I finally got weaving

 Foreword:  If you came in in search of the information about next Saturday's museum presentations, scroll down to the previous post. It's all there.

 Meanwhile, in the midst of spinning and plying and looking at Rebecca Mezoff's tapestry weaving book, I got thinking about pockets for the jacket I'm making.  At first I had thought of diagonal knitted ones. But I also wondered about some weaving element.

 Rebecca does a lot of tiny works, as a form of note taking, like a knitter doing swatching.  So I thought about that, then decided no, I wanted to use the beloved potholder loom.

This is the one that everyone says Oh I had one of those when I was a kid, made my Mom a potholder, I wonder what happened to the loom..and it's really not just for kids.  It's a very nice little tool, particularly if you buy this kind, made in America with real metal with properly designed pegs.  I've made long pieces by crocheting together a series of squares.  And you're not stuck with squares. You can weave triangles or rectangles within the size of the loom.  Nora will show you how.  But here I wanted a square.

I used my trusty Tunisian crochet hook as a weaving hook, works a treat

I had to go back to Norah Crone Findlay for a reminder on how to get started warping the loom.  This is a lovely paperback, which I think I've recommended before.  She specializes in very clear useful instructions and photographs. 

She also has a YouTube channel from which I learned how to use paper clips to make a four selvedge weaving, which ended up being a purchase award piece at a regional show shortly after, and is now hanging in some elected bigwig's office, it being in a public art collection.  So there's that.  Here's me, at the gallery, looking gormless, and getting the official word that Red Building, tapestry, woven in embroidery floss, four selvedge,  had been selected.

Back to the potholder loom: here's how you go

And then, people think, well, this is all very well, but with yarn looped around on all four sides, how do you get the weaving off and finished?  It's like a crochet stitch, just lift up the first two loops, slide one over the other, pick up another, all the way round till you reach the starting point again.  When I do the corners, I loop twice, because there's a bit of slack where the yarn turned the corner.

And here's the pocket, steam pressed and looking okay, for an hour's work from thinking about it to looking for the iron

You can see how the yarn bloomed nicely and filled in all the gaps you saw on the loom.  I think I'll probably make another pocket, and line them so they don't sag in use.

Which will reintroduce stitching into my life, about time.