Weaving

My weaving posts are listed below – I’ve organised them in 6 headings. Click to jump to the corresponding list of posts for:

1. Rigid Heddle Loom – Weaving Drafts
2. Rigid Heddle Loom – Techniques
3. Table Loom – Weaving Drafts
4. Table Loom – Techniques
5. Sewing with handwovens
6. General Weaving
7. Weaving a Library

There may be other weaving related posts non included in the above (e.g. in Year of Projects series of posts) – all weaving related posts can be found listed in reverse chronological order here.

1. Rigid Heddle Loom – Weaving Drafts

4 shaft lace/spot on the rigid heddle loom - I happened by chance on Kate Gagnon Osborn’s beautiful LeCorbusier Scarf, and it was love at first sight, I had to weave this! I have since discovered Bronson Lace – the November/December issue of Handwoven Magazine has a feature on it by Madelyn Van Der Hoogt on Bronson Lace on 4 shafts. Lace and spot …

Bumberet galore on the Rigid Heddle Loom - I’ve had a bit of an argument with Bumberet on my Rigid Heddle Loom – not that it is their fault, it is just that it did take me a while to warp my first Bumberet scarf, and I managed to screw it up in some mysterious way: for some reason the warp threads where …

Summer waves on three heddles! - I am very much enjoying weaving with three heddles on my SampleIt loom, and although I already suffer from shaft envy and really need an eigh shaft loom, there is so much my 40cm Ashford SampleIt has to offer. So I embarked in another twill weaving – this time straight draft twill, but playing with …

Twill houndstooth check on the rigid heddle loom - Shepherd’s Check, Pied de poule, houndstooth – this is a classic, which I now note is quite trendy this year, and I decided I would weave it exaclty in its classic form, namely alternating groups of 4 warp threads in two contrasting colours, and alternating groups of four picks in each colour. To better manage …

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2. Rigid Heddle Loom – Techniques

Double width weaving - (Jump to summary) The yardage I wove for my summer dress is for the main part of the dress – additional fabric is required for a bottom band, pockets and sleeves. The band in particular calls for wider fabric than my loom can weave – so what better opportunity to give a go to double …

Fixing a broken warp thread with very little yarn - The standard method suggested to fix broken warp is to take a fresh length of yarn as long as the remaining length to be woven, secure it to the cloth already woven, and weave that while discarding the broken warp thread. Perhaps because I came to weaving from knitting, with a sizeable stash of expensive …

Four shaft twill on the Rigid Heddle Loom - I cannot remember exactly when is that I decided to try weaving, but I got attracted it progressively more in my quest for hand made skirts – I am not too fond of how knitted skirts look (though there are exceptions), and while I adore knitted dresses, for standalone skirts I wanted something else. True, …

Reading a weaving draft (including adaptation for the rigid heddle loom) - There are many sources to find out about weaving drafts and how to read them – however most of what I’ve found is either for multi shaft looms (e.g. check out joy of weaving, Cally Booker on floor looms and table looms, or Peggy Osterkamp) or for rigid heddle looms (joy of weaving again). I …

Resources for the beginner weaver on the rigid heddle loom - The “humble” rigid heddle loom can do so much, as I hope the pictures above show. A beginner is most definitely what I am at the time of writing, as I have been weaving for only over six months on the rigid heddle. Hence there may be a lot missing from the info below. However, …

Tips for the Rigid Heddle weaver “graduating” to a Table Loom - And so it was that after admitting defeat (wanted to do double weave overshot on my rigid heddle loom – sadly, it can’t be pushed to that, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to accommodate it with three heddles without any pickup sticks or additional threaded heddles), I plumped for an Ashford 8 …

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3. Table Loom – Weaving Drafts

Year Of Projects: week 6 - Craftingwise, this week has been both very eventful and very uneventful – uneventful in the sense that I can only measure progress in terms of fixing previous mistakes, but eventful as it was a lot of work, and I learned an awful lot, all to do with weaving, which is my current and not that …

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4. Table Loom – Techniques

Adding a shuttle race to a table loom - Table looms (mine is a 60cm 8 Shaft Ashford) do not generally come with a “shuttle race” – in a floor loom this is a little shelf beneath the reed that prevents a boat shuttle from diving to the floor. In order to use a boat shuttle with a table loom or a rigid heddle …

Choosing and using a boat shuttle - For the Table Loom without a race? Yes, for the table loom without a race! The race can be hacked by attaching in a non permanent way (so no damage to your loom!) a lease stick held under the warp by the short helping hands, or some rubber bands; some examples are here and here, …

Fixing a broken warp thread with very little yarn - The standard method suggested to fix broken warp is to take a fresh length of yarn as long as the remaining length to be woven, secure it to the cloth already woven, and weave that while discarding the broken warp thread. Perhaps because I came to weaving from knitting, with a sizeable stash of expensive …

Miracle weaving tool – the autodenter (or auto reed hook)! - I had come across this tool several times on George Weil’s webpage while looking for something else weaving related, and always wondered briefly and idly what it was. And then decided to look it up. And then decided to buy it. And then used it, and really, it makes a super neat party trick – …

Reading a weaving draft (including adaptation for the rigid heddle loom) - There are many sources to find out about weaving drafts and how to read them – however most of what I’ve found is either for multi shaft looms (e.g. check out joy of weaving, Cally Booker on floor looms and table looms, or Peggy Osterkamp) or for rigid heddle looms (joy of weaving again). I …

Tips for the Rigid Heddle weaver “graduating” to a Table Loom - And so it was that after admitting defeat (wanted to do double weave overshot on my rigid heddle loom – sadly, it can’t be pushed to that, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to accommodate it with three heddles without any pickup sticks or additional threaded heddles), I plumped for an Ashford 8 …

Unbeaming and rebeaming on a table loom - Which is something you should ideally never do. But what if you have to? That is what I was confronted with when after threading each and every one of my 672 ends for my very first table loom project I realised that something was amiss from my 7.5m warp: tension! My heart sank when I …

Unbeaming and rebeaming on a table loom – a better way! - I have blogged previously about fixing tension issues in a warp already wound onto the back beam – that experience was scarring, and since I’ve just come across and tested a much simpler method, at least for the Table loom, I thought I’d report it here. The problem: I wound a gradient warp involving three …

Warping a table loom back to front without a raddle - The advantage of this method is that you do not need any additional equipment other than what comes as standard with your loom, at least in the case of Ashford, where raddles are optional add ons. The starting point is a chained warp, still uncut on both ends just in case, where the “tail” (i.e. …

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5. General Weaving

Band weaving on a rigid heddle loom (or on any other loom, or on no loom at all!) - I’ve been long fascinated with bands, and especially while planning my double faced yardage, I’ve been thinking of ways that a novice sewer like me could use to sew up a reversible garment. A decorative band might be just the thing to make a feature of seams – or at least this is where my …

Choosing and using a boat shuttle - For the Table Loom without a race? Yes, for the table loom without a race! The race can be hacked by attaching in a non permanent way (so no damage to your loom!) a lease stick held under the warp by the short helping hands, or some rubber bands; some examples are here and here, …

Fixing a broken warp thread with very little yarn - The standard method suggested to fix broken warp is to take a fresh length of yarn as long as the remaining length to be woven, secure it to the cloth already woven, and weave that while discarding the broken warp thread. Perhaps because I came to weaving from knitting, with a sizeable stash of expensive …

Miracle weaving tool – the autodenter (or auto reed hook)! - I had come across this tool several times on George Weil’s webpage while looking for something else weaving related, and always wondered briefly and idly what it was. And then decided to look it up. And then decided to buy it. And then used it, and really, it makes a super neat party trick – …

Reading a weaving draft (including adaptation for the rigid heddle loom) - There are many sources to find out about weaving drafts and how to read them – however most of what I’ve found is either for multi shaft looms (e.g. check out joy of weaving, Cally Booker on floor looms and table looms, or Peggy Osterkamp) or for rigid heddle looms (joy of weaving again). I …

Tips for the Rigid Heddle weaver “graduating” to a Table Loom - And so it was that after admitting defeat (wanted to do double weave overshot on my rigid heddle loom – sadly, it can’t be pushed to that, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to accommodate it with three heddles without any pickup sticks or additional threaded heddles), I plumped for an Ashford 8 …

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6. Sewing with handwovens

My proudest rigid heddle loom moment yet! - The full account of how the fabric came to be is here (sampling and main fabric) and here (fabric for bottom band, sleeves and neckband trim). I used Sarah Howard‘s excellent dress pattern n5 (no affiliation, just a very satisfied customer), and off I went! The fabric was thick-ish, soI had to abandon pretty quickly …

Pencil skirt from handwoven cloth - There are various first for this skirt: it is my very first sewn anything, the very first garment from my own handwoven yardage, woven on a rigid heddle loom, the very first use of my new-to-me sewing machine. It is quite far from perfect, but I am very very pleased with it – in hindsight, …

Sewing with handwoven cloth - (Note: updated to add point 9 on 5th June 2020) I really do not expect to be able to teach anything to anyone on this matter – I am an absolute beginner myself! However precisely for that reason I still have those absolute beginner questions very fresh in my mind, so I thought I’d gather …

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7. Weaving a library

Weaving a Library: “Designing woven fabrics”, by Janet Phillips - (Book cover is from the author’s webpage) This beautiful book is on 4shaft twills, and is organised in three parts. The first part is entirely devoted to the construction and weaving of a 4 shaft twill gamp/blanket, with ten different threadings and 50 different treadlings, providing a total of 500 sample weaves (I am currently …

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