Star Warps

When last we left off, I was planning some curtains using leno for the living room. I want something that, when drawn, will provide a little interest and will still let some light through. Last year when my handweaver's guild went to MOMA I found this partition by Anni Albers quite inspiring: So more rep weave and I'll leave learning leno for another day. I won't be using the braided horse hair (!) she used for a weft, and I'm looking to use an 8/4 cotton warp with a rep-weave-like sett. Instead of black, I'm going to do teal and white stripes with a white weft. I'm a magpie at heart, so I'm also thinking of a couple of thin stripes of silver within the stripes. The only thing I wasn't sure about was the weft. So I sampled. Look, I love a good gauge swatch when I'm knitting, but if I'm honest, I hate sampling. I know I need to, but getting a warp on the loom for me is still a little challenging. Especially since I'm not following a draft ...

Almost immediately after finishing the last project (that I still have to blog about!), which were a set of rugs for our apartment, we moved. Making curtains feels like a great way to not only learn a new weave structure or two since it's essentially weaving yardage, but it also feels like a great way of making this space truly our own. I'm planning on starting with curtains for the living room/office area because we spend a lot of time in this room, and while I absolutely love looking out my windows and into those of my neighbors (in a curious way, not a creepy way - I'm not Rear Windowing this at all ), I would also really like to feel like there's a smidgen more of a barrier between me and my neighbors. This is what the space those curtains are going to go into looks like. This space gets a lot of natural light and I want that light to come through the curtains so I was looking for something sort of gauzy and ran into a picture on Instagram from tesiapark that ...

I'm back from my parents' and have been reunited with Rey. I've been thinking of a real project that's not a sampler and have decided to weave a set of placemats to give to my sister-in-law. Her birthday is in June, so that should give me plenty of time to get this project done before the MAFA Conference where I'm hoping to take a few weaving classes. I've been thinking about this project for a long time. I figured I'd weave them sideways since I found a zig-zag twill I like. I think my sister-in-law would like zig-zags so I've been a little fixated on them. I want to hem the edges so they look professional, especially since I"m somewhat new to weaving and worried about how my selvedges will look. The best way to do this wihtout disturbing the pattern of the zig-zag seemed to be to put a border around the placemat so I'd know exactly where the edges that I needed to hem were. When I start a hobby I tend to start with an incredibly complicate...