How to fix waves after taking your weave off the loom

A little while back, I had this idea for a weave that was the largest one I had made at the time (15” x 26”). I finished the weave on my loom and it didn’t turn out looking the way I had envisioned, and actually I hated it. So I started unweaving parts here and there, and then wove in different colors and patterns until I got it to the point where I really like it. Over all this had taken me quite a few days to do, so imagine my dismay when I cut the weave from the loom and I saw that there were huge waves in the dark blue area. I really wasn’t sure how to proceed, was the weave ruined and I just had to forget it and move on? Of course I didn’t want to do that because of all the time I had put in and I had gotten it to the point where I really liked how it looked. So I decided to figure out how to save it.

Seriously, look how smooth it was on the loom!  So why did the waviness happen in the first place? Well if you look at my weave, that blue shape is created at drastic swooping angle, while the rest of the weave is more horizontal. By making this swooping shape my weft wasn’t able to push down as close together and that is why you can see a lot of the warp thread in the shape. So without enough support the weft threads were spreading apart causing the waves.

So step 1 was to give the weft threads some more support. To do this I turned my weave onto it’s front so that the back was facing me. I then took a really long piece of warp thread and began weaving it horizontally across my wavy area picking up warp threads here and there. You’ll notice that I couldn’t pick up the warp threads in straight lines due to the swoop shape, and the fix sure isn’t pretty, but it’s the back so that doesn’t much matter. Weaving this extra piece of warp thread through the back worked perfectly and gave the blue area a lot of support.

If I had realized this would be an issue before I cut the weave off the loom, I would have added this support while my weave was still on the loom and it probably would have looked a bit nicer. Lesson learned. With my support issue solved, my weave was still looking not as nice as I would have liked due to the stretching it did once cut from the loom, so step 2 was to iron my weave.

A fellow weaver had suggested that I block my weave, which is a practice often used in knitting and crochet, where you wet your finished piece then pin it down flat in the shape you want and let it dry. I do think this would have worked also, but I did not have a good setup to do this in. Also ironing worked really well for me and was quick. If you are going to iron your own work, make sure to note what fibers you have in your piece and then set your iron to the lowest tolerance. My weave was made up of cotton and wool, so I set my iron to wool as it has a lower heat tolerance then cotton.

I was so excited to see that these two steps worked for me and my weave looks great again, crisis averted!

Have you ever taken a weave off the loom and had it get all wavy? If so what did you end up doing? Have you had any other issues when weaving? I would love to hear about them and offer any help if possible.

Happy Weaving!

Kate

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