After reading the review of This is how I go when I go like this in Knitter's Review, I decided I wanted a copy.

It's a book of essays that Linda Ligon wrote for Handwoven magazine over the years

I've been reading away at it over the past couple of days. Even though I don't weave, and don't know all the terminology (like sett and sley and the numerical code for yarn sizes that weavers use) I still enjoy the short essays - as I enjoy most writing about "why we do what we do."

(And I love the title. And, like Ligon writes, the phrase "this is how I go when I go like this" makes me want to do a little soft-shoe dance; it makes me think of a vaudeville act).

And the book has re-awakened an old desire in me, one that I've had for perhaps as long as 25 years now, ever since a school (or maybe it was day camp) field trip to Hale Farm in Bath, Ohio (not very far from where I grew up). One of the traditional crafts shown at the farm was weaving.

As I remember it, the loom was huge - I think it was one designed that rugs could be made on it - and it was the only furniture (besides the weaver's stool) in the room. The room was whitewashed, with wood-plank floors. And something about the whole set-up appealed deeply to me, even as a pre-teen.

I could picture myself at that loom. I could picture myself in a big empty room, sitting and weaving, as the sun made butter-colored bars across the wood floor. I could hear the rhythm - step on the pedals to move the warp threads into position, throw the shuttle, pull the bar to put the course of weaving into place, drop the heddles again, and do the next row. I could see myself doing it - playing the foot pedals like the organist at church played the pedals on the big pipe organ. I could even feel myself doing it - the quick wrist motion to send the shuttle through, the satisfying firmness of the beater bar putting the threads in place.

The fantasy ebbs and flows. Sometimes I'll forget about it for years at a time. Sometimes it will come to me very strongly - particularly when I'm dissatisfied with something about work, I contemplate what it would be like to be a full-time artisan, making what living I could off of the rugs and wraps and towels that I wove.

(I do know I wouldn't want to be a full-time artisan knitter; I suspect if I learned to weave I would feel the same way about that).

I picture myself in a big room nearly empty of furniture, with a hardwood floor on which the sun is making butter-colored bars. Unlike the Hale Farm weaver, who worked in silence or to the accompaniment of whatever sounds came to her dooryard, I'd have Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony playing, or perhaps some of Vaughn Williams' work, on the stereo.

My mother does own a loom; a friend found it for her cheaply. She's not used it much and now it sits in their basement. I've told her more than once that if she ever wants to dispose of it, I'll take it; I'd even pay her for it if that was what she wanted. I live partly in hope and partly in fear that some day when they come to visit me, they will come towing a trailer, and my mother will inform me that she has brought the loom...because really, I don't have a good place for it. I could move things around in the dining room and put it in there, I suppose, but having a loom in my dining room would seriously cement my weirdness. And the living room is already too cluttered, and my sewing room is too remote from the "public" rooms of the house to take the instructor I would surely have to hire back to...

But still, it's something I daydream about, because it seems like something that would be nice.

I also daydream about learning to spin with a spinning wheel - I tried drop-spindle spinning and either the instructional video was not very good for me or I lack good coordination for that sort of activity, because I got nothing when I tried to spin the wool into yarn. I don't know anyone who owns a wheel, though (For that matter, I don't know anyone other than my mother who owns a loom, and hers isn't set up right now). What I would really love would be to have the chance for a day or two to go somewhere - or have someone with a portable wheel come to me - and show me the ropes, so I can see if it was something I'd love, without investing in an expensive piece of equipment.

Of course, I'd like to try that with a loom, too. I've tried various "portable" looms but they are not the same. What I want to try is something with foot-pedals - it has to have foot-pedals. For me, that's a big part of the fantasy, oddly enough.

And of course, all of this thinking about "crafts I would like to learn" comes up on the dreaded First Week of the Month, the week when I am Never at Home: book club Monday, youth group leading Wednesday, AAUW tonight - and Tuesday I was home but might have well not have been; I foolishly agreed to make two pies for a potluck.

So part of this daydreaming is an escape mechanism from my too busy life. It's imagining - or maybe peeking into one of those infinite numbers of alternative universes that some suppose exist - a life for me where my schedule is less variable and more constant, where the first thing I do after breakfast is head into my workroom and start on the day's projects, where I could go for several days without going on the computer, or dealing with people who "need" something from me, or even several days without leaving the house. And as sad and as stressed as I'd doubtless be as a production weaver (or knitter or spinner or quilter), it's one of those "the grass is always greener" situations, and is fun to dream about.