I've an inkleing ...

It's been a busy week. The Dread Reverend had back surgery on Wednesday. He was only in the hospital one night, they sent him home Thursday. He's not completely incapcitated, but he's in quite a bit of pain, so he moves around as little as possible. Mostly we've been living on the air mattress on the living room floor ... which is okay with me, I like it there.

In crafty news, I tried a new experiment with inkle weaving last week that didn't go so well. I've made several bands in plain weave recently ...





... and I'm quite happy with this process. But I (of course) wanted to change things up a bit and begin getting a little fancier. So I started trying the pick-up method of making a pattern. It didn't go well at all. I tried a variety of different fibers for the weft - embroidery floss, full strands and split, crochet cotton, and sport weight yarn - but nothing was giving the full coverage, without the big gaps, that would be necessary for making a nice picture. In fact, it all looked pretty crappy.





I even tried using the thickest yarn I had, a thick wool I was using for my tapestry project - even that just disappeared between the warp.




I don't know what I was doing wrong, but I do know this ... I'm just not going to get frustrated about this, and abandon it like I did card weaving. Later, when I have time to work on it again, I'll try some other techniques for making patterns. I'll let you know how it goes! And if I never figure it out, oh well ... I'll be content with designing patterns by the way the loom's warped, and then just happily plain weave away. That's what I'm going to do to finish my test band - I got the loom all warped up with all that fiber, I'm not going to waste it just because my pick-up techniques failed. I'm going to finish weaving it in plain weave, and I think that narrow dark and light green pattern is way cool, anyway.