Developing awareness on extraneous movements while at the loom

I wove a great deal yesterday, after a few weeks of taking care of other stuff.

The Ocean-Born Mary scarf warp is still on the loom. 

I think I had been weaving for about an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that something was bugging me about *how* I was weaving - more specifically put, my hand movements surrounding the handling of the shuttle. 

I have been weaving for 36 years, but not until yesterday did I ever think to look critically at my bodily movements while handling the shuttle.

As I watched myself weave, I realized that as I catch the shuttle as it exits the shed, I draw it up and away from the shed and the beater, probably in an effort to not whack the shuttle with the beater while drawing the beater forward to beat the shot.

I had taken this real need to move the shuttle backwards and had, over the years, developed an exaggerated movement back and *up*, to the point at which I found myself holding the shuttle way above my head.  It was slightly less so when catching with the right hand, but still pretty much the same.  Big wasted movement, wasted energy, undue wear and tear on the body, and wasted time spent pulling the shuttle up and away, and then having to look down at the weaving to find the spot in the next shed where I should place the nose of the shuttle. 

So I imagined where the shuttle would be after a shot if it was being used in a fly-shuttle set-up.

And it wasn't over my head and way back.

I tried to imagine catching the shuttle without any undue movement; and with enough speed to get the edge of the shot into the corner of the shed and selvedge to bed it nicely, and it worked.

There arose a kind of movement that basically kept the shuttle at exactly the same level as it would need to be in order to accurately enter the next shed without exploding any of the selvedge threads.  As I drew the beater backwards to pack the weft up to the fell of the cloth, I found that I was able to still keep the shuttle close to where the next shed would open up, at exactly the same level, while at the same time drawing backwards with the shuttle to avoid hitting it with the beater.   All in all this gave rise to a kind of windshield wiper shape of movement, with approximately 2/3 less motion, no extraneous motions up and back, and with considerably less time.

As once Artur Rubenstein is said to have shut himself up once to 'relearn' how to touch the piano, I started very slowly to weave, but with only the exact movements I'd just explored.  It took a very long time, a few hours, but finally I was able to keep weaving that way without effort and without looking.  The net result was that the weaving progressed much faster, and the motion of throwing/catching the shuttle and pulling it, without changing its level, backwards to accomodate the beater suddenly became *one* smooth motion, and on a soft curve. 

After hours and hours of weaving like that I found I had progressed by about a yard more than I otherwise would have, even at my fastest previous pace.  And no pains in the rotator cuffs in my shoulder joints, either!