It’s a good time to weave!

Without further delay, let the weaving begin! First up, a little toilet paper to space out the yarns. (The cheap stuff works great!)

TP to start the show!

When dealing with a material that I can’t easily wind on a bobbin (ex. TP, or neckties), I use the rag shuttle. It’s easy and quick to hook the material and send it through the loom!

Rag shuttle takes the TP through!

Each loom design has it’s own charm! One of the things weavers will look for in a loom is what kind of “shed” does it offer. The shed is the space between the yarns when some are resting in the down position and others are lifted. A good shed space will cleanly separate the yarns and give the shuttle lots of room to slide through! The photo below shows the shed space on my Schacht loom – perfect for me!

Peering into the shed space

For this project, I’ll be using neckties AND yarn for the weft (the weft refers to the yarns/materials in the shuttle, versus those strung through the loom). So, prior to weaving, I had many, many ties to cut up! (I recommend multiple cups of hot tea and lots of episodes of Big Bang Theory to keep you company while mindlessly slicing neckties!)

Lots of necktie bits!

Like necktie soup, right?

Because the project has a focus on the color blue, I tried to select ties that were blue-related!

Necktie mayhem!

It’s not pretty, but I dump all the ties on the floor next to the loom and then sort through them as I go. Hopefully in the future, I’ll find a better system for managing the neckties. But for now, I wade through the lovely, silky mess on the floor to pull out the desired ties necessary for the project!

We’re weaving!

In the past when I’ve done a project using ties, I’ve organized them by color. And that’s a fairly intuitive process for me. (I’m the one that has to put the crayons in order like the rainbow. It’s a weird compulsion, I know…) So this time around, even though blue is common throughout, I’m still going to attempt to weave in groups of colors. I’m starting off with all the gray-ish blues I can find.

Gray-ish blues first!

When using the ties to weave, I like to use a yarn in between the ties to reinforce the fabric. I’m not really planning on someone yanking out the ties. But, if they did, it would still hold together! With the gray-ish blue ties in the beginning, I chose a pale blue yarn to compliment them.

Hmm, happiness…

There is much more weaving to come, don’t you worry! Talk to you soon…