I used some different coloured yarns to (hopefully) create interesting patterns later on. I didn’t have clever tools like a warping peg or board, so my warp was a little bit wonky. The warp is the bunch of threads that lie lengthwise in your weaving, and you weave your weft through the warp. Still didn’t prevent me from making all kinds of rookie mistakes! Warping the loom It looked a bit daunting, but I had already read Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom so I knew what to expect (more or less). It’s a no-name loom that has been circulating around crafters who want to try to weave. My original vision for this spin was a more saturated blend of purples and oranges, but in order to stretch out the colors to have enough for a big project (most likely a sweater), I added a substantial amount of undyed fiber, which ultimately toned the yarn down to a lavender color.Īs I was spinning, I figured I would jut overdye to get the yarn to the color I wanted, knowing that would also even out the color of the yarn.Yes, I took the plunge! My friend Gloryfied let me borrow her simple rigid heddle loom to try and weave on it. I figured I would put it through the drum carder anyways, and decided to blend the braids with some other colors of merino I had on hand, plus a little bit of silk that was part of another braid. And while I love Malabrigo, their spinning fiber is often felted, and this was no exception. Both were mostly purple, but one was more blue, and the other was more purple. The impetus for this project was two braids of Malabrigo Nube. And in addition to the actual spinning, there's the plying, which I somehow didn't think of when I was setting my goal! This project accounts for 30 of those ounces. In January, I blew that goal out of the water! Instead of spinning 20 ounces, I spun about 35 ounces. Plus, I have an underlying goal of spinning about 12 pounds of fiber this year, and 4 ounces a week will get me there (plus give me a little bit of grace in those weeks I don't quite measure up). In part, I want to get a better understanding of how much I really spin, because it's not something I've really tracked before. This spin is finished! This year, I've set myself a goal of spinning about four ounces of fiber every week. It was a process all its own, but much faster than starting from square one! Once I was finished, no threads remained in the incorrect reed, so it was easy to just pull it away.Īfter sleying all the ends through the reed, I tipped it upright and put it into the beater, then tied on to the front beam and checked for errors. Then I pulled each group of threads out of the incorrect reed and placed them into the correct one. I pushed the incorrect reed back, and then put the correct reed in front. But because I had already done a lot of work grouping the threads together correctly, I improvised an easier and faster solution. To fix the mistake, I could have pulled all the threads out of the reed and started over with the correct one. (It was early, and my coffee apparently hadn't kicked in yet!) This mistake needed to be fixed, otherwise I'd end up with a narrow scarf as stiff as cardboard! Of course, because nothing is ever as easy as it should be, I grabbed the 15 dent reed instead of the 12 dent and was almost halfway through the task when I realized what I'd done. (A description is in the tutorial I linked above.) It was a lot easier than the way I learned and led to a lot less neck strain than the methods I'd tried before. This was the first time I tried threading the reed laying down flat instead of upright in the beater. Looking at the reed substitution chart, if I used the 12 dent reed, and sleyed in a sequence of 2 per dent, 2 per dent, 2 per dent, then 3 per dent, I would get 27 ends to the inch. I have reeds that are 8, 10, 12, and 15 dents per inch. Since I don't have a reed that has 27 dents to the inch (most people don't!), I use a reed substitution chart to figure out what to do. This particular yarn is a 20/2 silk, which a lot of people set at 27 ends to the inch. After threading the heddles, I untie those bundles one by one and pull warp ends through the reed.
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