If you’re in my online classes, you might by now be used to me saying that tapestry weaving takes practice. As adults, I actually think this fact can be a little hard for us to wrap our minds around. Many of us trained for a long time when we were much younger to become good at whatever we spend much of our days doing. We forget that back then, we practiced.

When learning tapestry weaving, we have to understand with our heads how the structures work and we have to teach our hands to manage the physical materials we’re working with.

In college, I trained to be a piano teacher. I knew I was never going to play in Carnegie Hall, nor did I have any desire to be a performer. I loved my pedagogy classes and ended up writing a piano method for preschoolers as a senior honors thesis. In the process of testing that book, I taught a little group of 3 and 4-year-olds to play the piano from my method. I was astounded at how fast these little tykes could gain the physical knowledge of pressing particular keys. They were not, however, so quick at understanding how reading music worked.