How I Learned to Miniweave Part Two: When I Knew I Didn't Know

The knowledge begins when you realize how little you know. After spending hours weaving rugs on a small, wooden frame, using variety of yarn from local craft shops, and finding out that none of them were to scale, I decided to take a weaving course at the local art centre. I wish I could say that I had the realization of how little I knew, but in my enthusiasm, I sincerely believed I have mastered this weaving thing, and the course is really just to teach me how to use a real loom. Again, that question, how hard can it be?

The weaving course was led by an amazing lady, vibrant, energetic, extremely knowledgeable and experienced in both weaving and teaching. She knew our difficulties and she adjusted the weaving learning to the absolute beginners that we were. The looms were for the most part table looms, those portable versions that can sit on a table and can fold for transportation but are still large and heavy. She gave us proper weaving thread and it is then I realized how crude my little rugs were. To make a thin cloth, you have to go to the yarn size comparable to a fine crochet thread at least. This yarn was made for weaving so it wasn't as tightly wound like crochet yarn, nor or as loose as knitting yarn. It was smooth enough to have no bloom and lay flat, but with those micro scales that grab onto fibre and hold the weave together. Suddenly I realized how little I knew about weaving overall.

Thousands of years made weaving one of the ultimate feats of humankind, and one of the most important parts of our existence. If for some reason we had to close all our textile factories, we would quickly realize what an amazing technological revolution was just to invent machines which can weave. There is a movement out there, called "slow cloth", or "slow fashion" countering the environmentally devastating "fast fashion," a relentless production of low quality clothes that gets discarded quickly and ends up as a massive pollutant, not to mention that it already polluted the environment during production. Weavers are a part of that movement as they aim to make their own cloth from environmentally sustainable materials, where possible. These are practical items which will last not just because they are durable, but also because it took so much to make them that there is a whole new appreciation for them, so they don't get discarded simply because we need new colour for our kitchen towels, or new scarf. Once we see directly what it takes to make cloth, we appreciate it far more, take care of it better, and reuse it whenever possible. These wonderful weavers around the world make kitchen towels, baby blankets, couch throws, scarfs, rugs woven from strips cut out from old clothes, and make a contribution to the efforts to somehow balance our consumption with our relentless need to create.

I fell in love with weaving right there and then. I decided to buy my own table loom and after some research decided on Ashford* 24" table loom with 8 shafts. Shafts are those frames that hold the yarn and go up and down in different sequence, producing patterns. They were the predecessors of computer programming. Here is a YouTube link to a two-minute video which explains the process at a high level of traditional machine weaving, the early industrial weaving.

How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer Technology (youtube.com)

Being a huge supporter of local vendors, I ordered the loom through a local weaving shop and they shipped it from the manufacturer's warehouse directly to me. The loom was supposed to be delivered in two days, and I could see in the tracking app that it was picked up and left the warehouse, and it's on the way. Oh, the anticipation! I couldn't wait to get it and kept on checking the app hourly, but when after two days it still didn't have the delivery time I started worrying. My vendor assured me it may be just stuck somewhere but days went buy and now the app said something like "unknown". Well, I knew what a broken heart felt like, but this was a whole new level!

I ended up waiting for six weeks before we were able to finally get my package declared lost, get a refund and then order another one. This time they didn't have a 24" wide loom so I went to 32" and I am quite happy I did that since now I can make wider cloth. This one arrived to the vendor's store where I picked it up. Technically, she wasn't responsible for the first one disappearing, but she still handled the whole process of return for which I am grateful. If she still had that store I would gladly mention her but since then she was forced to leave the building she was in for over 20 years as it was sold to a developer and rents became utterly unaffordable, so she went online only and stopped selling the stock I buy.

The loom finally arrived, and it was in pieces, so I spent some time assembling it. This was all after I finished the course, so now I had no one to ask for help so I resorted to YouTube videos and Facebook weaving groups.

Setting that loom for weaving - so-called dressing the loom - is an exercise of significant proportions. It's tedious, time consuming, and unforgiving to mistakes. Pulling just one thread through the wrong heddle (yarn holders in frames) will create an ongoing error in pattern that will continue through the whole weave like a run in stockings. Winding the warp unevenly will create "smiling" cloth, where every horizontal stripes will be curved. It is possibly one of the most difficult skills I had to learn, and I am still dreading winding that warp, even if I do only 6" width at the time. I admire weavers who do wide cloth that comes out perfectly strung and evenly woven.

And then there are patterns, which is actually the best part of weaving. When setting the warp initially we decide on certain "family" of patterns, which we have to stick with throughout that particular warp. Those "families" can be very small and produce only few pattern variations, while some have many options. Since it gets boring to do same pattern over and over again (which is what weavers in life-sized weaving do), I always set my warp for large number of variations so I can explore and experiment and never repeat the design.

But before that, I had to learn to weave evenly, which is akin to learning to play a musical instrument: repetition, repetition, repetition. The large "comb", called reed, is what determines how close the rows of yarn will get to each other, which in turn determines the evenness of the pattern. When you pull the reed to compact the cloth, the last few rows are never as tightly compressed as the ones before then, simply by the nature of pressure that each rows brings. It's deceiving to a novice so I kept pushing the reed harder, then realizing it's too much so then I'd release it and all that created uneven cloth and wonky patterns. But the process of learning requires repeating this until the muscles develop a memory and I had a feel for it, at which point it "just happens," as my instructor said. It took some time to get to a decent level, but it is worth it.

Another thing during weaving is remembering the sequence for your pattern. From Facebook pages for weavers I learned that it's not just me who has a challenge of remembering which frame to lift. Patterns come in combinations and sometimes they are very intricate. Some weavers have iPads with the sequences and they go through screens but I opted for a simple writing pad where I turn pages as I pass a shorter sequence. After a while there is a bit of memory on those so they are not always necessary, and sometimes the errors create unexpected patterns.

But more on that part of the process in How I Learned to Weave Part Three: A Rug is a Rug is a Rug?

*Please note: I am not affiliated with nor sponsored by any manufacturer or brand name on the market and am not making any recommendation. The brand names are mentioned only as a part of my personal experience.