weaving workshop

This weekend I took the plunge and did something I have been wanting to do for ages and went on a weaving course with the lovely Margo Selby in her very posh studios in Bloomsbury, London.  I really enjoyed the course and learnt an awful lot about weaving and what works well together in terms of colour and texture.  It was also really nice to see what everyone else was creating - no two were alike :-)

The first day we experimented with different weave structures, on point threaded (wool) and straight threaded (bi-colour cotton) warps.

I started off on the wool warp and had a great time trying out different patterns and types of yarn for the weft

Here you can see lots of different structures - extra weft circles, a chequerboard formed by using a satin next to a twill, goose eye, rib, etc.  I fell in love with the colours!

In the afternoon it was time to switch to the much brighter cotton warp, in my case a yellow and red mix.  I found this really challenging as the first few stripes blended in too much with the warp colours.

You can just about see that the blue strip is a herringbone design... so, in theory are the two below it!

But I persevered and managed to weave a sample which I'm relatively happy with.  I much prefer the wool colour palette though.  In real life this is much more garish!

Day 2 was our chance to weave an item, and I decided to try and weave enough for a cushion, using the structures I had best liked from Day 1.  I chose a palette of blues, greens, reds, oranges and pinks in a mixture of wool, feltable wool and silk.

This is part way through

I didn't get much chance to take photos on day 2 as I was frantically trying to get my 14 inches woven by 4pm ;-) but here is my piece coming off the loom

And here is the finished piece!

The next part of the process was the scary bit - I needed to wet finish it and felt the long woollen floats of the circles so that they don't catch.  I made the cushion cover first to help stabilise the shape, then washed it with mild detergent in hot water, rubbing the woolly bits to help them felt.

And this is the finished result, which I am very happy with... now to get my own loom(s) set up... gulp!

Katie xx