inkle inkle

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/TWXBuQ9

so okay you might be asking, B, you might ask, if you have an inkle loom why haven’t you done any inkle weaving on it, and you would be right to ask this, and the truth of the matter is that I just had always, always wanted to try card weaving and none of my attempts had ever amounted to anything if I had to come up with some way to manage all the shit myself, so the inkle loom was my shortcut to how to figure out how to do it.

But of course, I wanted to use my inkle loom as an inkle loom, as a great deal of attractive weaving can be done with that method, and I already own all the necessary equipment. (You make string heddles for the method to work, and i own string, so.) (I know! Stunning.)

But I couldn’t find any good simple directions that I could understand. That last bit is crucial. I have very little brain cell, see, and the bit where my brain interfaces with reality is badly-worn and slips a lot. I can’t just like. Read a thing and have it actually go into the part of my brain that understands how physical things work. Oh ho ho no! Not at all. And anyway you can’t find shit like that on the Internet anymore, everything is videos.

Let me tell you, video tutorials are horrible. The vast majority of videos I found were poorly-edited, with bad audio, not great camera angles, and crucially, minutes upon minutes of extraneous discussion of unimportant, irrelevant things. The manufacturers’ how-to videos were the clearest, but most of them didn’t really give me a good idea how this was actually supposed to go.

And the worst is that most of them don’t give you written patterns, the way I’m growing used to with tablets. I struggled to figure out what on earth the minimal lists of numbers meant. Sometimes they were graphed. I– what? Well what do you do? How does this go?

It took me a while to finally puzzle out that, well. Nobody writes down any more because that’s literally it. For a basic band, literally all you do is follow the list of ends, and the top line is heddled and the bottom line is un-heddled, and you just do that until you’re done, and then you just weave it, there’s no further instructions. Pick-up is something else, which I shall puzzle out directly, but.

So here’s the one I made. It took me three hours to warp it, because I did the whole thing, 43 ends, and then realized I’d done 22 of them wrong, and had to redo them all because of course they have to be in order. But I wound the entire assemblage off– it’s continuous, you tie the color changes together as you go– onto a spare 120 film spool I had lying around because everyone has those– left the heddles on as I wound it off, and that worked a treat– and then wound it back on, and it worked perfectly so now I’m considering that maybe I could just wind warps like that when I’m in a good attention span place, and store them to wind back on when I’m not so coherent, so I could always have an inkle band ready to work on. And honestly I wouldn’t have to wind it on the loom, I could take measurements and do it with a yardstick, so that makes even more sense and may become a thing I do.

But anyway, I’ll start by giving you the pattern, and you can just guess what it’s gonna look like. I had no idea when I started it; the only clue is that it’s got a name. Photo behind the cut.

“CHECKS thru heddle: r r r r r p p p r r r p p p r r r p p p r r (22 ends) not thru heddle: r r p p p r r r p p p r r r p p p r r r r r (22 ends) heddles required = 22 total red ends ® = 26 total purple ends (p) = 18″

In my case, R meant white and P meant maroon.

[image description: a close up of a bit of weaving, very narrow, on a pale-wood loom. The weaving is white with maroon checks in staggered rows of six. There is a visible flaw along the left selvedge halfway up where the weaver made a mistake, but otherwise it is quite regular.]

So that took me like…. mmm… I started weaving at like 8:15 pm and with very few breaks I finished at 10 pm, and wove not the longest weft path for this loom but not the shortest either. This is just crochet cotton; I still had a lot of white wound onto my belt shuttle from the Exhausting Tablet Weave With Skip-Holes that I didn’t do very well at but did finally finish, and I figured I’d just do something with white to use that up. Of course I used it up and still had more to go BUT i managed to wind only what I needed on for the last bit, which was really an achievement I think.

Anyway inkle weaving is really fukkin easy so I’m gonna do more of that. Like, it is so easy. It is not possible to– well, it’s possible to make an error or two, as you can see above, but– one of the videos I watched, the narrator was like “well so your first two inches are gonna look terrible so don’t worry”, but the Schacht-sponsored pamphlet I finally wound up using had the extremely sensible advice that you weave your first four or five passes with either sticks or thick waste thread (it suggested broom straws as a possibility), and then pick it out afterward to leave a fringe, because yeah, you need to weave everything into position, and it’s going to look like shit, so as part of your finishing you make it easy to unpick that. And your end will always have all this extra to be a long fringe; you can make the beginning match, and have a fringed belt. Yay! (Your picture was not posted)