ah-yi

I love weaving!! ( I say it loudly, really!!)_to answer your questions in comments.......

Shiri Me asked me if weaving is difficult to learn! I am not sure it's " difficult" but I want to say it's a bit " complicated". The main thing is to set up the loom, there are several steps and every of them needs to be taken care carefully. Usually it takes me an hour to finish the setup. Sometimes it takes even longer.

I did struggle a lot ( trust me!!) First, the class is not cheap, and you need time to do it. Once I enrolled the class, I made myself to go to the studio almost everyday (but not weekend), and I tried to stay there as long as I can. Simply I don't want to waste my money.

Right after the class finished, I immediately decided to buy a loom from studio. I think at that time I was losing my mind, I was so afraid that I would forget whatever I've learned from the class if I don't have loom at home. I threw my last bit of saving on the loom. ( It was right after our wedding and a trip back to Taiwan) Also I got a smaller loom. It was a 8 harness table loom had been converted into a floor loom. It' s smaller but still take a lot of space and It only fits in the front door so I can't move it into my studio. The interior doors were slightly smaller. We knew we probably could reassemble them but we gave up. It's ending up sitting in our living room now.

Of course this is not the happy ending yet! I did found some little problems ( I want to say little because I don't want to scare you). It's a 8 harness loom but the one I learned in studio is 4 harness. I definitely need a 8 harness book, but I missed a bid on Ebay. After that I didn't see any more 8 harness weaving book. So I decided to solve this problem by myself. I did learn how to do the drafting in the class. So from the tie-up patterns of this 8 harness loom I figured the way to do twill or diamond pattern (see the picture above). That means I can do any patterns now. It was at least 2 hours looking at the numbers and I kept telling myself to be calm........

The first time working with this loom was NOT so easy neither. When I learned setting up loom in studio, Babajam was always there. We always chatted and did it so naturally but I found it so much different to set it up all by myself. I had to squeeze my brain to remember every steps!! It took me forever to finish the setting up for the first try.

CL reminded me a very important thing when he was helping me to set up the loom. He said " come on, can you make it more workable?? can you do something with this crappy loom???" I was a bit mad with him. I said " it's a old old machine, you can't do anything with it!!" And then he answered back to me, " NO NO NO, you definitely can do something with it, you have to adjust it to become YOUR machine.... thousands thousands years ago people invented the loom, it just made of wood pieces with very straightforwards mechanics...."
I totally agree with him now. I did make some little adjustments and I know I will do more later on.

Of course this is not the end of the story yet... b

I hope you won't get bored with my weaving story or scarves.


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Two new scarves I made last week before I got sick. They are super super soft . I used alpaca for warp and played with different textures and mixed a lot of colors.