New Year, New Craft

For the last few months, I’ve been admiring woven scarves on Ravelry.  As I flipped through a Webs catalog awhile back, I casually remarked to Mike that maybe in a few years I’d look into weaving.  For the record, I knew absolutely nothing about weaving other than self-striping sock yarns made pretty woven scarves.  Looms?  No knowledge at all other than that’s what you use to get pretty woven scarves.  The actual process of weaving?  Well, weavers talk about needing to warp their looms, whatever that is.   And that would be the extent of my weaving knowledge.

You can imagine that I was a bit surprised when Mike handed me a box Christmas morning, and I unwrapped:

I may know zippo about weaving, but I know Mike deserves some major good husband points for taking an offhand comment I made about something I’d like to try and running with it.  I mean, the guy read loom reviews.  More points for helping me assemble the loom. 

Once assembled, I started pouring through instructions and learned how to warp the loom, which I now understand is basically getting the vertical threads all measured and threaded to weave. 

My small house is not exactly well suited to the task, but I made it work. Then, I poured through more instructions and actually started weaving.  My first attempt was appropriately a total mess.

I only wove about a foot of that blue and green yarn before cutting it off the loom and starting something else. Still uncertain about how things would come out, I chose a handspun skein that was a little lumpy and not quite my colors for the warp and dug out some Lamb's Pride from the stash drawer to use for the weft (horizontal threads).

The fabric was much more even, but not surprisingly, drab-colored yarn created a drab fabric.  Olive green, mustard yellow, and some brownish golds mixed with charcoal grey?  Blech.  The ugly project, however, gave me lots of practice and when I was finished, I finally felt ready to try making one of those pretty self-striping sock yarn scarves.  Still lacking the confidence to break into any of my really prized self-striping skeins, I dug out a club skein I got last year that I was pretty lukewarm on. 

And now I'm halfway to a self-striping woven scarf of my very own.  How cool is that?  And looms?  Freaking brilliant.  How does anyone ever come up with this stuff?  I know there are a zillion weaving techniques, patterns, and textures to learn, but right now I'm just enjoying keeping everything simple.  It's fun to know though that when time and energy allows I have a whole new craft to explore.  Thank you, Mike!