Weaving with Arthritis
I’ve been trying to write about weaving and rheumatoid arthritis for a while now.
Photo by Laura Muus Photography.
Previously, any time I sat down to write, I approached it like I was trying to advocate for weaving as a craft for people with hand and wrist pain and disability.
People like me.
Because yes, as far as fiber crafts go, elements of weaving are conducive to working with pain. With tools like a heddle or foot pedals to lift alternate warp strings and create a shed, tossing the shuttle stick through or gripping a large bobbin to move over and under select strings is a large enough movement that can be done even with swollen, clumsy fingers.
But before that, there’s the initial warping: keeping either hundreds of individual strings organized and threading them through the tiny holes or slots of the heddle, and/or gripping a single string tight over an extended period of time to warp a frame loom. Tying knots, sewing in ends – for as many steps to weaving as there are that can be done with pained hands, there are just as many that are made more challenging and occasionally infuriating.
All this being said, weaving does offer something special for those with arthritis, autoimmune disease, or any kind of chronic illness.
Something that goes far beyond mechanics. It offers an opportunity to create order in a chaotic, unpredictable world where your body can at any time, decide to rebel and stop working properly, at any age and for no discernible reason.
I was twenty-two when I first started experiencing symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. (Read more about my diagnosis and my early processing of what it meant for me in this essay published on Buzzfeed.) It did not run in my family and I was not considered to be at risk. At the time, I was an active young person working an intense outdoor job in the Conservation Corps in northern Minnesota. It took a year to properly diagnose my illness, and nearly five years after that to get my symptoms somewhat under control. Since then, the pain and inflammation continue to fluctuate and working hands are never guaranteed. There is rarely a clear way to predict or solve flare ups, which in the last year or so, have been frequent and persistent.
With weaving, you take a tangle of string and a bulky wooden machine and organize chaotic nothingness into a grid: perhaps the simplest, most orderly, predictable thing there is, There is so much satisfaction in the simplicity of the action of moving a string over under over under over another string and emerging with a physical, undeniable woven object, to be hung on the wall or wrapped around the body or laid across the floor.
I am not saying that I started weaving because I consciously sought to create order.
Weaving at Honeymoon Bluff on the Gunflint Trail. Photo by Laura Muus Photography.
Order and control and construction seem like such cold, clinical words for such a warm, soft, dynamic craft. But I can see now how weaving has offered me these things even when I didn’t know it was. Clare Hunter writes in Threads of Life about how embroidery, another fiber art, provided Mary, Queen of Scots, with an opportunity to “create order and exercise choice.” While she writes this in terms of what embroidery offered to Mary to cope with the “tumult and humiliation of her life,” I found it easily applicable to my experience with weaving, which has given me the gift of creating order and exercising choice while living in an unpredictable body and with unpredictable health.
And so yes, weaving can be done with arthritis or other physical ailments that zero in on the hands. Certain parts of it are easier on the fingers and hands than other fiber crafts, other parts are not. But beyond the mechanics, weaving offers a way to create warm, soft, dynamic order in spite of disorderly bodies, and to accumulate brilliant beauty while the body slowly, microscopically, breaks apart.