Buellwood Guild Meeting January 2015_Tablet Weaving

Tablet Weaving Demo by Eileen

Eileen was gracious enough to share her knowledge of Tablet Weaving with our guild in January.
She Explained the process to our group and then set up some sample warps for our guild members to try their hand a weaving with tablets.

Explaining Tablet Weaving.

Eileen is explaining what tablet weaving is and what can be made with weaving these narrow bands. Eileen has done this demo many times and usually with a group much younger than the Buellwood Weavers.



All of the members tried at least a few minutes of weaving with tablets. Which can be confusing because it is necessary to turn the cards one quarter turn with each weft pic. The small warps were nice to work with in the short amount of time we have at our meetings.

Eileen showing how to weave on the warps she set up.

Adding the weft to the weaving

Carol getting help with her tablet weave

the woven band from one of the warps

Each of her warps was set up to produce a different weave pattern. It was quite interesting to see how these warp patterns were established by the arrangement of the Tablet Cards. These bands make nice trim for a garment, straps for bags or instruments and many other decorative needs.

Our show and tell is always an interesting time during our meetings. Today we had a few new weavers showing off their work.

Julie brought a wool and acrylic yarn scarf that she wove - completely on her own with no help from her instructor. It had a very nice hand and was woven beautifully. She had been weaving hand towels in the past and has moved on to another fiber. I think she is now hooked on weaving with wool.

Eve shared with us what she had learned weaving two scarves over the last few months. She brought in a mohair scarf she made at 5EPI . although the Sett was very small, she found it hard to lift her sheds while

Check out Eve's beautiful shadow weave top out of Zepher wool/silk

Mohair Scarf

weaving on 4 shafts. So she re threaded the harnesses to use only 2 shafts and found the weaving to go much smoother.

Her second scarf was woven with hand dyed silk. She thought the scarf was too stiff off the loom and still stiff after she washed it. She researched woven silk and learned that it you spank the woven silk it becomes much softer. Nice work Eve.

Hand Dyed warp Silk Scarf

Eve keeps a record of her projects

Clare our new member is a knitter who wants to weave. She is wearing a knit hat that she made. Her woven sampler has some very beautiful areas, I really like the chevron pattern she is getting with the twill weave. She tried many variations of weaving twill with this sampler and even invented some new patterns. There was a section in white with twill and tabby combined that I really liked.

Clare in her hand knit hat.

Clare is also trying her hand at spinning and brought in her first spun yarn.









I finally got around to weaving with some White Fish Bay Farms Corriedale yarn that I wanted to make a blanket with. I have to say I was a little disappointed with how it turned out. The yarn is very soft and stretchy so it was a little difficult to weave even set at 10 ends per inch.
I used a weave structure from Mastering Weave Structures by Sharon Alderman referred to as: two four shaft twills interleaved. I was looking for a longer twill which would look like a chevron pattern.

My sample of weaving before and after washing.

My samples were not too bad but I used a lot of yarn with the samples and ended up with a very small blanket. I then fulled the cloth in the washing machine, my first mistake! and because it was sopping wet I threw it back in to spin out the water. My second mistake.... now I have a very small, very felted piece of wool. It is very soft and blanket like.... Not what I was hoping for to throw on my couch.

I will use more caution in fulling my 5 yards of wool fabric I just took off the loom..... maybe even hand full it!

Next meeting is Monday - February 16th noon at Gloria Dei Church in Hancock MI. See you there.