How I Learned to Miniweave Part One: When I Thought I Knew

My interest in weaving started with a small, wooden frame I bought in a craft store and then quickly escalated to a full eight-shaft loom only to return to a small miniweaving pad three years later. One would think I just made a full circle ("circled back" as they like to say in my office these days) to the same but I beg to differ. Sometimes you have to cross the desert in search for a pot of gold only to find out there is one buried under your threshold, as an ancient story tells. It seems that "it's the voyage that counts" has never been so applicable to my endeavors as this one. My three-year exploration through the world of miniweaving was well worth the tiny pencil case with everything I need to start weaving just about everywhere.

All I wanted was to make a flat-woven carpet for my miniature domicile. How hard can it be? One over, one under, right? I don't mean to deter anyone who wishes to try: it indeed is not that difficult, but it's not easy to figure it out by yourself either, and since weaving is one of those crafts invented very early in our human existence, by now they came up with numerous small ways to make weaving easier and faster.

However, I did not feel I needed help from this collective, prehistoric knowledge of our predecessors, so I jumped right into the deep end of the yarn ocean: artistic, multicoloured waves. For the weft (horizontal rows) I chose this lovely, fuzzy sweater wool in gentle flowing colours of blue and green, and for the warp (the vertical ends which serve as a base) I made a brilliant decision to use a synthetic super-strong thread for outdoor stitching, slick and thick, so I can slide the wool in any direction. I started my masterpiece wondering how come no one thought of this approach before: it looked amazing on the loom.

Let me start with the choice of yarn for the weft. Wool has "bloom", these fine fibres which capture air and make our wool sweaters fluffy and warm, and our skin irritated and itchy. Any wool for knitting will have this bloom even if it looks smooth. On miniature 1:12 scale that will make your rug float on the floor and never ever lay flat. I fought the bloom with all my might: heavy iron pressing, shaving off the back side with a razor, even starching. Nothing worked.

In addition, knitting yarn, no matter how fine, is always too thick for our scale unless it's a specific yarn for weaving only, and only in fine sizes. Even then, it comes in variety of styles and may have bloom, so at this point I am not using wool until I find proper weaving yarn used for clothing textiles.

Using that smooth, super strong sewing thread for the warp was the next mistake. Warp has to hold the weave and not let the weft slide or you will never have a stable cloth. In miniweaving we can use sewing thread or embroidery floss or finer crochet yarn, and it will do for our purpose, but we will have the weft sliding and we will have to put a bit of effort to keep our weave straight. The best is, again, yarn made for weaving, and I prefer finer cotton as it's rough enough to prevent sliding, yet smooth enough to allow for easier weaving.

And since we are talking about keeping weaving straight: weaving in waves by moving yarn up and down is not something that works well. It looks gorgeous on the frame, but the moment you take it off, it collapses into a rag with no shape or form. Weaving is a grid, and the whole structural integrity of your final product depends on that grid being straight. The only way to preserve these waves (and only if they are not drastic) is to use a piece of fusible interfacing (a cloth with glue on one side which is fused by hot iron) and fuse it with the weave while it's still on the frame. It has limited success though. Waves are usually done by layering straight rows of weft atop each other. That will be a topic of our intermediate level tutorials next year.

Another unforeseen challenge was the draw-in. Ah, the draw in... It is a phenomenon where your work starts narrowing and reaches the narrowest point somewhere in the middle and then starts getting back to the previous width leaving you with an hourglass shaped rug. We'll tackle that at the beginner's level, but let me tell you, I think I spent at least a year trying to figure this one out. When later on I took an expensive weaving course and asked the instructor how can I prevent it, all I got as an advice was "just don't pay attention to it and it will go away." Well, maybe after years of weaving, when you develop a feel for your work, that just happens, but not for a novice. I will try to explain that in my tutorials in a way to make sense HOW it happens, not just how to overcome it.

Finally, when I got to the end of this work, which, up to this point was real fun (little did I know?) I made the ultimate mistake of cutting it off the loom with an idea of tying the vertical ends afterwards. That's not really done in life size weaving and in miniweaving it's a disaster. The remaining ends were too short and slippery, and it took forever to tie them. They looked wonky and made horrible fringes. The weave is always finished on the loom by hand-stitching the ends in a particular way, and if you don't use such a smooth yarn, it will not come apart.

That much for knowing how to weave. I still think going through this process and making all these mistakes was very important for future learning so don't be discouraged if at first you end up with less than desirable results.

I sure wasn't discouraged. At some point I decided to enroll in a proper weaving course in my local art centre. This was a whole new level of weaving: it included using a proper loom with shafts, the one that can make various patterns. I am sure it was probably very strange to the instructor that someone will spend about $1500 CAD to buy a proper loom that can make a cloth in 32" width, and use it for 6" wide miniature rugs, but that's exactly what I did. At this point I was determined to start weaving tiny rugs in different patterns, and given the investment, I also realized I will be making lot of rugs, and I need to sell them. But that also required developing my skill to a much higher level. (continues in How I Learned to Miniweave Part 2: When I Knew I Didn't Know)