Weaving Made Easy -- the Beginning of a 2 x 2 Sampler Scarf

There's a lot to be said for just jumping and trying things.  There's also a lot to be said for taking advantage of the wisdom collected into books by people with a better understanding of the subject.  For my second project, I took extensive advantage of the information in Liz Gipson's Weaving Made Easy -- a collection of projects all based around the rigid heddle loom and meant to help newbies like me get started and get excited about weaving.




First off, for anyone who is thinking about getting started with a rigid heddle loom, I highly recommend this book.  It is definitely not a bible to all things rigid heddle, but it has just enough information to get you off and running and to help you create a polished project.  And the projects, while simple are actually the sorts of things you would want to make for yourself.  She does a nice job of balancing the kinds of projects.  While there are a number of scarves, there are also pillow covers, a belt, placemats, a couple of bags, an obi, a table runner, felted coasters and even felted slippers.  Each project features a different kind of technique and helps the new weaver get their feet wet with regards to both the weaving process and terminology.  With a couple of exceptions, she also focuses on the kind of yarns that a lot of knitters are likely to have in their stash already, making this a doubly nice book for the knitter who is interested in learning to weave.

Make no mistake, I think the most difficult thing about weaving, for me, so far,  is the technical jargon that comes along with it.  I know the language of knitting and spinning, but weaving comes with a whole new set of terms.  Frankly, I can completely understand why this particualr fiber art may have more appeal to men* -- setting up a weaving project and working with loom equipment starts out feeling very technical, almost like you are embarking on some engineering project.  This book does a great job of de-mystifying the terminology.  It defines weaving terms well, and then uses them without overwhelming you with them so that you feel confident and excited about learning a new language rather than baffled by it all. 

Perhaps the only thing I would have liked to have had more of in this book was more discussion of how varying color in the warp and weft has an effect on patterning.  And, thus, that was I decided I wanted to explore more with my next project.

The project I decided to riff off of in the book was a pattern for a simple hounds' tooth check satchel.  It means warping the loom with two colors and weaving with two colors.  So the first thing on my agenda was to pick those two colors.  I knew that I wanted to work in wool for my next project, that I wanted a scarf I could enjoy and that I wanted two colors with fairly high contrast so that I could see clearly what the pattern I was creating looked like.

To find the yarn, I went stash diving (I'm really making an effort right now not to increase my stash as I learn to weave since I have plenty of "unintentioned" yarn to work with) into my Cascade 220 stash and came out with a skein of "Quattro" that falls into the "orange/pink/red" region of the spectrum and a heathery purple skein.  Ideally, the ends per inch (i.e. the number of warp (or vertical) threads per inch) should be about 1/2 the wpi of the yarn.  However, since I only have one heddle, and it's a 10 dent (epi) heddle, I didn't actually bother to do that calculation.  The reality is that the 8 dent heddle probably would have been more ideal for the Cascade since it's a worsted (some say light worsted) weight yarn, but sometimes a girl's gotta run with what she has.  I was hoping that since Cascade is on the light side of worsted that using the 10 dent heddle wouldn't result in a fabric that was too "boardy"**.

I decided that I wanted my scarf to be about 8" wide and 60" long*** -- and after doing the calculations for how much warp and weft I would need, it was clear that 2 skeins of Cascade 220 would have enough yardage for what I wanted to do as long as I used an equal amount of each color in the weft.

After that, I warped up the loom (while enjoying the afternoon with Julie) and got started.   

One thing I knew from the get-go was that I was not going to do 5 feet of hound's tooth check.  In addition to using this scarf as a project to focus on making my selvedges even, I wanted to use the scarf as a chance to see what patterns I could get from different numbers of picks (weft threads) of each color in combination.  I started with a header of all purple, followed by 4" of the hound's tooth (2 picks of orange followed by 2 picks of purple, etc.).  After that, I tried out a bunch of different combinations, all of about 4" and each separated by a section of the hound's tooth.

The picture above shows the header and the first bit of hounds's tooth.  Pretty neat, eh? I loved watching those first patterns grow.   It probably shouldn't be any surprised that I had that loom warped by Friday night and pretty much had a finished scarf by Sunday morning.  I've got quite a few detail pictures from my sampling, so I'm going to save the final reveal and pattern discussion for Monday to give myself more time to put together a nice post.

* This is not to say that I know what ratio of male to female weavers there are, just that I can understand why it is easier to find more male weavers than one might find male knitters or spinners.

** Of course, if I'd been paying more attention to the second book I bought (which I will talk about in the future) I would have realized that I could have just used 8 out of each 10 slots in my heddle to achieve the effect of having an 8 dent heddle... but sometimes it's hard to learn too many lessons in one project.

** I'll spare the gorey calculation details, but I ended up with 86 warp ends (42 orange, 44 purple) each at about 92" long.