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...