Seventh Anniversary

According to lore, every wedding anniversary has a representative material. The only ones that the jewelry industry really pays attention to are the 50th year (gold) and the 60th (diamond). But in fact every year that passes in a marriage has its own stuff to commend it. Last year's was iron; this year: wool.

I have challenged myself to make a gift for Sara every year, composed of the material for that year. Since I don't knit or crochet (yet), the demand to make something of wool yielded only really to weaving or felting. I chose the first course, with some help from friends who have done a lot of work in the textile arts, Jim and Sandy. Kudos to them, who showed me the way. None of the errors which follow are theirs. I claim them all!

To weave a scarf (my ultimate goal) on the Structo Artcraft Loom that Jim and Sandy so graciously gave to me, the first task was to lay out the strands which pass through the loom, called the "warp." Since the production of a five-foot piece of fabric requires lots of extra length for the loom, I had to lay out eleven feet of warp strands. Here they are on the guest bed, green yarn from Sara's vast horde:

The next step was to run each strand through the loom and attach it to the spool on the far end. It was at this point (after cutting sixty-some eleven-foot strands of yarn and laying them out parallel so as not to get tangled--aarg!) that I discovered a major flaw in my plan. Yarn is too thick a fibre for this type of loom. The "heddle," a rack which the weaver pulls against each cross-wise strand (the "weft") to tighten up the weaving, had slats that were too narrow for the yarn. I needed to cram each thread between the slats with a toothpick. Trouble was brewing as I stubbornly stuffed every strand through anyway:

Here's where things begin to show up poorly. Pulling the heddle to the right (in the following picture), I discovered that the yarn would not pass freely as it should. Instead, the friction against the heddle gathered the yarn on the right side, and increased the tension on the left:

But did this stop me? No! I had cut three miles of yarn, and I was going to use it! So I carried on. The following photo shows every strand of yarn now tied to the loom. Note how densely the fibres are packed on one side of the loom. Given that I wanted a loose weave, anyway, I ought to have skipped a slot in the heddle between strands. Sigh. Next time, maybe. (Ha!)

Here's the scene before I began to wind the strands into the loom:

I finally got all the strands wound up. None of them tangled (praise the Lord!), so I could set about tying the other ends to the other end of the loom. I moved down to the kitchen counter for this phase:

I took the orange yarn we bought in New Zealand and began to weave. Now, if you have any experience with a loom, you will see from the following picture that I'm using the loom backwards. (Art teachers would have rolled in their graves if the ground weren't frozen.) I had to do this, in fact, even though it meant using my fingers to tighten the weave after every pass of the shuttle (which carries the orange weft thread). I could not move the heddle without doing damage to the weave, so I did the weaving on the wrong end of the loom. It was much more laborious that way--but it's all about the journey, right?

About an hour after I got my backwards weaving system (patent pending) going strong, I had used up the warp and had to cut the far end. I tied the loose ends of the warp into tassles, so that it won't come unravelled--at least not until Sara decides she wants to reclaim the orange yarn for a higher quality project. Note in the following photo how one side of the weave is really (too) loose. I docked myself an hour's pay for that:

Et voila! Happy Anniversary, with another anniversary gift adventure:

And here's a close-up of the finished product. You can see how loose some of the fibres are compared with others:
I don't think I'm going to be hired yet into the international weavers' union. But it's another adventure, inspired by that folksy list of materials for wedding anniversaries. And what fun to discover how many ways I can screw up weaving! Sara's been very kind so far, not immediately dismantling the scarf for a different knitting project.

By the way, if anyone wants to borrow a Structo Artcraft Loom with instructions on how not to use it, let me know!

Next year is our eighth anniversary. The material: bronze.

~emrys