Continuous Strand Weaving

It's been a long time.. But I have been busy playing on my looms. This one is almost done      

I was trying to come up with a way to integrate beehives spun into yarn, into my weaving. I realized this would also apply to a triangular loom. In a triloom I weave with the arrow pointing to the floor. I consider the strands horizontal to the floor my warp... The strands perpendicular to the floor are my weft. In order for my beehives to be at the top I float the weft over the warp... Here is a picture on a rigid heddle loom.      

I was looking for a portable loom. I decided to give rigid heddle weaving looms a try. I am in love... What fun. I am so glad I started with a smaller loom. The smaller size is much easier to use. Here is the first item:    

I must confess I have had this shawl on my Triloom for some time... Now I am in the home from of finishing. I am trying to decide on a yarn for the border. I saw my Triloom teacher today. She does incredible stuff with a Triloom...I would love to be as talented as she is.    

For some reason the ipad app Blogsy.. won't let me post things on this blog.. it gives me a strange error message. So I am back to using my old PC. I have finally finished weaving my most recent shawl. It took less than 3 skeins of yarn and I used the 7 foot setting on my tri-loom. It amazes me how little yarn tri-loom weaving uses. If I were to knit it.. I would use way more. I know have the loom set up to the 4'9" setting. I am using some of my earlier hand spun. I really love the colors of, I will need to mix two colors to get enough. I am really excited to be finally weaving with my hand spun. I still need to add a border to this 7 foot shawl. Yeah.. I got blogsy to work. Now I can post again to this blog.

I was at the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta the other day and my kids discovered a really fun weaving/braiding activity. It is called Kumihimo or Japanese braiding. These are a great way to use up yarn scraps. Here are two results These were made by a nine year old. Even the lower braid is very easy. It is a lot of fun. You can make your loom using foam or very sturdy cardboard. My disc is 3.5 inches in diameter. The nicks are 3/8 inches apart. There are 32 of them. While the number is not important we found it helpful to stay on track. The upper braid is called fill the Fill The Gap. It is even easier. Here is a picture of the instructions