I made another thing!
The only thing I’m not happy about is the braided ends and that was only so I could take it off the dowels and figure out what to do with it. I had planned for it to be a bracelet but as it turns out, I know nothing of how to make woven jewelry and don’t know how it works. Ah well. It looks cool and I’m very pleased with it. My main focus was the edges and not weaving the whole thing too tightly and I definitely succeeded for the most part. Most of the wonky spots are near the beginning so I definitely improved. It could be a bookmark I suppose. I used solid yarn on the borders and variegated yarn for the center. I warped it in four sections, so the center is actually two different sets of the same variegated yarn, which is why the color changes are different.
My next project is going to be something longer and using normal yarn. I just need to figure out the warping situation and actually get the brackets installed that should work. In theory it will be the strap for the full sized loom for when I acquire dowels. I may actually need to spin for warp if I don’t have anything suitably slick or spun enough but we will see. I mostly have soft knitting and crochet yarns in my stash and they aren’t really suitable for warp, which needs to be sturdy and not fray easily. The friction of the warp sliding past itself and the heddle sliding through warp can cause some issues. I may also attempt a balanced warp where you see both the warp and weft rather than the warp faced like this piece where you only see warp.
I also pulled my thread experiment off the spindle since I did what I attempted to do: spin thread. We’ll see if it holds up okay. It is not plyed, so I will be finishing it on the niddy noddy to set the twist and fulling it (first step of felting) to get it to stick to itself a bit better. There was definitely a balance between how fine I could go and the strength of the thread. Since it was a thicker wool, it was more difficult to go very very fine but I don’t think finer thread would stand up to use as thread. So we’ll see.
I still have a ton of the guard hairs that I pulled from the fleece since I’m still processing it. And I really don’t need that much experimental thread in my life. This post shows the guard hair stuff. I will probably spin the guard hair into warp for weaving since that was the traditional use of guard hairs on double coated sheep breeds although they are usually much more strongly double coated. My next project on the little spindle is flax splicing which will be super interesting I
