Weaving Weekend

Dear Mom,

Saturday's weaving class spilled over into Sunday. Eight hours bent over a loom is enough to cripple a person and we all needed more time to finish. So back we went on Sunday.
In my last post I showed you the yarns I'd chosen. I didn't need to use all of them (but I did use up all of that Downton Abbey yarn).
This was definitely a 'don't think about it too much' project. After demonstrating how we would be weaving and letting us throw a few practice picks, Linda wove off the remaining bit of the sample and we got our first look at what, exactly, we were there to weave.....a triangular shaped shawl.

photo before trimming the fringe

We then set about sorting and selecting our yarns. I had already wound mine into warps so I was able to go ahead and start dressing the loom. I had never dressed a loom from front to back. Doing it this way let us randomly place our yarns and reposition them if we chose to do so. It is a rather spider web-y mess on the front end, but that sorted itself out. It helped that the warps were only 2 1/2 yards long, too. It was mostly because I didn't fully understand how this was all going to work that I was able to turn off my brain and not over think the placement of my yarns. I just went with what I hoped was an even distribution of the different yarns I'd chosen. I am very happy with the result!

This is how the weaving looked on the loom, near the end. Frankly, if I hadn't stopped after just about every other pick to admire and stroke what I'd just woven, I may have been able to finish in the 8 hours.  It was just too dang pretty not to and I was just stunned at what was happening on the loom. I did it, but don't ask me to explain it.

There were two other weavers in the class with me. We all had different colors and types of yarns- hand spun, hand dyed, commercially dyed and spun, mohair, boucle- and each shawl was beautiful.

Definitely a good project for stash busting, or using those small skeins of hand dyed yarn.
The only down side to this is that Donna Reed, my Baby Wolf, is not wide enough to do this and make a wearable scarf. BUT, I can see using this random front load trick to make a rectangular shawl or scarf.

You can just imagine ( or maybe not) the condition my house is in today after my absence for most of the weekend. The last thing I should be doing is sitting here, but I couldn't wait to show you this latest pretty thing.

Off to scrub, dust, vacuum, wash-dry-fold....it helps that this is a sunny day. It makes me want everything to sparkle, and thankful that even though it all needs cleaning, that I have it to clean.

Love,

Kim