Not that I need any new creative interests, but after seeing the ever adorable Rachel Denbow's DIY handweaving tutorial, I couldn't get the desire to make one out of my head. You know what happens after that, I eventually give in and start searching my house for needed supplies.
I grabbed some scrap plywood in the garage and some nails and started hammering away. I did measure with a ruler first, but as you can see, I decided that I really didn't have enough room for more and was too tired to try to do the math to divide it up and measure for more, it was either an inch or 1/2 inch when beginning at 9pm. (In hindsight, I'd add more nails, as my 9 weren't enough when actually weaving.)
I used some baking twine (used for the turkey) to wrap the loom just as Rachel describes in her DIY. Or kind of, think I messed it up a bit and I didn't think it mattered enough to fix. I went looking around for what I had handy here and found some regular string, yarn, and some coronation cord as well as a little spool of string tinsle and then started at it.
You can see I had the ipad with her tutorial handy for the duration.
It seemed to be going well. I was trying very hard not to pull too taut, as her tutorial describes.
Then I saw Elise's version, also inspired from Rachel's, and loved her double stranded/checkered look acheived by doing the two colors at once. Um, duh Pam! And...that was so much faster, that it dawned on me that I could do the same with a single color as well:
It was about this point that I thought, gee, I bet there are some many hints and tricks out there that would be helpful to know when doing a project like this, and I plan to look around for them and other inspiration before doing another, but for this one, I just had to jump in, I was obsessed, couldn't hold off another minute for any research!
You know, I was trying to be clever by using things like coronation cord and the tinsel since I had it on hand, but truly, it might not have been the smartest idea, because different materials behave differently yadda yadda yadda...again, next time a little research will be good first. But especially when it comes to ideas for changing up the designs. I had wanted to create three white plus signs (red cross signs) in the yellow area, but kept getting all confused and found that I didn't have enough strands on the loom to make it easy (for me anyway). So I just let it go, thinking I'd "fix" it later, but then decided to just move on.
Here's the finished project:
It's a little bit of a hot mess in spots (especially the top), but that sort of endears me to it, or today anyway, ha! The other "let's be clever, and do something different" idea was the two open box areas...but now, all I see is a happy face. Do you see it? Well, if you didn't before, likely it's all you'll be able to see now too ;).
So imperfect, but so so fun to do. And basically free, since I had everything on hand. I'm excited to start noticing handweaving now, and to start thinking about the next one I make... eventually. Now that the total obsession I was feeling has been addressed, I can get back to other things that need finishing before starting another new idea.
Have a favorite handweaving artists who's work inspires you? Or do you do any handweaving? I'd love any links you'd care to share!
