Video Notes:

Follow along as I puzzle out a card weaving draft and weave a belt.

IG: barrowsandwights
https://ko-fi.com/barrowsandwights

Transcripts for videos are available on my website.

Notes:

Card Weaving by Candace Crocket

Yarn:
Blue-Faced Leicester fingering weight wool dyed with madder for red, marigolds for gold, and tea with iron for the black/brown.

Loom:
10″ Shacht Rigid Heddle loom
with card weaving cards

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Attributions:

Title Card:

Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

Logo designed and drawn by A.R. Gergler

Background Music:

Music: Tranquil Fields (Peaceful – Loop Ready) by Alexander Nakarada (www.creatorchords.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

End Screen:

Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

Transcript:

[Music]

You’ll have to excuse my extremely messy table here, but I don’t actually know how much of this messy process I actually recorded. So, I figured I’d sit down and explain what’s happened here. So, way back when I was doing all of these little weaving pattern drafts to see what I would like. This sample- Let me get my book. So, the pattern I’m trying to do for this belt is from this Card Weaving book by Candace Crockett.

Here it is. I’m trying to do this pattern here. You can see my little test draft is basically the same thing that she has here. And my little swatch never actually made it to making the pattern correctly. This was the top side of the pattern. The underside, however, seems to be- let me uncip this – seems to be correct. Don’t know how I did that, but I did that way back when. So, I had written out this little correction card, which I misplaced until after I had done this design. So, my threading directions, these little arrows here at the bottom, were entirely wrong, which is how we ended up with this little bit here. That’s just- How to explain this in a way that makes sense.

If you’ve threaded your cards correctly, your pattern should appear smooth like this. All of these lines are smooth on this back side. They are jagged. The little gray parts are probably the easiest to see in here as they’re facing the wrong direction, which you can do by design obviously, but that’s not what my intention was. So, I had my cards threaded incorrectly. This pink is the correction. I had to rethread all of my cards, which gives us this. You can see the shapes are smoother. The lines flow more naturally. However, there’s a number of things wrong with this, which is why we do sampling. One of the things that was wrong, you can see there are some places where I have these floats that shouldn’t be there. One of my problems with this little sample was that my cards are two different sizes. These cards came in 24 packs and my design was 26 cards wide. If you’re a practiced card weaver, I imagine that would be less of a problem. However, I am not a very practiced card weaver and these bigger cards were getting- the corners were getting caught in the warp threads as they were changing directions. I do have more practice with these smaller ones. And because the shed doesn’t open as wide with these smaller ones, I find I have less of a problem of the corners catching.

So, one of the first edits I’m going to do, let me get another marker to mark this up. So, I’m going to chop off these extra border stitches. I don’t know what today’s date is. 11 – 15, 16, 17 – 24 revision. I’m going to nix those last ones so that this will be 24 and I can use the same size cards for the whole thing. The other problem is I did not really get this pattern to work. I kind of got it to work here, but I do have these rows where the pattern doesn’t connect. I think I figured out what my problem is. But I want to do another test to make sure I know how to do this pattern before I do the actual warp threads for my belt. This- this was stumping me so much that I basically created this little cheat sheet to try to make my brain make sense of how this pattern was supposed to go. Uh, I think I figured it out, but I would like to do more practice.

That is the next step is to do more practice. I’m also going to simplify the color design. I think because I’m not practiced in these more complicated card weaving designs, I should make the colors simpler so that it’s easier to read the weaving pattern. What does that mean? I’m going to- So, right now, this has four colors. this kind of peachy pink, this reddish orange dyed with madder, this gold which I believe was um marigolds, and this gray brown uh which was dyed using tea and iron. I’m going to remove one of these colors. I’m going to remove this peachy pink altogether. And I’m not going to split the color design this way. My idea is to do the actual rams horn in the red with the gray outline and use the yellow as the background color. I’m a lot less annoyed about this today than I was yesterday. Yesterday, I could not wrap my head around this and it was extremely annoying. My next step is to draw out my new correct pattern with the correct colors, the correct threading, and this is my little guide for what the directions mean, which way you thread the card. Um, get my new thread counts. And we’ll try another sample and see how that goes.

[Music]  

Just going to quickly pop in here to let you know that I finally figured out this card weaving pattern. Uh you can see on this second sample, it did take me a while to get there, but it’s this row where I’m off. Now, I don’t know if that’s a problem with the pattern draft or just how I’m interpreting it or how I count my turns or whatever, but let me just explain how I figured this out in case you run into this problem. I kept turning the pattern until I figured out which orientation got me the widest sort of arm of this W, which for me and the way I threaded these based on this pattern draft, it’s the blue circles. But once I figured out which row it was that had the widest part of the arms, that is the finishing row for all of my pattern turns.

So, what I ended up doing is for the front facing and the back facing for when I’m turning all the cards the same, I put down which colors are my counts. So, now red is one, green is two, yellow is three, blue is four. So, I’m finishing on blue. And then that’s the what I call the face portion. that section that’s difficult to see. It’s where the the horns are not curving back on themselves. So, it’s just like where the face of the goat would be. And then when you switch directions, that’s what I called the horns. Um, the first color is the cards nearest to me. The second color is the cards furthest away. So, the first turn, the red would be facing me, and then the yellow over here would be facing me. So, you have to turn them in two different directions. But I mapped out exactly where each card needed to turn for each step of this, which is what I did for this little face down here.

And then I started reversing it because I had a lot of twist up here in one direction. So, uh, after this one, I will flip it again and go back to doing this kind of front facing face. Uh, the plan is to do three in one direction, three in another direction. That’s sort of a rhythm that I like to do when I’m doing card weaving. uh simply because that’s about as much twist as this loom can handle because it’s not very long. But three feels like a good number for me. So now that I’ve figured that out, I can keep going with this sample. Make sure that the three and three looks good. And then hopefully I’ll be ready to actually do the real thing. I’m so glad I figured this out and that I took a bunch of notes. It was driving me crazy. I have like five or six inches where I was just like really trying to figure it out. But I did it. I’ve got the pattern. Now, as long as this holds true, I am all set.

[Music]