Archive for the 'Fiber Arts' Category

i’m playing in my first WAL (Weave-Along) over on Weavolution with the backstrap weaving group. it has been an interesting and exciting learning experience. Lavern (our wonderful experienced teacher/cheerleader/organizer) is a wealth of knowledge and doesn’t complain about going over things repeatedly when we don’t quite get it.

the WAL is going in 2 parts. one is a more advanced group doing double weave pick up patterns (i’m reading along with interest and will try that later!!). the other group is for the more beginner backstrap weavers. there is a group of folks who just started putting together their looms and learning to weave on a backstrap. i’m working along with that group.

for this project, i didn’t use my rigid heddle. instead i learned to make string heddles.  in the photo at the bottom of this post, you can see the shed stick (pencil with 1 loop of yellow string holding the stick shed) and the heddle stick (pencil covered in loops of yellow sting each securing a single warp tread in the heddle shed) for warp faced weaving, the string heddles are much better! (but my rigid heddle will still be used a bunch. i love the soft plain weave fabric i wove with it. must make some scarves… )

the WAL project was stripes. we were given 3 options with instruction on how to warp for each: Vertical Stripes, Horizontal Stripes, or Combs. always determined to do things the hard way, i decided to plan out a pattern and warp up using all 3 methods at once.

this is where my “learning opportunities” began…  somehow in all my reading and talking to weavers…my brain just failed to register that you should tie the warp to the *warp* when starting and ending… not to the ruler i was using clamped to my desk as a warping peg. duh. i won’t make that mistake again. but, even worse than that… about half way through wrapping my warp, my rulers started to slip and the distance my warp was traveling got shorter and shorter as they pulled in. this meant that my warp was 1.not one continuous loop that could even out tension by itself and 2. very badly tensioned! ACK!!

ok, lesson learned. i chalked it up to learning experience and moved on. i put my lease sticks (two pencils) into the cross and secured them (rubber bands). feeling confident, i lifted the warp off the warping “pegs” and started to transfer it to my loom bars. ACK! i dropped it. Doh! Doh! Doh! ok, preserver!  i was so close to a beautiful warp and i was learning…. i slipped all the warp ends on the loom bars and strapped myself in…. and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half reordering the ends back the way they started.

Whew! ok, that done, i thought it would be smooth sailing… i got out my directions on how to reorder the warp threads for the horizontal stripes and combs. that went perfectly! that was the hard part right? i was feeling so proud of myself. i took a small break. checked the WAL group. patted my self on the back. and got out my instructions to start making string heddles. again, it went smoothly and came out perfect! i was really riding the high! this weaving thing was awesome! i still had the problem of uneven tension, but other than that, my warp was looking good. so, after another brief break, i strapped myself in again and started meticulously tugging on each warp thread to move the slack to the nearest knot and tighten it up.. until an hour later (back aching and very tired) there was even tension across the entire warp! huzzah!

deep calming sigh. now, all that lay in sight was to weave it up. all the patterning was already programed in… it was simple weaving. i took out my lease sticks and looked at it in a little bit on satisfied wonder.
just then, the phone rang… it was my mom. she had broken her arm (humerus) and was in a lot of pain. jumping up to talk to her, my toe caught in the warps and suddenly my shed stick was no longer secured my that little yellow string… or even in the warp at all!!! oh no!! in my stress and tired state, i believed this meant that all the work that had gone into it was lost and ruined. mom was more important, and i left the weaving sitting in corner for a week as i avoided thinking about my poor mess…

and then after a week of finishing projects due in on deadlines.. and as my mother’s arm got taken care of… suddenly, my mental fog cleared and i realized, THAT SHED WASN’T GONE! all i had to do was reverse the process i had used to make the string heddles… slipping my warps over the shed stick instead. duh. the heddles secured things in order. nothing was lost. nothing was defeated. i had just needed the mental break to clear out the garbage from my head and be ready for understanding to come.

the wonderful thing about that whole process though, was that with each miss step i got a much clearer picture of what was going on with the whole process and why things were important. if i had followed things to the letter and had no miss steps, i wouldn’t have learned as much.

onward to weaving… i’ve done 25″ so far. i still have 11″ of warp left, so i want to get a little farther… but it is getting much harder to open the sheds, so i decided to take a break. i am hoping to use this to make a good wide supportive backstrap for my loom…