First Attempts at Weaving

I'm weaving!

I finished warping my little table loom last night. After attending the open workshop at Yarns by Design, the book Learning to Weave by Deborah Chandler makes a lot more sense.

I figured out how to attach the warp to the front roller, adjusted the tension. Loaded the stick shuttle with yarn, tested the heddle harnesses--and I was weaving! It IS fun--and it seems to go pretty fast. I was able to do about a yard in not very much time. It took longer to warp it, than it did to do the weaving.

I used a medium acrylic yarn above. It has a nice soft feel to it. I filled up the stick shuttle 3 times. A boat shuttle would probably be too thick to use on this little loom. The shed wouldn't open wide enough to use a boat shuttle easily, so it's a good thing I bought the stick shuttle.


The last round of yarn is the red wool above. This is the first batch of yarn I ever spun myself in a spinning class about 10 years ago. It was a nice cream-colored roving. The teacher taught us how to dye it with Kool-Aid back then. It was pretty rough and ugly stuff, I thought. I never would have kept it--I'm a much better spinner now. However, it's a nice record of how far I've come with these crafts. My husband had the foresight to save that red ball of yarn all these years--for just such an occasion as now--my first attempt at weaving.

At this point, I'm out of warp. At the workshop the other night, the teacher only had me put on about 1-1/2 yards of warp--just enough to learn the process. Next time, I'll put on 5-6 yards so I can do a few more things with it. Now I'll have to make sure I can attend the next open workshop so she can show me how to fix the problems (uneven tension in the warp strings, uneven edges ...) and how to remove the newly minted fabric from the loom.

I think the next warp might be black or dark purple. I want to see what a dark warp does for the weave ... So many possibilities! I may have to move up to a larger sized loom someday. I think it's safe to say--I'm hooked!