Playing With My Pin Loom
Today I took some time for Sunday crafting while I was watching and participating in the BotanicWise Allies for Plants and People Symposium. This year, the Pin Loom Weaving Support Group held a Weavealong hosted by TexasGabbi of Turtle Looms. The weavelong ran for six weeks and, though I did not finish on time due to the stress of the global pandemic, I’m still plugging away at it. I made all the weavies called for in the weavealong, but I used to be intimidated by sewing the weavies together – part of the weavealong instructions.
I’m happy to say that I no longer am intimidated by this process! I’ve successfully sewn Week 1, Week 2a, and Week 2b weavies together. And today, I worked on the extra project for Week 2, embroidering a weavie.
This caused me some consternation, because my very first textile art was embroidery. I could not settle on a design I liked. I dithered and hemmed and hawed, and overthought, and finally, today, decided I’d had it: JUST DO IT, as Nike says. Right? Right.
Only problem was, when I started to embroider on a finished weavie, I couldn’t get it under tension. It was flopping all over the place because the weavies are such loose-weave fabric, and I don’t have a small enough embroidery hoop. A friend suggested putting the weavie back on the Zoom Loom, and thereby under tension. I tried that, but fabric off a loom settles and it’s next to impossible to get it back to its former state.
Then it hit me: why not make a new weavie?
Voila.
This time, I switched back to my main color, a lovely charcoal grey marino wool blend. Then I used my CC3 color (contrast color #3), which is a light grey variegated color, also a marino blend. I used a detail of a pattern from Alice Starmore’s book, Celtic Needlepoint (if you haven’t checked out her work before, you owe it to yourself to visit her site that she shares with her talented daughter Jade Starmore, Virtual Yarns). I added the year and then took it off the loom. I’m really pleased with the final look of it. When it came off the loom, the threads relaxed and came together, so the needlepoint really pops.
Next time, I’ll share some of my herbal adventures. I have some lemon mint infusion steeping on my counter overnight and tomorrow, I plan to make a mint syrup.