A Second Look at the Pin Loom Weaving Book

We are getting near the June 1st publication date and I am about two weeks away from being able to post an organized view of all of the project items from Pin Loom Weaving; 40 Items for Tiny Hand Looms.  In the meantime, this is a look at a few of the pin loom patterns.  Meg

The Prism Afghan -exploring color variation with pin looms

I wove and constructed the Prism Afghan shortly after getting my 2" x 4" Weavette Loom. It was such a thrill to be able to weave a rectangle. My intention was to weave a blanket in two contrasting colors with one color going from dark in the middle to light on the outside, the other color going from dark on the outside to light in the middle. The third color, in the little blue squares, does not change at all. It looks as though it does due to the other color variations.

This blanket is joined in a two step process. Each weavie is finished with a row of single crochet in the same color as the weaving. The pieces are assembled using a whipstitch. When I whipstitch two different colored weavies together, I either use a completely separate color-- if that will add to the composition, or as in this case, I use one of the one of the two colors from the weaving. My rule for choosing which color to use is, whichever color you want to emphasize, use the other color to complete the whipstitch.

This afghan was made entirely with Red Heart yarns, which was all I could afford at the time and offered the variation of colors that I needed. Making an afghan with a single yarn type and manufacturer lets it go together a little better. The cloth seems to lay more evenly. However, that asset is offset by the differences in texture and design that can be captured by the use of more than one yarn type, which is very important to me.

Bigger than a mug rug smaller than a blanket; making small blankets or pillow tops

This is a note about small to medium-sized flat items. I love making pin loom blankets-- but they take a really long time to weave. Sometimes it feels good to make something that offers a more immediate payoff.

Amish Style Doll Blanket

My favorite bigger-than-a mug-rug items are pillow tops and doll blankets. Both aim at moderate size, 12" square to 18" square. Both can be completed pretty quickly, which means that you can move from conception to gift giving in a week or so.

I made example to the right to accompany the Amish Style doll. Below it is another, even better example of a doll blanket made by wondertrading using 2" x 2" squares, made on a 2" Weave-It.

by wondertrading, 2010.

Anything that we call a doll blanket can just as easily be used as a pillow top, a wall hanging or an inset in a larger blanket.  

Speaking of Pillow Tops

Summer Pillow Top

The following two items were specifically made as pillow tops although it is more likely that they will end up as mounted hangings. By "mounted" I mean that my plan is to buy a couple 12" x 12" canvases and mount them using a spray-on fabric adhesive and staples around the edge.

On the other hand, I am fascinated by the idea of completing a series of woven pictures that displays several seasons. These two pillow tops were intended to show approximately the same image as it would change through summer and winter. It would be easy to do the same through summer, winter, spring and fall. Because all of the squares are 4"x4", these would be a great project for a Zoom Loom or other 4" pin loom.

Winter Pillow Top

Here is some construction information on the pillow tops. I used a single crochet edging around each of the squares and joined them with a whipstitch. I edged each pillow top with half-double crochet. If I were to do them again I would edge them with single crochet. The embellishment is free-hand, except for the crowns of the trees in the Summer pillow top, those are little crocheted circles with some tiny stitches in a lighter green on top.



One feature of pin loom use is that you can wind on a variety of colors to achieve different effects. I made the green stripes on the Summer pillow top by winding on two layers of dark green yarn, then winding one layer of light green yarn and weaving in the same light green.

The winter sky is made with the same striping technique, except the first yarn was a variegated blue/white and the second was white. I also worked pretty hard, selecting and sniping sections of yarn, to make sure that the designs were somewhat centered.

Four Seasons Medallion Throw, draft--not to scale.

I love the way that pin loom projects fit together so well. Each completed pattern is a 12" square.  I could see these two 12" pieces, along with two more representing spring and fall, serving as medallions, surrounded by an edging of 4" x 4" squares other borders and turning into a great little blanket or throw.

Well now I'm excited about them again. It may be a while before I can pick up on this project, but I'm going to do it someday. I think it could have a nice retro "Currier and Ives" feel to it. It would make a great present for someone that you cared a great deal for -- because there is a lot of weaving and work in it.  However, this is also a great example of a group project, one that can be shared out with siblings and cousins, so that it not only represents the quality of seasons, but also the quality of family.

Drafting a Sunshine and Shadow pin loom blanket

If one of the upsides of pin loom weavies is that you get a perfect little piece of cloth with selvedge all the way around, one of the frustrations with pin looms weavies is that you have a bunch of little pieces of cloth that you have to figure out something to do with. And the world only needs so many mug rugs. If you look at a lot of the old patterns-- you can find the original old pattern books from the at eLoomaNation-- you will see that the authors spent a lot of time trying to turn the woven squares into larger pieces of seamless looking cloth, with limited success.



Weavies Sunshine and Shadow

So here is an opposite plan, draft out a Sunshine and Shadow pattern. This pattern, also known as Trip Around the World, is perfect for pin looms. Each square, each color, stands in contrast to the ones beside it. And drafting the pattern is almost as much fun as a coloring book, more if you were never a very good colorer (I could never produce that incredibly even crayon texture like my cousin, Debbie).

My most recent crush is on FREE graphics program called PicPick. Its very easy to use while offering some rather sophisticated features. For example, you can make very complex arrows, example to the left, which I love to do. More to the point, I can pick a color from an endless color scale and, using the little paint can thingy, drop it on to a square, the perfect coloring book! 

Below are some ideas for Sunshine and Shadow blankets as well as an empty grid for an 11 x 11 square blanket, which works out to a blanket of about 45" x 45".

Amish style Sunshine and Shadow with borders.

 You can also try out the larger illustration of a blanket, it has 19 by 19 squares (361 total weavies!) which makes a blanket about 6½ foot square. I got a little carried away with the deep borders, but they look so good. Those heavy borders of teal and red also contradict what I was saying above about the difficulty of using weavies to make a solid piece of cloth. To me, joining the squares becomes the equivalent of the pattern made with quilting. So here are some ideas for pin loom blankets that you can take and make even better by reimagining them with your colors and approaches in mind.

Sunshine and Shadow with 20's colors and style                                      Blues, Reds, Yellows Sunshine and Shadow

Blank template with lots of space around it to add borders.

House art loves pin looms... or is it vice versa?

I have always been fond of architecture, which has worked out well when weaving with pin looms. The blanket below, Minnesota Landscape, is one of my favorites.

I wove it one winter when I was commuting 35 miles each day across a very cold Minnesota landscape. Often on the way home the sun would be setting, the sky turning incredible colors, one side still light, the other side beginning to pick up the dark blues of night. Scattered across the landscape were old farmhouses and barns.  

My intention was to show the sun setting in a blaze of orange while the darkness crept in on the other side of the sky.

The challenge of showing a landscape on a blanket is that no matter which way you turn it, something is going to be upside down. I've seen blankets and quilts showing houses lots of different ways, and they all work. This has turned out to work best on a bed or folded so that just some of the buildings show when laid on a couch or chair back.




The other thing that I enjoyed about making this
blanket was that I could design and weave each building as a separate piece, then join them all together at the end. As you may notice from the pictures, I joined all the weavies by using a single crochet edge which was then whipstitched together. I find that the weight of the joining nicely matched the weight of the woven fabric.

If you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please let me know.   Meg

Blankets and afghans, big projects from little looms

Here is my confession right up front. The reason that I have woven blankets and hangings and bowls and every possible thing that I could think of in little squares of woven fabric, a.k.a. "weavies", is that I LOVE weaving on pin looms.  I believe that they represent the crack cocaine of weaving.

Weavers all secretly (or not so secretly) know that weaving is addictive. It makes you feel good. It is calming and energizing at the same time. It gives voice to creativity and allows it a concrete, whole-body expression. The downside of weaving is that it can take a lot of time and space. Pin looms are little. The most popular size is 4 inches by 4 inches. You get all the good feelings of weaving in an intense little package.The downside (or the upside, depending on how you look at it) is that you end up with lots of little squares. The projects shown below are all proof that I love weaving on pin looms.

 

A Victorian House

This was modeled after a house in Tucumcari, New Mexico. One of the things I love about designing with weavies is that it gives a wonderful primitive look that I like very much.

Nine Square Afghan

The next several blankets owe their design to Amish quilts and, along with the house, were some of the earliest items I made. One of the challenges of using pin looms is joining them. If you look in the instruction books from the 40's and 50's, you will see clothing and blankets where the weaver tried to join the squares so as to make it look like a larger piece of whole cloth. It never works. You can always see the join lines. So I decided to highlight the the fact that these blankets are made from tiny pieces by incorporating colored patterns and using a joining approach that did not try to be seamless. All of these pieces, except parts of the house, were joined by using a single crochet around each weavie and then whipstitching them together.

Amish Postage Stamp Blanket

This blanket was based on a postage stamp that celebrated Amish quilts. It did not take forever to make but at the time it felt like it was going to take forever.

Diamond Square

It was only after I finished this blanket that I thought, "wow, those edges would be a great place to use a bias loom." Since then I have made some smaller throws using weavies and bias loom weavies and it worked pretty well. We can talk more about the ups and downs of the bias loom later.

 

 Minnesota Winter Blanket

I call it that because it took almost a whole winter to complete it and it is too large to be a afghan, its a real blanket. I recommend starting a project like this in the summer, that way by the time you are ready to start attaching all the pieces, its getting cold and you may actually want to hold it on your lap.

Dragon Blanket 

This is a picture of a blanket made for the daughter of a family who had a connection to the Renaissance Fair.  I wanted to make something slightly feminine but dragony. It was not an easy pattern to carry off. I finally accomplished it by making a full sized pattern and then just weaving squares and filling in the parts. Making a blanket like this is such an adventure. I spend about a third of the time feeling lost, pretty certain that I'd taken on an impossible task. And then, somehow, it came together and was so much fun. And it looks great! Or at least as good, though different, than I originally saw it in my head.