Pin Loom Yarn Bags

There is no rule, as far as I know, that says that all yarn bags must look like something that your Great Aunt Harriet or that scary old lady in the Wizard of Oz would make, but that seems to be the prevailing idea. The upside is that yarn bags are so old fashioned and usable that they never really go out of style.

I think that we are on the verge of a great Yarn Bag Renaissance- at least I hope so. After all, there is an enormous amount of fabulous yarn around these days, we need a few good yarn bags to carry it.

I will modestly confess that I have a pattern for a truly marvelous yarn bag in my book Pin Loom Weaving, now available for purchase. Pictures of all the Pin Loom Weaving items can be found under the page heading, Pin Loom Weaving; The Book.

Here are some other great yarn bags including this vintage bag highlighted on Eloomination.  You can find the pattern for this classic bag at the Eloomination site: http://www.eloomanation.com/gallery/vintage.php

This next bag is crochet but wouldn't it would look great woven with a pin loom? The pattern is available at: http://archive.berroco.com/exclusives/bramble_bag/bramble_bag_lg.html 

My first yarn bag was the product of falling out of love with an earlier project and having a bunch of weavies already made into right triangles. This bag strikes me as the epitome of ugly but useful. It is nice and heavy and will handle all sorts of weaving items. See a simple pattern below. I left out the part about turning the weavies into triangular pieces first, that seems a lot of work for no purpose, but I have posted notes on how to make dual colored weavies to recreate that effect.

Pin Loom Chickens

Chickens with wings posing with egg

The pin loom chicken pattern was developed a number of years ago and appeared in my first book, Weavies One.

The first chickens had no wings, like the example on the shelf. The wings are an option that offers great little pockets for storing things away that you don't want to lose... unless you forget that you put them in the chicken wing. I find the chickens to have an interesting, if beady-eyed, personality. 

Materials:
Yarn - All of the examples are made with worsted weight yarn and worsted weight chenille yarn plus polyester stuffing and some plastic pellets at the bottom for extra weight and stability.

The original chicken pattern called for all of the pieces to have a single crochet edge and be joined using a whip stitch.

These examples of the chicken pattern also show some of the variations made available by choosing a mix of yarns. For example, the green, wingless chicken was wound with one layer of beige chenille yarn, then finished with a green worsted weight yarn. This worked particularly well because weaving with something very fuzzy, like the chenille yarn, can be difficult. The yarn can break or knot up. By winding the difficult to weave with yarns onto the loom first you can integrate them into the weaving without having to manipulate them so much.

I made one new generation chicken-- shown below with the horizontally striped wing. Instead of using a single crochet edge on each piece and whipstitching together, this chicken is joined using a single crochet to join the two pieces, then the join is turned to the inside. You can see a close up of the two approaches on the Pin Loom Essentials page.

Because the new chicken is a bit smaller due to the difference in joining, the original beak was too big for it. For a smaller beak, I used some yellow fingering yarn to make a lighter weave and folded the 2" x 2" weavie 3 times, to create a small cone.  I also used two 2" x 4" weavies for its wings instead of the 4" x 4" weavies used for wings on the more vintage style chickens.

One of the chickens has apparently laid an egg. The egg was woven with one layer of chenille and an off-white worsted weight yarn. I wove two 2" x 2" weavies that were stitched together with a running stitch, leaving a hole at one corner, then turned inside out and stuffed.

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.

Pin Loom Weaving Mouse Pattern

This is the first of a series of patterns and  instructional material on using pin looms. The Weavies Mouse pattern has been around for a number of years. It has been a popular project, great for the quick creation of a stuffed mouse (catnip or stuffing filled) using one 4"x4" and two 2"x2" weavies. 

One note, the directions suggest using a Weavette loom. The directions were written shortly after the Weavette looms came out. Any of the 4"x4" and 2"x2" pin looms will work for this pattern. 

Happy weaving!  Meg