Continuous Strand Weaving

It took me over a week but I have woven my first shawl on a seven foot loom. Wow you get decent exercise doing this. I used a bulky cotton yarn, probably should have used a wool. But I love this yarn. I found one tool to be a life saver in the end. It is a crochet hook with a needle hole at the end. For the last fourth of the project this really helped. You can buy one on Carol Leigh's web site. I have a picture of my shawl before fulling.    

I have just started working on a large tri-loom for the first time.   At first I was not sure if I liked it compared to the smaller ones.  After the first couple of rows I started to have fun again and I love it.   For me it is a much different experience. Some of the differences are, for the first couple of rows I found that I had to have some significant tension to keep my yarn from low sagging.   I am a little nervous about this since on the small looms I tried not to overdo the tension.  I am using a cotton yarn and it gets stuck more easily than it did on the small 18 inch loom.   It is still doable but just something to be aware of.    One thing I do like is it is a lot easier to use your fingers to weave the yarn.   On an 18 inch loom I found using my fingers hard and clumsy.. but this is not the case on a large loom.  It is actually fun to weave the yarn with your fingers.  I sometimes use a crochet hook but sometimes use ...

I have been weaving squares out of the purple cascade yarns 128. It is so easy to work with and gives a nice weave on my square loom. I decided to take a break and tray swatch of a different yarn. This swatch is from Filatura Di Crossa Fancy Felz. It is 46 percent Acrylic, 20 percent wool, 24 percent mohair and 1 percent Polyamide. This is a really fuzzy yarn. I had a some misgivings about it... But I love how the swatch turned out. I think on loom with half inch spacing this yarn would be fine. My spacing is 3/8 and it was a little tight but doable. Having a light background under the loom helped a lot it made it easier to see the yarn.           Posted with Blogsy

I have started weaving on my square loom. I love it. The weaving area is about 12" by 12" of course the loom area is bigger. Here are the first two squares..,already joined. I used cascade yarns 128 from yarn.com.

My throw is finally complete.  I used 15 squares or 30 triangles.  To get a bigger throw you might want to use 20 squares.   My throw is 3 squares by 5.     I figure I can always add an extra row. A 4 square by 5 square(20) is a really nice size.     It is actually relatively fast to do.   My goal was to weave at least 1 square a day.    Even with my crazy schedule I was able to do that.    The nice thing about this craft is you can pick it up for 5 minutes then come back to it an hour later and know exactly where you are.. so it is easy to progress even with a crazy life.

I am thinking of trying to weave on a square loom, less ends to weave in and probably a little faster than 2 triangles.   Here is a video of the technique.   I am hoping to use a bigger loom, something the size of my triangle loom but square. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWNdSYAbXLs&feature=player_embedded   

I have a bunch of woven squares and was trying to figure out what to do with them. I have decided to combine them into a scrappy throw. I was not sure what would be the best way to join the squares. I tried two different ways..one was sort of a grafting..using a yarn needle and yarn. If the areas are the same yarn and you are using matching yarn this works fine. The other way is to use a crochet hook to sort of do a cast off between the loops. With two loops on the hook move the lower loop over the higher loop then add another loop and repeat. I liked this method the best... Especially since I have a variety of yarns and colors.