I’m embarrassed to say I’m behind on my emails, but please keep emailing me your questions because they are the best questions and would love if everyone who wanted to weave knew how to weave!
One of the emails I was trying to catch up on asked about a cardboard loom where the number of slits made it so that it could only be warped starting at the bottom and ending at the top. As you may have heard, I often talk about staring your warp thread on the bottom of the loom and ending the warp thread on the bottom of the loom. This is only necessary if you are planning on hanging your weave from warp thread loops. If you aren’t planning on hanging your weave in this way or you can’t end your warp thread on the bottom, then that’s no problem. There are a lot of different ways to hang a weave (I’ve posted about a lot of them here).
Oh and never forget, you don’t have to use all your loom slits, notches, etc. If you want to weave something small then just warp your loom part of the way. Or if you had a similar issue as this question, then it’s ok to end on the bottom and skip that last slit. Doing that would get you the warp loops you might be looking for.
The second part to the question was, since the warp threads ended up being an odd number across the loom, the weft thread would start a row over the end warp and then end that same row over the end warp. Was this an issue? The answer is no, the weft thread can be manipulated across the warp threads in many different ways without issue, which is the really fun part of weaving.
If your woven row starts over the end warp and then ends over the end warp, it won’t cause issue to the weave. Assuming you’re weaving the plain weave, you’d weave the return row opposite starting with the weft crossing under the end warp then ending with the weft thread crossing under the end warp. Since you wove in an opposite pattern across your rows you’re warp threads would be locked in, regardless of how the weft crossed the end warps.
And if you’re a beginner that feels limited by weaving over/under for each row, then you need to try these weaving techniques to gain a newer understanding of weaving and all the different things you can do:
- One of my favorite techniques is the twill weave. In this technique you weave over two and under one. It creates a really nice pattern that builds in each row you weave.
- Doodle weaving is another great technique to get a better feeling of how your weft threads can work together across the warp threads. This technique is very open and organic. And yes, in some rows when I switch colors my over/under won’t match up, but that’s ok. The weave still comes together in the end and is really fun to make.
- There are a whole lot more weaving techniques to try too! And if you’re looking for a challenging pattern, you can make the lacy weave from my weave along. In the weave along I go over a bunch of different ways to weave your weft thread, which shows how much freedom there is to weaving.
The worst that can happen is you might end up with gaps in your weave, but even that isn’t bad. Some people design their weave to have gaps. If you run into an issue with having unwanted gaps in your weave, I have ways to fix them here.
I hope this clears up some questions for beginners. Keep sending me your questions, I love to help where I can.
Happy Weaving!
Kate
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