Weaving Mistakes 101

Mistakes in weaving are easy to make, especially as a beginner weaver. While there are a few easily fixable mistakes, most are devastating, requiring hours of rework. Yes, I have cried over finding an error that could’ve been prevented had I been in less of a rush and more careful. The good news is that as you become more skilled at dressing the loom, which is where most of the problems occur, it’s much easier to prevent, find, and correct mistakes before they become a big hassle.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t still make mistakes. I still consider myself a beginner, though I’ve been weaving for a few years now, and I usually make at least one mistake on each project. It’s just part of the weaving process.

Recently, I finished a prototype, something that I hope is a product that will be included in the fall/winter collection for The Stranded Sheep. Designing an actual garment brings me back to my roots as a child who desperately wanted to be a fashion designer. Admittedly, it feels a little daunting to think that creating very simple garments could evolve to more complex designs, both in weaving and knitting, but that’s another story for another day.

With any good weaving project, at least with mine, there are always some pretty good stories that come out of the process. When these little bumps in the road are happening, it’s hard to look past the frustration and realize that there is a serious evolution taking place—real learning in my case. Making minor and critical mistakes has always been the best way for me to take those learnings and implement improvement next time. I guess you can say it’s trial and error. With this project, there weren’t a lack of mistakes, which I’ll talk more about below.

First, I ran out of yarn when warping. I chose a 3/2 warp and a slubby cotton for the weft to showcase the true nature of the chosen pattern, M’s and O’s. I’d used this same pattern for Elliot’s baby blanket, but my warp and weft were similar in size. Since they say you should use a bigger warp than weft, I didn’t feel like I really experienced the pattern as I should. My project required me to weave my loom’s full width (45”) so I ran out of yarn halfway through warping and had to wait a week or more for yarn. Do your calculations correctly and buy enough yarn. If I'd followed the plan, this would've never happened. Or would it? Read a couple more paragraphs below.

I decided not to count my heddles and just winged it, which left me transferring heddles to the other side when I ran out. I’ve been in this predicament twice before and it isn’t fun. In fact, it’s a total nightmare to ensure that all of the heddles go on the shafts correctly and in the same direction (weavers, if you have any tips, I'm all ears). I’m still finding heddles that are in wonky positions. One of these days, when I have an immense amount of patience and a babysitter, I’ll go through the entire loom and fix them. Count your heddles, weaving people.

Threading the loom went great, can you believe it? I began to sley the reed and just about the time I could see the finish line, I realized that I was not going to have enough room to accompany all of the warp threads that were still hanging. And there were a lot of them. I panicked, texted a weaving friend and tried to figure out why my calculations were so wrong. I’m pretty sure I left the loom for a day or two while I pondered my mistake with no luck. In the end, I decided to pull the threads out of the heddles and throw them over the back of the loom. Yes, tons of wasted yarn, money and time threading those extra heddles. Yikes.

This leads me to my next problem. I needed to know the middle point for my secret project and because of my extra threads, I had no idea how many total threads/ends were in my warp so I had to count all of the threads, one-by-one. I tried counting multiple times and finally decided to tie off the warp threads into 100/thread bundles to ensure accuracy.

After sleying the reed, I was ready, right? Wrong. I discovered a hanging thread a little more than midway through the warp that had not been pulled through the reed. Ugh. I had to pull the threads from the reed and sley them again.

From there, I was pretty much home free with the exception of loom troubles that I think were caused by an old, rusty reed along with the common balance issues associated with counterbalance looms. Oh, how I yearn to buy a new loom, but I need a dedicated studio space and money to get the loom of my dreams. Here’s to future weaving goals.

So that's a typical weaving project for me. I really hope you expert weavers aren’t snickering, though I know you’ve been there before. My goal with this blog post is to help beginner weavers know that making mistakes is common and that you aren’t alone. I’m here to remind you to laugh at yourself when trying new things because I need that reminder just about every day.

I can’t wait to share the end result of my prototype with you soon!