New for me, anyway! Babs has a long-time love for the craft, and the beautiful variety of items that can be produced with a loom and yarn. In order to be able to help our customers who may want to use our yarns to create with weaving, I'm beginning at square one with a big rigid heddle loom - a Kromski Harp - and some Northumbria Fingering. I caked the skeins and sat down with a book from the library and a Craftsy video.
Remember when you last started a new skill? There is a whole new language to become familiar with! Warp and weft... sett and sley! I'm still tripping over the words, but the doing is wonderful!
There is math. The craftsy video included worksheets for figuring out how much yarn I needed for warp and weft. My goal was to use up the majority of the 2 skeins of Northumbria Fingering so that I could get a feel for the amount of weaving produced - What can you make with 2 skeins? So I followed along with the video, did a little reading, and dove right in!
I chose Obsidian to warp the loom and used the direct warping method.
After carefully pulling long loops through the slots in the heddle, I wound the 2.5 yards x 112 ends onto the rear beam of the loom.
Then distributed the ends into the holes...
...and tied the ends onto the front beam of the loom. There is a lot of concern about tension in weaving, and I had no reference to go from... so I tied and pulled and fiddled until things seemed even and uniform. Then it was time to weave a header to even out the spacing of the warp - weaving, but not quite weaving...
Now I could use the Joan of Arc and begin to see the colors play!
The process is detailed and repetitive, relaxing and rewarding! I practiced weaving in ends, and played with selvedges, and made mistakes, and corrected most of them. I made fabric, and it was pretty!
And it IS portable!
When I ran out Joan of Arc, I realized that I still had plenty of warp left, and began to realize that my weaving had some issues. My weft rows were approximately double the number of warp epi (ends per inch)... and that made my "finished" piece half the length I had planned on paper. I had accidentally made a weft-faced fabric. Beginnings are full of fun and mistakes and learning!
I picked out the header, tied a knotted fringe, and gave it a bath!
It is a short runner...and I really like it! The next warp is already on the loom and I will let you know what comes off this time!
1 comment
Loveitloveitloveit.