weaving

[dragonlady7]

loom, tablet weaving

via https://ift.tt/Z06sMcO

so for my birthday, I bought myself a Schacht inkle loom. unicornduke https://tmblr.co/MVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ​ was like hey you could just make that out of a pile of dowels, and I was like …. will I though? I will not. So, since I had birthday money, I bought it. As a bonus, it was scratch-n-dent from Webs (we made a pilgrimage to the Webs warehouse in MA, which was fun) and so it was already assembled. Because assembling it is currently beyond me. When I say I am low on braincells, I genuinely mean that I am very low on brain cells as like an ongoing situation.

I also bought the 25-pack of tablet weaving cards from Schacht. Because why not. Cut, for some photos.

Brought it over Monday night to unicornduke https://tmblr.co/MVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ​‘s house. We sat on the balcony, and I learned about how to warp an inkle loom for card weaving. When it was done, it looked like this:

And so I set to weaving. It got dark and rainy around then, so I moved indoors, and sat at the kitchen counter– made and ate dinner, then resumed.

Figured after a little while that uh, the pattern doesn’t look like I expected. unicornduke https://tmblr.co/MVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ​ came out to look and discovered I’d reversed two of the cards. I had to unweave back to the beginning to fix the problem. This did involve some space-time shenanigans, but I eventually succeeded.

(See how that pattern is uh sort of… just weird? Looks a bit like a reel of 8mm film actually…)

So then I started weaving again, and firstly, my first few passes looked much cleaner and so the end was much nicer, and secondly, the pattern revealed itself to be quite nice actually.

This picture is when I reached the point where the twist had built up so much I had to reverse the direction of the weaving, so you can see where the pattern turns backwards. Pretty cool!!! Almost makes me want to do a variant of this pattern where you just do that every repeat!

But then the crucial thing about this is that it can be transported. I clipped the cards together with a binder clip and brought it home to buffalo and now I can keep working on it. Complex enough to be absorbing, simple enough that I don’t constantly fuck it up, small enough to be easily-transported: perfect storm of craftable thing.

Chita cautiously approves but would prefer it if I did not weave and only paid attention to her instead.

What am I going to do with this? I don’t know, and I also don’t know that it matters, LOL. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[unicornduke]

Doing the pattern repeats where you go back and forth actually turn out super well. There's a bunch of patterns that are turn forward 4, turn backwards 4, repeat. Are pretty cool. You can try one of those next if you want. I'm glad it's working for you!