastinated and kept having to unweave silly mistakes.

On my last free day at home for 2013, after finishing the daybed cover, I decided I was going to finish the ruanna if it killed me. I thought I only had five stripes of the twill pattern to do. Three stripes in I realised I’d woven only ten, not twelve picks a few stripes back. I unwove, then discovered I hadn’t made a mistake after all, so I rewoved them.

But I know from experience not to take anything off the loom before I check it. I unwound the ruanna and discovered that the front panels were shorter than the back. I needed ten more stripes on each side.

So I tied the right side back on (fortunately, I hadn’t pulled the ends out of the heddles, instead knotting them at the back, so just had to ‘sew’ them back onto the back beam with a length of rug cotton.) I wove ten stripes, then pulled out that side and wove ten stripes on the left and finally removed the ruanna from the loom.

Except somewhere I miscounted and had added five stripes more than I needed to the left. So along with sewing in ends and tying the fringe I had to remove five stripes.

A lot of wasted weaving time there. But that’s been the story the whole time with this one. Lots of silly, silly mistakes.

But it’s finished now, and it is pretty. Narrower than the usual ruanna, so it’s more like a long vest. That’s okay. In fact, I think I like it better that way.