February Weaving Study Group Project

As I mentioned in an earlier post I've joined a weaving study group being run by my local fiber arts guild.  We had our first meeting earlier this month which was really interesting and I'm excited about participating the rest of the year.  Each month we will have a project to work on at home.  This month we were to explore how different colors and textures interact in both plain and twill weaving.  Since I just got my floor loom I haven't done any of the twill sampling, but I did complete the plain weave sampling on my Flip.

First we were to wrap cardboard blocks with different fibers with at least one card in each of 3 categories (same color - different textures, same texture-different color, different color-different texture).  Then pick 2 cards and warp your loom to sample.  Based on the sample choose yarn to make a small project. `

Here are my cards:



Top left - Same color (yellows), different texture (thick suede, thin chenille)
Top right - Same texture (2 ply wool), different colors
Bottom left - different colors and different textures
Bottom right - different colors (yet united by all metallic) and different textures (pink silk wrapped in silver thread, silver multi-ply, blue ribbon)

Here is my sample - plain weave on 12 dent heddle:



You can see I used the top left card and the bottom right card yarns for the sample.  I used each yarn as both warp and weft (bottom right is pink/pink progresses to top left suede/suede).  I learned from the sample that the pink-wrapped-in-silver yarn made a terrible warp (kept breaking).  The blue ribbon, while very pretty, caused bunching as both warp and weft.  I didn't really like the gold and cream chenille yarns next to each other in the warp, should have tried the suede in between them.  The silver weft made a very pretty accent in the cream chenille, but I didn't like the silver warp with the cream as weft.

I decided to use the silver and pink-wrapped-in-silver yarns to make a small drawstring spindle bag.  I used the silver as warp and the pink-wrapped-in-silver as weft.  It's so shiny!



I hope to have the bag completed this weekend so that it's ready for next week's study group meeting.