Warped

Hello! I just got back from vacation so my weaving has taken a brief hiatus.  Never fear, however - I have picked it back up and am almost done warping some orange and brown sock yarn to make a "test" scarf.  Here you can see the front of the loom, with the yarn passing through the reed.  The reed is what creates your "gauge" in knitting.

Here is the side view.  The yarn has passed through the reed and I have threaded all of the heddles.  The heddles are inside of the shafts, which together lift the different threads up and down as you weave.  Just a few more steps and I'll be set to weave!
Since I was away from my loom I did manage to get a bit of knitting done.  This is the free pattern from the Knitting Pure and Simple website - I am currently knitting the matching overalls.

Meet my new baby

I alluded to this in my previous post, but after my wonderful weaving class I made a few phone calls (and checked the limit on my credit card) and came home on Tuesday evening to find this "little" gem sitting on my front stoop.

It's my new loom - the Baby Wolf!  The loom was pretty much ready to go out of the box, but there were a few things for me to put together.  Tying on the apron bars was relatively simple, but getting all of the heddles into the harnesses drove me crazy.  Here I am trying to keep all of the little buggers from sliding off onto the floor.
Thankfully I was able to get it all done with no loss of sanity, and finished the setup by tying up the treadles.  You can't see in the photo how happy I am that it's all done!  You also can't see that I was sitting on one of kiddo's chairs during this "test".  I need to find a decent chair for my weaving.
The Yarn Barn sent all of my extra little goodies in the same box, so I'm all set to start EXCEPT for a warping board (they were out of stock).  For those of you "in the know", you know that the warping board is the first step in weaving.  So while I wait for said warping board to arrive, I can admire my beautiful loom.

A Recap...

Well, my class is over and done with and I LOVED IT! The instructor, Susan, was very nice and she packed a lot of knowledge into a two-day class. I found out later that Susan is also the owner of the Yarn Barn, so it's wonderful that she gets to own such a cool store and still teach. For anyone thinking about weaving, I highly recommend taking a class since weaving is such a "hands on" type of activity and there's lots of different skills involved. So here's a recap of the weekend:
The classroom: The class was held in the office building adjacent to the Yarn Barn. We were in a small room set up with mostly Baby Wolf looms, plus one Harrisville workshop loom and another small counterbalance loom (I don't remember the brand). There were 7 other ladies in the class with me.
Day 1: The first morning Susan told us how to read a weaving draft, and went through the steps of warping the loom. It took about two hours, and at the end I was overwhelmed at the number of steps involved. She also showed us an example of the sampler we'd be making so that we could plan our colors. Then we walked over to the store and we each picked out 3-4 cones of 5/2 perle cotton for our own sampler. I picked two shades of blue and and an ecru color. After that, half of us went back down to the classroom to measure our warp while the other half went to lunch, then we switched places.

In the afternoon we actually warped our looms. Warping was much more fun than I expected, and actually went really fast considering that none of us had done it before! Susan even manged to not freak out when I threaded my heddles backwards at first (did I mention I learned lots of new phrases, too? Like "heddle" and "sley the reed" )

Day 2: Day two was all weaving! Once the warp was ready, all that was left was learning to follow a treadling pattern and throwing the shuttle. We had quite a bit of leeway here - Susan said that she didn't want to "tell us what to do". She gave us a few patterns to practice on, but encouraged us to experiment. At the end of the day we each had a lovely sampler table runner.

As a result of the class I *may have* bought a loom that is now sitting in our family room...