This was my first project. I started it, and completed most of it, in a class. My goal for this project was simple: To learn the basics about weaving, and to be successful in a minor weaving effort. I also wanted to see if weaving was interesting to me – if I felt, after this first exercise, like continuing.
I had read some books about weaving. I also had been to the Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona, and I talked with a very helpful woman there. I will mention her name in later posts, and thank her, once I remember to learn it. That’s a habit that I am not proud of.
She showed me several looms, and things that could be made on those looms. Since I was interested in starting small, I signed up for a class using a rigid heddle loom. Those looms are table-top, portable, and are less complicated than a shaft loom (either table-top or pedal-operated free standing variety).
I was excited and a little anxious. Although I know that weaving is not an activity limited to women, I was the only man in the shop. And, for anything truly new, I am a little bit nervous going in. I am not sure that’s true for everybody, but it sure is for me.
I started my weaving career (that sounds so momentous!) on May 31st, 2015, in a class at the Fiber Factory. Susan Clark was our instructor. She was very good. She was easy to get along with, very practical, very patient with us, and promoted our efforts. There were two of us in the class, a woman named Sherry as well as myself. Sherry had experience in other fabric pursuits, that was clear to me, but we were both new to weaving.
We had the class on a couple of tables in a back room at the shop. The room’s walls were cluttered with shelves of various projects in various stages, extra pieces for looms, scraps of all sorts of fabrics, and paper and cardboard abounding. I wondered why all the paper. I learned about that later. There were no windows. It was a pretty good environment for allowing concentration on the subject at hand.
I used a Schacht Cricket 10″ loom.
It is a good beginner’s loom. I had already read about it, and I was happy that I got to use it. I was considering buying this loom.
I had thought that it might be troublesome picking yarn, since I really didn’t have a specific plan or goal. But Susan was helpful. She pointed me towards a rack of yarn that would work well in the classroom loom. The Cricket had an 8 dent heddle.
So in 2 minutes I decided on a bunch of lavender yarn. I need to learn the names of these things – I am sure that “bunch” is a description that could stand to be improved. (Late-breaking learning: I think it is a skein.) I chose a single color, lavender, same for warp and weft, to make it as easy as possible for myself for the first project. I have no clue why I chose lavender in those 2 minutes. It ended up in my hand.
Here are the details of the yarn, as much for my historical benefit as anything else:
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I plan to record the weaving-lingo description of the yarn I use for projects, so that I can repeat the projects and also so that most readers can have a correct notion of what I used. This is a start – I hope to improve my technical descriptions over time.
The label says “knitting worsted weight” which means nothing to me at this point.
An exercise from the book “Learning to Weave” is to wind the yarn around a ruler for an inch. I wound 12 or 13 winds. Divide by 2, gives me 6.5. So I think that I did have correct-enough yarn for an 8 dent heddle.
The label says “100 grams = approx. 200 yards”. So if I do some conversions I calculate about 900 yards per pound. (454/100 x 200) As I read more, I see that this was a fairly “fat” choice for yarn.
It is 3-ply.
So I walked into the back room with a bunch (no! a “skein”!) of yarn in my hand.
We tied down one thread at the warp end, then used a peg a table’s length away (I don’t know the actual distance, probably something like 60″ or more) to both warp the yarn and to dress the loom at the same time. I am not sure those are the correct words.
We pulled the thread through the slots in the heddle, a double thread, wound it around the peg, then did that again until we had the width that we needed. Then we took one of the doubled threads in each slot, and moved it to the adjacent hole in the heddle. Of course we had to cut the yarn at the distant peg before doing this, but things were relatively orderly.
Now we had the heddle all set up properly, with the width of material what we wanted. In this case we were trying for 6″ more or less, but we weren’t particular.
Keeping fairly even tension on the warp, we wound the yarn onto the warp beam. This is where we used some paper, putting it in each layer of warp rounding the beam, so that the yarn on the warp beam, at each revolution, was fairly evenly tensioned. This activity is better with three or four hands, so Susan helped us with that.Then we used some clever knots to tie off, re-tension, and re-tie the yarn to the cloth beam (the place where finished cloth winds onto – the yarn “travels” from warp beam to cloth beam while weaving).
Then we started weaving.
We wound a shuttle and made a few initial passes (I forget the details of this), and started weaving. You leave a little on the side, just a little, and you leave the yarn a little loose, and then when you beat the weft that little loose-ness gets taken up because of the up-and-down movement of the weft onto the warp. Or something like that.
I started with close to a 6″ width but I can see that I pinched it a little during my weaving, and lost additional width in the first wash. I was fairly consistent with my pinching. Amazing that if you are consistent, even consistently in error, things tend to look okay. But you know that you were in error, ha ha. And, if you were counting on a certain size, you’ve messed up. But that wasn’t the case for me for this first piece.
I worked all day on it that Saturday in class, and a few hours on it on Sunday at home.
I cut and tied the ends on my own, then cut the fringes to make them equal length. I have a sense that there is probably a better way to do them, and better knots to tie them with, than those that I used. But I wanted to finish and get the loaned loom back to the store.
I washed it by hand in warm water in a sink, and laid it outside on a towel to dry.
I ended up with a scarf, 57″ long and 5″ wide, that looks like a first try but looks pretty good. You can be the judge.
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Although the pictures were taken with the same camera (smart phone), the colors look different because there was different light for some of them. The “true” color is lavender. I actually can’t say which picture is closest to the true color. Weird, that.
It feels good in the hands, soft yet substantial.
I was pleased with my result. Terry liked it as well.
I decided to buy a rigid heddle loom, and bought a Kromski Harp 24″ loom from the Fiber Factory. It will get to them in about a week. By then I hope I have a plan for “002”!
Here are some observations from my first weaving experience:
- You have to prepare. You must have a plan or you cannot start. You have to calculate how much yarn you need, and get it, especially if the yarn is rare. You have to measure the amount of warp you will use. You have to place the warp on the loom. That can be a pleasing job, or it can be a tedious task. It is up to you which attitude you choose. You have to mind the tension in the warp so that your project goes smoothly later.
- When weaving, you have to pay attention on each pick. Your goal is consistency, and consistency doesn’t happen if your attention is elsewhere. Your selvedges will expose your inattention. Some of that is experience, but much of it is attention.
- Weaving takes time before the product is complete. Is it a long time? It is the right amount of time. You have to stay with it, be patient and attentive and consistent.
- If you approach weaving with the right attitude, you can have a comfortable fun time all the way through, and in the end you’ll have produced something beautiful.
Hey, just while I was finishing this blog, I got news that my loom came in! Onward!