The green and white one is handspun bamboo; the purple, blue, green and brown one is some cotton samples from Texere; the blue, turquoise and lavender one is crochet cotton; the charcoal, orange and blue one is handspun BFL/tencel; the coral and green one is Natural Dye Studio sock yarn in merino and bamboo; and the grey and pink one is handspun Shetland. They are all different in feel, and I love them all!
Then back to the backstrap loom for an experiment in sprang, something I'd been meaning to try for ages.
Brief instructions in a paragraph and 3 diagrams in a 1974 book, Off the Loom by Shirley Marein. Unfortunately, it forgot to mention that some of your earliest handspun wool yarn is perhaps not the best material to use for your first attempt. On the other hand, though, there was no need for sticks to hold the twist in the upper part of the work - the yarn stuck together by itself, very securely. Only really a problem when mistakes were made, and un-weaving had to be done. But that was more often than I would have wished.
And then, looking on the positive side again, that's the last scrap of the awful hairy Wensleydale used up (that's the bluish colour). This is how it looks relaxed -
- and this is how it looks spread out -
The instructions for finishing it off were vague, so I turned to my friend Google, who brought me straight to Phiala's String Page; where I discovered that my use of bamboo kebab skewers had already been thought of, and the method of closing the middle of the woven piece was one I had come across before in tri-loom weaving.
It is, of course, the ideal method for making a string bag.......
5 comments:
Wow! When relaxed the sprang looks like another inkle band. Cool.
Hi Valerie -
the sprang looks more like tablet weaving when it's closed up - the threads twist round each other. But there's no weft, just the warp threads - magic!
Very nice! Did you say you made this on your backstrap loom?
Laverne - thank you! The inkles were done on an inkle loom, the sprang on the backstrap loom - perfect for relaxing the tension when needed for manipulating the threads.
That is really cool, it almosts looks knitted!
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