Weaving Class Sampler 01

I made this sampler while practicing the techniques I learned in an Introduction to Rigid Heddle Weaving class.

Materials:

• Reed size: 12 dent

• Warp: Harrisville Designs Highland in White

• Weft: Harrisville Designs Highland in White, Silver Mist, Charcoal

New skills: Warping a rigid heddle loom. Plain weave. Leno lace.

Lessons: The reed size was too small for the highland wool yarn, and I had a hard time using the sley hook to get it through the eyes in the reed. I had to create extra slack at the eye because pulling it straight through resulted in some of my warps threads breaking.

Wool warp of this sett is also hard to use for tapestry weaving (i.e. where you beat down each weft row) so I defaulted to plain weave for this project.

Getting even selvedges is tricky. While weaving, you want your weft to be at an angle before beating it so that you have enough slack in the fiber to go under/over the warps, but sometimes I’d end up with a little loop of extra weft so that the first warp isn’t snug against the rest of the cloth. I think the solution is more practice to get my technique more consistent, but I’m planning to also do some reading to help diagnose this. I also want to test out what happens to the selvedge when you wash/soak a finished piece, because my research so far indicates that the cloth will have some shrinkage with washing.

What I'd do differently: Keep practicing!

Care: n/a - hand wash cold, lay flat to dry

Hemp Basket

Pattern/Technique: Basket weaving workshop by Flax & Twine via The Crafters Box

Modifications: none

Materials: 1 ball hemp twine, 1 ball woolen spun linen yarn (both provided in kit)

New skills: stitched basket construction

Lessons: How/where you stitch the basket influences the stability: I misheard the video and initially stitched to the left of each stitch (down through the front of the basket), which made an interesting coil pattern (and a really pretty feather pattern on the reverse) but as I increased the number of coils the outside started getting loose. I ripped everything back and used the actual technique in the video, which was to stitch to the right of each previous stitch (coming up from the back of the basket) which gave a more subtle feathering visual effect, and was more stable as the number of coils increased.

I noticed that the 18-20 coils were quite loose, so I went back and tightened the anchor stitches to snug up the coils. However, on row 21 you're supposed to tightly stitch all around the coil, and the width of the linen yarn actually snugged up the coils more and made the center of my basket slightly concave. In the future, I should not do any extra work to make the coils tighter before a densely stitched coil.

The linen yarn sheds and thins quite a bit, and if it looks like it's about to break it's totally fine to start with a new length.

When switching strands of linen yarn, weave in the old end in the next line of anchor stitches (and start the new strand in the same line) to keep the anchor stitches looking consistent.

When binding off the basket, you can do a set of 3-4 wraps with the linen yarn to secure the twine, then either weave in the end in the 3-4 wraps you just made, or a line of anchor stitches.

What I'd do differently: I think I may have held my yarn too slanted in the section where I started creating the basket shaping, and ended up with sides that were a little too curved, so I ended up binding off earlier than suggested. I'm really happy with how this first basket looks, but if I make a larger one in the future, I'd use a gentler slant in the shaping section so that I can get a large, shallow bowl.

Care: spot clean