I was given the great opportunity to view a wonderful video on beginning weaving. The video is from The Mannings, and a friend who recently took a class there, has shared the video she received during the class. It was so nice of her to let me borrow it. She knew I'd been having trouble especially with the warping part of getting prepared to weave. The video answered all of my questions - it was simply the best educational material I've seen to date (mind you, I've only been weaving for about 7 months now).
It's really wonderful to make friends, have them understand where you're coming from, and know that they are thinking of you, by sharing something so simple yet so important.
I've got another video by another professional weaver. That video did not grab me and say, YOU CAN DO THIS. It was wonderful to watch the professional, but when I tried the same methods, I didn't get the same results.
The recent video I watched was simple, it was easy, and I'm SURE I can do what he did. I'm actually looking forward to getting my next warp on my warping board, then onto the loom, which is where I've had problems the first two times I tried it.
Right now, I'm putting new heddles onto the shafts. I have 4 shafts, and all the heddles are old, and dirty, and rusty. They would not move back and forth on the shafts very easily, and I would get frustrated when they would stick. The new heddles are SO pretty, and shiny, and nice! I'm excited to have them on the loom now. Unfortunately, they are $18.99/100 and I soon realized, 100 per shaft is NOT enough. Not even! I need at least 200 per shaft....that's 800 heddles. I'll continue to order them, a bundle of 100 at a time, spreading the cost out. For now, I have 100 on each shaft and am keeping about 100 older ones on the shafts. I'll use as many of the new ones as possible, and when I get all new ones, I'm going to make a baby blanket. :-) I'm looking forward to that.
Something else I'm going to start doing is cutting strips of fabric. I have lots of fabric, unfortunately, it's not all in yardage. Some of the fabric I have is smaller pieces - such as fat quarters. But I'm going to give it my best, start cutting, and see what I get for strips. The shorter ones should be good to do a few shopping bags with. I can hopefully get the strips long enough to do one side of a bag, and the ends will be sewn in when I put the seams in. We'll give it a shot. I don't know if I'll sew the ends together - I know some weavers that do, and others that just overlap them. I'm going to try the overlapping method.
First, I'm going to put another warp on the loom to do more towels. Now that I've gotten some done, and I LOVE the 5/2 mercerized cotton I used, I want to do even more, so I'm going to do a longer warp (I think). I have to figure out how many yards I'll need. The last warp I thought was pretty long and I got the equivalent of about 6 towels out of it. I'd like to do that many again, but I used my entire one pound cone of white 5/2. I bought another cone, but want to make sure I don't run out.
Well, the dogs are bothering me -they must need to go out and they probably want their dinner, so I'd better go and take care of that. Chicken legs are in the toaster oven, and are cooking up for hubby. I ate Chinese for lunch, and I'm stuffed, although I might make some veggies to go with the chicken so I can have some of those. Gonna have to find another side dish to go with the chicken for hubby tho.
Have yourself a wonderful day.
Thanks for reading.
Martha
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