My oldest child needs a new belt. As a weaver and a spinner I figured that I could make her a cool belt. Ha! Some things in life are more challenging than I think they should be!
Thing #1: Hardware constraints. The buckle for the belt was ~1 1/4" wide and was salvaged from a belt whose vinyl strap was coming apart.
Thing #2: Yarn. I have lots of yarn. Unfortunately, I do not have lots of yarn in the black & silver color scheme desired by my daughter. However, I did have some very fine yarn in the right color. Out came the spinning wheel and I added twist and plied the available yarns so that I could work with something I felt was the right diameter.
Thing #3: Structure. Why, oh why did I think I would like double weave pickup on an inkle band? I have done this before and have not liked it. It looks so good when it is done well...and so sloppy with my beginning attempts! (Even my photo of that section of the band didn't turn out well! Argh!)
After a foot or two of double weave pick up exploration, I shifted to just weaving the band. The piece was threaded on four shafts on my Mighty Wolf--two shafts of black threads, two shafts of silver. As I wove, I used one shaft of black and one of silver to make the sheds.
And check out what I discovered: The section on the left of the photo shows a uniform fabric with black and silver threads showing. The section on the right shows alternating stripes of silver and then of black. What happened here?
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| Different sections of one band. |
I know that my tension on the piece varied during weaving and that the band is slightly more narrow in the striped sections (7/8" vs. 1 1/8"). I'll be looking into this. Leave me a comment if you know what makes the band change!
