Not tablet weaving (an inkle band and some fingerloop experiments)

 

I warped up and quickly finished the commissioned inkle band on a borrowed inkle loom that I mentioned in my past post.  It was very straightforward -- 48 threads total, strips of yellow-and-white checks separated by black stripes, using my stash of big-box-store #10 cotton crochet thread.  I ended up with a bit more than 5m (5.5 yds) of band, approximately 11-12mm (3/8") wide.  It went pretty quickly, though rotating the band around all of the pegs took a bit of oomph and/or easing it around.  Given the length of my finished band plus fringes, this is probably a 6-yard inkle loom.

I'm hoping that some of the irregularities ease out after blocking, though really, it's not too bad, and the width is nicely consistent.  The yellow and white don't have quite enough contrast to really pop.

I'm planning my next tablet weaving project, probably another commission/gift.  I'm thinking narrow rainbow stripes (2 tablets each) separated by slightly wider stripes (3 tablets each) of black.  It'll be simple to warp up and weave, and it will look good on both sides (it's meant to be a strap).  There are other ideas crowding my mind, though, so it's possible I'll do something else entirely.

Other than that, I've been playing around with simpler fingerlooped braids, inspired by the class I taught last week.

In my last post I mentioned 4 loop spirals.  Those are still fun.  I'm also messing around with 3-loop braids.  Interestingly (though of course it's entirely predictable), the results are slightly different if one takes the working loop through one or both of the other loops.  Different sources give different instructions for how to do a 3-loop fingerloop, which is when it finally occurred to me that there were different ways to do this.  Duhhhhh.  That's in addition to the reversed vs non-reversed working loop thing and also the various color/texture arrangements one can set up.  So there's another quick braiding alternative to add to my mental toolbox, or whatever the proper metaphor is.

To try to describe it a bit better...  For the 3-loop fingerloop, there are 2 loops on one hand and 1 loop on the other.  The hand with one loop gets a loop from the other hand.  So...  the empty finger can go through one of the loops on the other hand, or it can go through the loop on the same hand before going through the loop on the other hand.  Plus, now that I'm thinking about it, there might be other variations.  I'll have to do more experiments.  I'm sure this is a kindergarten-level understanding of how it all works, but heck, we all gotta start somewhere.  Sure, I can just follow instructions, and I do, but it's kind of fun to see how small choices can lead to different outcomes.  And of course all of this extrapolates to braids with a higher number of loops.

At some point I'll take a pic of my braid experiments.  Most look kind of dumb since I'm usually using whatever acrylic worsted weight yarn that happens to be around, the uglier, the better, and I don't care if it clashes.  I sometimes try different things in the braid rather than using only one method for the entire braid and I don't always braid to the end of the loops.