Why Am I So Excited About Weaving?

Well, for one thing, without weaving there would be no clothing. That's a pretty good reason all in itself. But even more, there would be no upholstery, no curtains, no bath towels, no baskets, no fabrics for anything; including doll dresses or sewing projects like yo yos and handbags.

I find we often take for granted the things we see every day in our lives, so I wanted to explore this craft a little deeper before telling you what I found. True, you can't weave straw into gold. But you can make gold by weaving fiber into fabric and turning fabric into things people need.

Weaving has been around since the New Stone Age. It is one of the red letter inventions as crucial to man of the modern world as was the wheel and the discovery that fire could be good. It is thought that weaving was discovered when man (or most likely woman) started twisting branches together to form containers to carry food home to their respective caves. Eventually they discovered that if they twisted some flax plant leaves, they could make strings, and so on and so forth to the invention of cloth.

Without weaving... how would Aladin ever have taken Jasmine on the world tour without the magic carpet? ....

I used to work for a non-profit organization that had a giant weaving loom. It went floor to almost ceiling and had what looked like hundreds of strings coming out of it. I made rugs there for the Rags to Rugs project that they sold at the craft fairs in the area. It was so much fun to see what I could create with strips of fabric and cut up clothing. I've always wanted my own loom, but frankly, could never afford one and cold not spare a place to put one.
This is what's exciting to me; because this is something new and undiscovered for me. So, without further ado, what I wanted to share about weaving is what inspired from the March 2010 issue of Threads. An article in this magazine written by a talented weaver, Shirley Adams, describes a process called pin weaving. You can use the same fabric, or mix it up for abstract work, or plan and work a design. Basically, pin weaving is a crude weaving application using cardboard and straight pins.

How you do it...

You just cut a piece of interfacing as big as you want the woven piece to be and lay it on the cardboard. From there, you line straight pins top and bottom about 1/4" apart (depends on what fiber you are weaving) across the length of the interfacing. Get some embroidery floss and tie it to one end straight pin, and then zig zag your way up and down until you get tp the final pin and tie it off again. This is your strung loom.
Now, you can choose some thin fabric strips, pieces of yarn, scraps, selvages, papers, lace- or whatever you want that can be woven- and begin to weave it in and out of the strings. (My recommendation is to use a wide tooth comb to 'comb' the work to keep the project woven tight).

Here some examples of Shirley's work from her website:



When I saw this, I thought "How fantastic is this? I make handbags. I make doll clothes. I have lots and lots of scraps of fabric not big enough for anything else. Why not make abstract woven embellishments for the purses? I mean, after all, if I am going to make handbags, I don't want to make one you can get anywhere. That kind of defeats the thought of OOAK. Besides, it's a green project. And I like giving back to the enviroment. This is the best of all possible worlds! It is so simple to please me!