Week 5

This week I finished up my traditional stringing.  It was very annoying to do in the way that there was just so much string involved.  For every weave I had to pull through yards of string and sometimes it ends up being even more when it gets tangled and confusing.  It seemed to get tangled almost every weave too.  After a handful of goes though i started to learn a trick, and whether it was that, or the fact I had half as much sting, it didn't seem to get tangled nearly as much.  Another pain with this form of stringing is the fact that you cannot tell how it is going to come out until the end.  With mesh you can somewhat see the pocket that will come and edit it due to what you see.  For traditional on the other hand, all that you can see is the sides and you really have no idea what it is going to look like.  Lastly, it is also a pain that it is so hard to notice problems, let alone go back and fix them.  Stringing traditional is so methodical and such a long process that, in the process, you get numb to changes because you get more worried about being done.  The main time that you do notice the problems though is when you are actually done the stringing and at that time it is pointless to go back because you will usually have to redo the whole thing.  For that reason, it shouldn't be recommended for inexperienced people, because they will probably mess it up and just find it a pain.  This is where I found an idea for my TED talk.  The idea being that harder work might make a better product, but it is only true if you have the skill to get the most out of that work.  In other words, if you leave someone trying something for hours with no clue what they are doing or how to do it, there will not  be a better product than the easy way.  If you give an experienced person the same time though they will get a much better product out of the time, and that is where hard work and experience combine to make the best product.
I also started to work on my final project.  This stinging is called a Pita Pocket.  This stinging is a newer twist on the traditional stinging.  It is one of the more commonly found ways, and is known as one of the best.  It still uses the four leathers and the crosslace mesh but it is done a bit differently creating a different pocket.
For these different pockets I used a couple of sources.  My main source for the traditional was elacrosse.com.  It wasn't as effective later in the project as earlier, but it was trill helpful, especially since there were so little sources on traditional.  The Pita Pocket on the other hand had many more helpful sources.  A couple of the best sources that I could find were Weston from Colorado on youtube, and http://sweet.laxallstars.com/how-to-string-a-pita-pocket/.  Laxallstars is helpful because it offers pictures of every step of the project, and the pictures are clean and easy to understand.  It also offers examples of every different step.  Weston from Colorado is also helpful for the reason that you can physically see the process going on.  You can see someone actually doing the work and in that way you are able to copy it more exactly and have a more accurate example because it is not only of what the product will be, but also of what you must do.