What To Do, What To Do

My borrowed table loom has warp left over from Ruby Leslie's Color Workshop in April. I need to weave it off.


When Ruby sent me the warp, we had 15 people registered for the class. I was going to be the only person warping a loom for this design.

By the time of the class, we had 5 more attendees. Another weaver was able to bring a floor loom warped with the exact same thing as my table loom. It seems like about half the class wove on each loom.

I might have a yard or two of this warp left. I don't want to unwind it to measure it because the tension has stayed even so far. (That's not always the case for me.)

Goals for this project:

• Weave the warp off this loom so I can return the loom to its owner in a timely fashion!
• Make something that I like out of this warp

At the end of the workshop, Ruby told us to go ahead and wind quills of the colors we'd need to finish our warps. I should have wound more of every color.

What I did instead (besides weaving up to the very last minute), was run around taking photos. I ran out of quills and managed to borrow a few. I did wind a few full quills of the dark blue. I'll have to figure out what to do about that.

Meanwhile, my loom is threaded with a straight draw on 4 shafts. I scoured Handweaving.net for drafts with this threading.

I'm not crazy about twill or plain weave for this project. I want to experiment with different options and pick what I like best.

I packaged up about 20 drafts on Handweaving.net, downloaded them to my PC, and slurped them back into Fiberworks PCW. Very cool and very easy.

Then I could start experimenting with my favorites.

I'm new at using weaving software, so I need to practice visualizing what the drafts will look like when woven. I really like this draft that reminds me of fern fronds.


But I'm not as crazy about it when I weave 2 repeats.


These crescents seem kind of cute.


And I like them when they're woven.

I love these fusilli and am curious about the little diagonal bricks.


But when I weave both the fusilli and the bricks, they kind of disappear. This picture has 2 rows of the fusilli and one of the bricks.

I decide to go with the crescents - which are in the middle of my samples in brown.


I had also picked out this draft....but didn't even try it. I think it will just get lost like the fusilli.

I still face the issue of weft yarn. I did try a few yarns from my stash as part of the samples. I was hoping I'd love one of them and weave the whole warp with one weft. I had high hopes for a certain marine blue (used for the fusilli and bricks).

But I didn't love any of my stash yarns with this warp. I'm definitely big on following my intuition and trusting that I really do like what I like. It doesn't have to make sense to like it, but if I like something, I move toward it! I almost always sense either a strong "Yes" or strong "No" when faced with a question.


I ended up dividing the weft colors into 3 piles: blue (I have 3 full quills!), greens (5 quills of different amounts), reddish colors (3 quills, including the very bright pink that's in the warp.)

My plan is to make an asymmetrical plaid with 4, 2, 3, then 1 repeats of the crescents. I'll change colors in each segment and I'll work in blue, green, red, blue, green, red, etc.

Bailey's scratching the floor, trying to get me to play. But I want to weave and see what happens!!!

Related posts:
Cutting off one towel

Samples from the workshop
Day 1 of color workshop
Day 2 of color workshop (I guess I was too tired to write about day 3!)
Ruby's Teaching Schedule