Little Looms

AFTER TWO LONG YEARS OF STAYING CLOSE TO HOME, I’m looking forward to traveling again. As an editor of a weaving magazine, I find that traveling is so much more than just staying at hotels and seeing the local sights. It’s also about checking out small yarn shops and weaving studios and, of course, picking up a souvenir skein or two. Over the years, these detours have led to a special collection of yarn and, well, “yarns,” because it’s often the conversations with shop owners, weavers, and other fiber folk that I remember most. After a couple of years of not traveling more than a few hours from my house, I’m looking forward to my next vacation someplace far away with new sights, sounds, and yarn shops. In the meantime, I’m…

Sheep Baah-bins Add some whimsy to your loom with these cute and useful sheep-shaped bobbins from KnitWitNerd. Designed for times when you only need a little yarn, such as when weaving a small tapestry or doing inlay, each bobbin measures 2 inches by 2½ inches. The four plastic bobbins in each set are 3D printed and come in multiple colors. KnitWitNerd.etsy.com Color Selector Do you sometimes struggle with picking colors that work well together? If so, let the Rainbow Pick, Point, and Match Color Selector from PattieWack Designs be your trusty guide in showing you complementary, split-complementary, and triad color combinations, all based on your main project color. The clear windows on the wheel allow you to match your project’s color to the color wheel. Then you simply turn the inner wheel to…

Margaret Stump Lanham, MD: Stackpole, 2017. Paperback, $17.95, 120 pages. ISBN 978-0811716130. About a third of the book is dedicated to tutorials on weaving with a variety of portable looms, including the 4-inch square loom, a 2-inch pin loom, and an adjustable fine-gauge knitting loom. You’ll even find directions for weaving with yarn rather than loops on a potholder loom. Anyone who enjoys weaving on the ubiquitous 4-inch loom will love the lesson on bias weaving on that loom, and the instructions for weaving triangles on square and rectangle looms are particularly clever. Learning those special techniques will open up a whole new world of design possibilities for anyone using a single loom. The section on joins is my favorite part of Pin Loom Weaving to Go. Not only does Stump go beyond…

THE YARN Kazoku, 135 yd/100g, 100% spun silk; available in over 100 colorways. Kazoku from Treenway Silks is a 10/3 spun silk with tight twist that gives the yarn a cord-like look. But don’t let its appearance fool you. Kazoku weaves into a soft, light fabric when sett at 10 to 12 ends per inch (epi). Its high twist gives it strength, and although the tight twist obscures some of its luster, Kazoku still shines in woven fabrics. I used it without problems in direct warping; it had some static cling, but by lightly spraying it with water, I was able to alleviate the problem. I found it worked especially well when used for a ground cloth to highlight other yarns. I handwashed all the samples with a mild detergent in warm…

Let’s look at the vocabulary that describes handwoven tapestry, starting with the structure. As mentioned, it’s usually plain weave with each row of weft woven in an over-one/under-one alternation of warp ends. Tapestry is also typically weft-faced, meaning the weft completely covers and hides the warp ends. As with other weaving, the weft insertion into a selected shed (the opening created when some warp ends are raised or lowered) is called a pick. When two picks are used in alternate sheds, the plain-weave structure is formed. These are the basic components that create the many results possible in handwoven tapestry. Although the fabric structure is simple, there are myriad ways in which multiple discontinuous wefts can be woven within it. I’ll describe one of those methods here: meet and separate.…

The secret to successful cloth design is simple: sample! Many weavers shy away from sampling for a variety of reasons: It takes too much time, it uses up materials, or it does not produce a finished product. I can state unequivocally that my most successful projects are those that were created as a result of sampling, while those that were created without the benefit of sampling have often been disappointing. SAMPLING FOR AESTHETICS Sampling allows you to assess the hand of the woven cloth and its suitability for the intended item. A sample can be used to determine exactly how yarns will interact in the same warp, how different colors and textures in the weft impact the finished cloth, how different methods of seaming or hemming will affect the cloth, and how…