New Weavers

Our local weaving guild offers beginner weaving courses. We have 2 instructors and we each take turns teaching the course. This fall the class is small - a total of 5 students. We can accomodate 8. I usually start the students off with a warped loom and encourage them to try a variety of treadlings on a plain weave threading. Once the students have completed the samples, they choose a project to weave. The project choice is limited by the fact that they will be weaving on a narrow table loom. Other than that, the students are free to create an item that meets their expectation in terms of complexity and time required to complete the project. Students can take the looms home in between classes or just choose to weave in the class time.

Tomorrow night is the last class and yesterday one of the students came to get some help on putting together a project to be put on her loom at home. It is always exciting when students are anxious to get to the next project. During the class time she has warped her loom with a 5 yard warp and will now try an 8 yard warp. I think once many of us find out how long it takes to warp versus weave, we gradually add to the length. Most of the time I try to warp 20 to 50 yards, to keep me busy for awhile.

My husband created some tea towels in an M's and O's pattern and my student liked these. The texture is really nice. She has chosen different colours for the stripes. I was able to show her how a drafting program works and we used the program to calculate the yarn requirements and then she choose the cotton yarns. I explained this is how we develop our never ending growing stash of yarns. Leftovers from here, buy new yarn for next project, oops more leftovers, more shelving, etc.

Two other students in the class have purchased looms that were being sold off by the guild. So we hopefully will have 3 new weavers in our fiber world!

First Blog Posting

This is my first blog post so please be patient if I do something wrong. I love the new technology and really enjoy learning how to use it when it is applicable. When I first started weaving and wanted to create drafts of my own, the only way was to sit down with graph paper and pencil and neatly colour in the squares. Now, of course, I use a computer program to help me do the drafting.
I am creating the award ribbons for the ANWG conference in June 2007 and fortunately weavers have websites that share drafts. It is so exciting to be able to download and edit the drafts to meet your particular needs. The yarn is on order and hopefully I will get to warping and weaving over my Christmas holidays.