One of my favorite things to do when visiting my mom in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia is to go to the local thrift store. Tucked in a corner is a section where the staff and volunteers sift through the donations and pick out special items to set aside for silent auction. I’m grateful that …
It happens, you warped up and things are just not going according to the plan in your mind’s eye, so you want to take the warp off the loom and save it. From time to time, I have weavers reach out to me asking what to do in these situations. There are a couple of …
Yarnworker is turning eight. This blog post summed up why I wrapped my weaving enthusiasm around the name Yarnworker. While I didn’t know what specific form this space would take when I started Yarnworker.com, I did know that I wanted a place to express my love of working with yarn within the weaververse as it …
Four years ago, a chance meeting at a trade show led to a partnership that has been both rewarding and fun. It is hard to put into words the satisfaction of having an idea and working with a perfect partner to make it happen. Angela Smith of Purl & Loop, who was most of the …
Stripes are the backbone of woven design—the workhorse of colorwork. When warp and weft stripes meet, beautiful things happen. Perhaps the three most common terms used to describe woven colorwork are stripe, check, and plaid. In general, I try to be precise with my language while trying to avoid some of the traps of being …
As a weaving teacher, I’m constantly reminded what an inexact term “beating” is. In weaving, we throw the term “beat” around a lot when what we really need to do is finesse. There are notable exceptions and we have explored some of those this year—weft-faced colorwork anyone?—but most yarn doesn’t really like being pushed about. …
As I enter my fifth year of hosting weave-alongs, I’ve been musing on how we spend our time. Besides generally geeking out on all the things weaving entails, we seem to spend the most time talking about the endlessly fascinating topic of yarn selection, sett, and beat, or what I like to call, the weaver’s …
With a little know-how, fixing a broken warp end is a relatively easy fix. To do this, you need to incorporate a supplemental warp yarn. Over the years my thinking has evolved on how to do this. The fundamentals haven’t changed, but how I manage the overlap has. To fix a broken warp end, gather …
Rugs have been made by weavers for thousands of years on all sorts of looms. I have woven many rugs on a rigid-heddle loom and have included projects for them in my books, workshops, and weave-alongs. I hear from time to time the pronouncement, “You can’t make a rug on a rigid-heddle loom.” The reasoning is …
The Yarnworker School patrons and I are spending our summer school session tackling the process of formulating a plan to weave a project. We placed pause on this activity to recognize a moment in a long reckoning with race, justice, and inequality in America. At a time when we have all experienced the impact of …
