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.

A Few More Inkles

 Here are the rest of the bands I made with that last bit of leftover perl cotton.  There was only enough left to make one more band with horizontal stripes -- blue with white bars.  Then the rest of the thread stash made two narrower bands with vertical stripes.

One of the vertical-stripe bands has 4 ends of red, 3 of orange, 1 of dark gray, 3 of yellow, and 6 of pink.  Yes, asymmetric, but it looks good anyway.  I particularly like the 1 dark gray, which of course makes speckles rather than a vertical stripe.  The band is very cheerful.

The other vertical-stripe band has 2 ends of blue, 4 of white, and 6 of green.  Simple, narrow, asymmetric, yet also attractive.

The last remnants of the various colors are all less than 3 yards long.  I suppose they'll go into the braiding stash.  Or whatever I end up using short bits of yarn/thread for.

The bands in the photos are unblocked.  I did block them later -- soaked them in warm water, then either ironed them or hung them up to dry.  They look better, of course, but not so much that I'm going to add new photos to this blog.  Not yet, at least.

Now what?  More inkle weaving?  I can move on to another thread stash.  I can put heddles onto the Dundas inkle loom (a thrift store find) and use that for a few bands.

Or maybe it's time to do more tablet weaving.  I've been circling around various 2-thread patterns and double-face patterns.  Which shall I try first?

A Few Inkles

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.