Fabric Follies Two

Like simple and elegant stockinette stitch sweaters?  Don’t like the roll at the waistline?  Today’s post at Knitting Daily shows how to add a no-roll hem that won’t add an extra inch around the waist…  Have a look….

I came across these Pocket Loom Sets  at Palmer Looms.com and was fascinated.  So I looked around some more and found a small tutorial of how to use these after making your own looms out of cardboard…Meadow Tree Shetland.com has a kid’s page showing how to make and use your cardboard loom…

I decided to try it so I made a cardboard loom and set it up using my natural Icelandic 2-ply wool for the warp.  Then I used both the natural (almost) white and the natural deep brown as the weft and began…  The only thing I did differently from the tutorial above was… I started at the top like it says, but found that to be unhandy for me, so I took it out and started at the bottom…  After about an inch, I used a cheap plastic comb that I have lying around and beat the weave down on both sides so the bottom wefts almost met on the bottom. 

I began the weaving using the darning needle in the pic…didn’t much like that so I took a bamboo skewer from the kitchen drawer and found that if I wound the weft thread around the skewer covering a large part of it, it would still be slim enough to move easily between the warp threads and long enough to cover the entire side at one go.  This made the weaving go much faster. 

As I progressed, I found myself much like a child..grin.. a bit amazed with the weaving and having a bag appear almost magically with no seams. 

When I cut the threads and removed the bag from the loom, I found it to be very smooth on the inside, but more like brushed wool on the outside.  This has to be from the comb that I used as a beater.  I was also surprised by the thickness of the fabric.  It has not been fulled yet, so I’m sure it will be even more tightly woven after I do that. 

The only real problem I see is that on the sides where the weft wraps around from front to back there is a long open weave since there is not a warp on the outside edges of the loom.  I will have to see what happens when the bag is fulled to see if this is a major problem.