Transcript for
Episode 72: Handspun on a Simple Loom
You’re listening to The Sheepspot Podcast, a show for handspinners about making yarn we love.
Hello there, my darling Sheepspotters! Welcome to episode72 of The Sheepspot Podcast (plague-years version #1)!
I’m Sasha, from sheepspot.com, where we are laser-focused on helping you make yarns you love, with beautiful fibers and top-notch instruction.
Do you have lots of handspun yarn around that you don’t know what to do with? Today I’m going to be talking about a quick and beautiful way to use hand-spun yarn. I’m also going to be announcing a new challenge at the end of the episode, which I’ve custom-made to our current pandemic-driven circumstances.
I’ll get to that in a second. But first, this episode is dedicated to the memory of my mother-in-law, Elizabeth Rowlinson, who died this week. Elizabeth was the best mother-in-law anyone could ask for.
Elizabeth earned a PhD in mathematics in 1965, she taught in McGill’s math department, and served as a dean at both McGill and the University of Toronto. When she retired, she went to divinity school and became an Anglican priest. Before she became ill with Parkinsons, she was a fixture on the staff of the Anglican Cathedral of Montreal, and chaplain at the Diocesan Theological Seminary at McGill, which awarded her an honorary doctorate. She was an amazing woman who taught her sons that women can be forces of nature and formidable intellects, and I will be forever grateful for the difference her example has made in my life and Matthew’s. I already miss her very much.
OK. I’m doing a “project month” with my members in The Sheepspotters’ Society right now (we do one every quarter), so I made them a video in which I pulled out as many of my handspun projects as I could find and just talked about what had worked well and not so well. It was a way to talk about the impact our spinning choices make on our fabric with lots of specific examples. While I was getting ready I pulled out a few woven scarves that I made with handspun on my rigid heddle looms. And it reminded me how much fun it is to weave with handspun. Since I mostly talk about knitting with handspun because that’s how I use most of mine, I thought that today I could talk about these very simple and relatively inexpensive looms and give you some suggestions of resources to look at if you want to try weaving with your handspun yarns.
The great thing about weaving with handspun is that all the perfectly imperfect aspects of your spinning just make the fabric look more interesting. So it’s a wonderful way to appreciate and make the most of the fact that your yarn is made by hand.
Rigid heddle looms are extremely simple looms, and very easy to work with. I am not a weaver, nor do I really have any desire to become a weaver, but I was able to make things I was happy with very quickly after buying my first loom, which is a 15” Schacht Cricket (currently listing at $199 USD). The Cricket is Schacht’s entry level loom. Once I’d made a few projects with the Cricket I decided that I wanted something wider, so I bought a 20” Schacht Flip with a stand (currently $308 USD). At this point the Flip is really the only one I use, because I just find it more comfortable to sit at the stand. (In fact, I should probably sell the Cricket. Make me an offer!) But they are both really well made. If I had it to do over I would just go right to the largest Flip, which is 30” wide (currently $389 USD). You can make narrower cloth on a wider loom, but you can’t make wider cloth on a narrower loom. And I’d like to have a bit more flexibility there.
I have never taken a weaving class or a weaving lesson. I really learned from two main sources, both of which are still available and will be linked in the show notes. The first is Jane Patrick’s video, Weaving on a Rigid Heddle Loom, which you can get as a video download from Long Thread Media. I found it quite hard to figure out warping without seeing someone doing it, so the video was very helpful in that regard. The other source I really relied on when I was learning is Liz Gipson’s book, Weaving Made Easy: 17 Projects Using a Simple Loom. Liz’s book is really helpful in explaining things like figuring out how much yarn you need and what to do if a warp thread breaks. And the projects are really achievable and inspiring.
There are a couple of other resources that you’ll find in the show notes: first, Jane Patrick’s book, The Weaver’s Idea Book, which is great if you want to learn structures other than plain weave (I happen to love plain weave, so I’ve never actually tried any of them, but you might want to); the second is a newer resource, Esther Rodgers’ Expressive Weaving on a Rigid Heddle Loom, a video workshop. I haven’t taken this class myself, but I’m eager to do so.
You’ll find the show notes for this episode at http://www.sheepspot.com/podcast/episode72.
Summary
Weaving with handspun is a great way to celebrate the perfect imperfection of your yarns.
I have two rigid heddle looms, a 15” Schacht Cricket and a 20” Schacht Flip with a stand. If I had it to do over again I would go right to the Flip, and I’d get the widest size available (30”)
I’ve never taken an in-person weaving class; the resources I’ve found most useful are Jane Patrick’s video, Weaving on a Rigid Heddle Loom and Liz Gipson’s book, Weaving Made Easy. Links to both, as well as some others, in the show notes.
I hope this podcast has gotten you excited about the possibilities of learning to weave with your handspun. At the top I promised you that I’d announce a new 5-day challenge. Here goes: it’s called #groomyourstash, and we will cover organizing your fiber stash and storing it safely. I’m also going to talk about combining fibers and colorways to make larger projects and use up odds and ends of fiber, and I’ll teach how you can use fiber prep tools to get compacted fiber in shape for soothing spinning. It’s a great chance to get your stash organized, stored safely, and to get some ideas about how to use what you have.
I firmly believe that as spinners we have some superpowers when it comes to calming ourselves down when the world is weird (and it is very weird right now), and when it comes to making time at home creative and productive. #groomyourstash is designed to help you to do that. I’ll be going live on Instagram every day during the challenge to show you how I’m doing with my own stash, because I’ll be doing the exercises right along with you, and I hope that the live sessions will also be an opportunity for us all to connect with other spinners and fight the dreaded social isolation, which I think is going to become a big issue as this crisis continues.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why the challenge is called #groomyourstash, it’s a shout-out to Gigi, of The Knitmore Girls podcast, who once said that we should think of our stash as a beloved pet. And my stash needs grooming big time, so I hope you’ll join me. You can sign up for the daily email prompts at sheepspot.com/stash-challenge.
Well, that’s it for me this week, my darling Sheepspotters. Thank you so much for listening, my friend. I’ll see you next time! In the meantime, go spin something! But first, wash your hands.