Sticks and strings make beautiful things :)

Happy Fibre Arts Friday! As you may know that I was bitten by the weaving bug recently, not content with waiting until January to lay my hands on a Cricket Loom I started searching for things I could do right now and I found just the thing - backstrap weaving :)

Backstrap weaving is an ancient craft that is still practiced in many countries around the world today, especially in South America and Asia. I found a very good online resource for getting started on this ancient craft on WeaveZine - it's written by a wonderful lady called Laverne Waddington, otherwise known as warmi on Ravelry, who has been learning, documenting and teaching this technique for the last 20 years.

So, with the help of her article and Ravelry group I started making my own backstrap loom. The first step was to make a backstrap...

I found that the poles on my "fibre cave" was perfect for warping:

And if you have a son who does army cadet he can be very useful for securing poles to table legs :)

Here's my very first woven piece - a backstrap, and my backstrap loom is complete (I bought the different sized dowels from Bunnings and they cut them for me).

The backstrap is far from perfect, the two ends are not of the same width and the edges at the beginning look like they have been chewed by a dog, but nonetheless it's a functional piece, so I'm fairly happy with it.

Then I got a little adventurous and tried tablet weaving, where you use a pack of cards with holes to make patterns. An explanation of tablet weaving (or card weaving) can be found here.

I started with a thin band:

... then I got a bit more daring:

Tablet weaving is a lot of fun, even though it can be tricky to thread the cards correctly and keeping to the correct turning sequence, there is so much learn and I'm eager to explore more.

On the other hand I really should go back to my knitting and finish some WIPs so that they don't become UFOs... And that's me for the week, what have you been up to?

Thanks for dropping by, there is more fibre arts fun at Wisdom Begins in Wonder. Indulge your creative side and join the party!