Fixing the Crooked Bits, or Leaving Them, That'll Do
Okay. Fringe is trimmed, hanging cord's on, it's on the wall. This is the last lesson, so let's talk about what you do when you step back and something's just... off.
Because something will be off. Every single hanging I've made, all two dozen of them, has at least one spot where a row's a little crooked or a knot's a little tight or the spacing wanders for two inches in the middle. That's not a flaw in you. That's just what happens when a human ties a few hundred knots by hand instead of a machine doing it.
So the question isn't "how do I avoid mistakes." It's "which ones do I fix and which ones do I let go."
First, walk away from it for a day
Before you decide anything's wrong, stop looking at it. Go do something else. Have some dinner. Come back tomorrow and look at it fresh, ideally from across the room, the way anyone who actually sees it hanging in your house is going to see it. Up close, every knot looks like a crisis. From six feet back, most of them disappear.
This is the same thing I tell people about trimming the fringe last, on the wall. Distance fixes more problems than fixing does.
What's actually worth fixing
A few things I will go back and undo, even now:
- A row that's visibly crooked across the whole width, not just one knot, one section
- A color that landed in totally the wrong spot because you grabbed the wrong cord
- A knot tied backward for a stretch you didn't catch early, the kind we talked about a couple lessons ago, undo it now not later
If it's small, contained, one knot out of a hundred, I'd leave it. Nobody who isn't the person who tied it is ever going to find that knot. I promise you.
What I don't fix anymore, and why
The first hanging I ever finished, I hung it in the front room and Deborah looked at it for a long minute and said the fringe was crooked. It was crooked. She wasn't wrong. I left it up anyway. It's still there, years later, still crooked, and I like it better than some of the ones I've made since where everything came out even. It's the one that taught me the knots. It earned the crooked fringe.
That's kind of my whole philosophy on this, if I've got one. A finished ugly one beats a perfect unfinished one. Waste bothers me more than it should, and an abandoned project, or a project you unravel three times chasing perfect, is wasted cord and wasted time. At some point you've got to let the thing be done.
If you do need to redo a section
Here's how to do it without making it worse.
- Find where the problem starts. Not where you noticed it, where it actually starts. Run your fingers along the row.
- Untie back to that point, one knot at a time. Don't yank a section out all at once, you'll lose track of tension on the cords around it and end up with a bigger mess.
- Re-tie slow. Slower than you think you need to.
- Step back again before you trim anything or call it finished.
This is where I've got to tell on myself again, since I already told you the crooked fringe story. A while back I cut all my cord for a project before I'd measured properly, twice, the way I'm always telling you to. I was in a hurry, felt productive cutting a whole pile of cord at once, and came up about eight inches short on every single strand. Every one. Had to start the whole project over from scratch. So now I measure, cut one strand, tie one complete row with it to make sure it's long enough, and only then cut the rest to match. Learned that one the expensive way, and by expensive I mean I wasted a whole ball of cord and an evening.
Point is, even the guy teaching the class still gets in a hurry and pays for it. Slow down at the start and you fix more problems before they exist.
A word on hanging it up for real
Once you've decided it's done, done, pick your nail or hook carefully. Drywall in most houses out here isn't forgiving, and if the hanging's got any real weight to it, from a heavy dowel or a lot of cord, use a proper anchor, not just a nail. You don't want to walk in some morning and find your six hours of knotting on the floor with a chunk of drywall still attached to the hanging cord.
The part I actually want you to hear
At the end of the day, and I know that's the Utah County phrase everybody uses without thinking about it, the crooked bits are what make it yours. A store-bought one doesn't have a spot where you got distracted and the spacing drifted for two inches. Yours does. That's not a flaw you're stuck with, that's just proof a person made it.
Give it to somebody if you've got somebody in mind. That's still my favorite part of any of this.
Before next time: hang yours where you'll actually see it every day for a week, and notice whether the thing that bothered you up close still bothers you from across the room.