I have been wanting to (a) use up my dwindling stash of perl weaving cotton, and (b) play around with stripes, and (c) do some quick things.
This meant that it was time to pull out my inkle loom. I wanted to do simple horizontal stripes (i.e. bars), preferably in low-contrast colors.
Some of these are low contrast, I suppose!
I like them a lot.
It's been a long time since I've done any inkle bands. As such, I'm not too surprised that my edges are uneven and my picks aren't necessarily consistent.
What I've learned -- I like these simple stripes! I will continue to do them as long as I have enough thread for horizontal bars, which is probably around 2-3 more, and then I'll switch to vertical stripes for the last band. Or I'll switch to some other thread completely, or even start doing wider and more complex inkle patterns. We'll see!
I seem to like using #20 crochet cotton for the weft. #30 is too fine, and #10 is OK but I still like #20 better. So that's useful to have learned. I feel like Goldilocks now.
It would have been fun to have done stripes with the opposite color for the edges, but I don't have enough thread to do that. Oh, well. That's what happens with stash-busting -- there's not enough left for new experiments. Maybe I'll do that for some future projects, especially if I'm still enamored of these narrow bands with horizontal stripes.
Cats are not particularly useful weaving assistants, but they seem less able to cause mischief when I use an inkle loom than when I've been tablet weaving.
Inkle-loom bands are quick to warp up and quick to weave. They are great for a little bit of near-instant gratification and low-attention-span weaving.
How I did these: The color that I had the most of was used for the border, which consisted of 3 or 5 warps. Then I alternated color 2 and color 1 until it looked like I was either out of color 2 or had just enough of color 1 left to do the other border. For all of them, I think I ended up with 7 warps of color 2.
The above photos are straight off the loom. I'm going to wet-finish them and will take new photos to share. For wet finishing, I'll soak them in hot water, then get rid of most of the water by wrapping them in a towel, then ironing them and then letting them finish drying.
In the past year or two, a couple of other inkle looms serendipitously have come my way. I'll need to play around with those, too. The one I used for the above bands is my own home-made one that I've had for many years. The person who made it used dimensions/instructions from Inkle Weaving by Helene Bress combined with images of a Schacht inkle loom. It holds roughly 3 yards. Of the others, one is a small 2-sided inkle loom, also home-made, given to me as a gift. The other is a Dundas that I found for dirt-cheap in a thrift store.
I still want to do more tablet weaving soon, once I have space to set it up again. A friend told me about a sale on ceramic fence insulators, so I might try using those as weights, one per card or so, the next time I warp up. I'll load them up like kumihimo bobbins (described in Braids by Rodrick Owen) and see if it helps me with my warp control issues.
I also recently had some fun with disk braiding, and in particular, the Fill the Gap braid. I ran a quick little course for beginning braiders back in November and we all had a lot of fun. I'll do a new post about that soon-ish.
