So, you might be asking yourself, what could possibly be distracting Heather so much from her blog that she hasn't posted in a very long time? The answer - weaving! The two wool/alpaca scarves that I wove at our lys were just the beginning. I gave the first of them to my mom, who was ecstatic to receive my first weaving ever. One of our friends from Tempe Yarn and Fiber told me that if I was serious about learning to weave (e.g. take the weaving class at TYF), she would loan me one of her floor looms. When I told my mom this, she said that I could have the money to take the class if she had it at the end of the week. She did and I started weaving classes almost 4 weeks ago. I learned how to warp a loom and all the terms and my brain was full of information - but it was so much fun. I took to it very quickly and after I finished my first piece, a sampler, I pretty much warped my second project by myself, with Terry just observing to make sure I didn't make a huge error.
My first real weaving project was a sampler, like I said. I'm not a big sampler person, but I was really glad that I was pushed gently into doing it. I pulled the yarns for the sampler from my stash, things that would match the warp, but were different from each other. I used worsted weight, fingering weight, sport weight and some novelty yarn (which I never buy but was so glad I did because it looked totally different than any of the other yarns on my sampler) and proceeded to do an inch of tabby, two inches of twill and 3/4 inch of tabby but weaving with buttons. The sampler was really instructional and it turned about beautifully. My mom saw it and decided she had to have it - so I finished it off as a wall hanging for her. Here are the pictures:
The second project I did in the class was a shawl, I gave it to Laurie as her birthday present. I used heritage sock yarn (which is washable wool) the brown as the warp and the weft was the lilac color. I used all 24 inches of weaving space on the loom, which meant a lot of time dressing the loom (getting the warp threaded and set up on the loom in order to start weaving). I used a very complicated pattern for a beginner, called gothic cross. It was a bit time consuming to thread the heddles in the proper order and more than halfway through it I realized I had a threading error. I ended up practically rethreading it all to fix the error. After fixing the threading error, I sleyed (threaded) the reed and realized after I started weaving that I had mis-threaded the reed and had to fix one little section (that mistake wasn't as awful as the first). I learned a lot from this project! Mistakes mean more learning - right?! Once I started weaving, it went very quickly. I am so proud of this project! I love it and I think Laurie does too. Laurie has been asking for an everyday shawl for quite sometime now, all the shawls I've knitted her have been in luxury fibers and not appropriate to snuggle in during everyday situations, so this project was the answer. It's washable and warm! And beautiful! I'm still working on twisting the fringe on the shawl. I've finished one side, but barely begun on the second. One of our friends loaned us her fringe twister, so it's going much faster than on the earlier scarves where I was hand twisting the fringe... Here are the pictures:
The next pictures are of some cotton that I am planning to weave 4 towels and 2 washcloths out of. Camelot (my therapeutic horsemanship program) has a big fundraiser in May and students are asked to contribute, whether with donations requested from others or from themselves, to a basket and the baskets are tagged with the student's picture and bio. For my basket, I'm planning to weave 4 colored hand towels and 2 white washcloths and then I will put in some bath and body works things like body wash and such. I think it will be a lot of fun! I know I had fun picking out all the colors. I'm using the white for the warp and the stripy colors for the weft for the towels, and white for both like I said for the washcloths. I hope they are well used eventually!
I've really pushed myself these last few weeks, but it was so worth it. I'm happily catching up on sleep now and looking forward to posting my next post... ;)
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