I have been cheating (with weaving)

It was almost a year ago that the weavers in Peru fascinated me with their fabulous yarns (all dyed naturally) and their intricate weaving techniques that I really could not get my head around. Using fairly basic, and rather unwieldy, instruments, they were able to produce fabulous fabrics and ultimately bags, wall hangings and other lovely things.

And so I cheated on knitting for two weekends while I learned to weave at the Handweavers studio and gallery on Sevens Sisters road in North London, by expert weaver Melanie Venes. And I felt bad while I thought that weaving is so much easier than knitting and could be used with much finer yarns, ones that I would never ever use to knit because they would probably reduce me to tears (see previous post on Damson shawl). In fact, all it seems to involve is passing yarn over other yarn and repeating.

Of course I am over-simplifying, and the set-up is much much more complicated than picking up your needles and casting on. You can have a four-shaft loom that can make complicated patterns,  an eight-shaft loom that can make even more complicated patterns or a floor loom with ridiculous numbers of shafts to make super creative textiles. You can set up your loom in specific ways so that you can get specific patterns when weaving by lifting different combinations of shafts, and use different colour threads to generate interesting combinations. The possibilities are truly endless, and we were shown a spectacular array of fabrics that can be made, and experimented on different looms with different pattern combinations (which is why all the samples below look a bit crazy, but the idea was to try out everything!).

My first attempt on the Ashford eight-shaft loom

After I got a bit more confident, I started experimenting by making patterns up

Using eight shafts to make a sort of quilted fabric with a different pattern in each square

And finishing with something pretty that I would wear in scarf format, mostly experimenting with different yarns

And then we get to the yarns - there is an unbelievable array of yarns available, from the regular wool and cotton that we are all familiar with as knitters, to the smooth and soft rayon, tencel and silk, to fuzzy novelty yarns and to crazy things like paper, latex, stainless steel and banana! I could have spent hours in the shop feeling the different yarns (in you can really call them that) and wondering what you could make with them.

Lots of yarn!

But you have to be careful with novelty yarn, it can lead to hideous results!

So I am going to have a proper affair with weaving? Well, as much as it all sounded fabulous when presented by an expert weaver, I don't think this will be a sudden career change for me, nor do I envision making my own clothes from scratch and my own curtains or rugs, and so I am reluctant to fork out over £500 for a fancy loom.

However, I did learn a lot in this course about how fabric is made (I do keep looking at people's clothes and guessing how they were made) and I am intrigued by the possibilities. So I am seriously considering taking a baby step towards weaving by purchasing a little rigid heddle loom, a type of loom that can't easily do fancy patterns but can still be used to make nice fabric with a bit of creativity and some interesting colour combinations or fancy yarns. Scarves for everyone next Christmas!