At the last Scenic Valley Handweavers Guild meeting one of the members returned my card weaving book which somehow ended up with me volunteering to lead an ‘introduction’ to card-weaving at the August meeting. Given that my experience to date was to read said book and produce a band which was turned into a strap for my mandolin with the addition of some leather ends. Hardly an expert!!
Nevertheless I do have plenty of time (I know, famous last words) to prepare, so to that end I have begun some background research into resources (lots and lots available via the Internet) and to start weaving some test bands which I will take along to meetings from now until then to drum up interest.
The first challenge was to find my set of cards in the weaving room – first fail. They’re there somewhere, but under something and certainly not on the shelf where other related items are. Plan ‘b’: produce my own…
I made a small set out of 100lb card stock – similar to playing card thickness – by drawing them on the computer 4 to a page then printing them out and punching holes and finally cutting out the individual cards. This seems to work until a bit more tension appears when the twist builds up (more on that below). I used a wooden ruler as a beater last time I wove this way which works but is not quite as ‘classy’ as a combo beater/stick-shuttle. I had some seasoned white oak that I’d stored in the shed for a couple of years so quickly cut out, shaped, and sanded a test model. Works fine!
The warp yarn was the 8/2 tencel I used in the recent scarves. I was curious to see if the solid and variegated contrast would show up. It did. I’ve initially used a thicker weft yard but will also weave some with the same yarn as the warp to shorten the pattern and tidy up the selvedges a little. This pattern calls for just backward turning of the cards which leads to twist building up behind the cards and would normally shorten the amount of warp yarn available for weaving and as mentioned adds tension which my thin cards don’t handle well. The solution was to attach the warp at the back to fishing spinners so that each 4 warp yarn ends that pass through a card, can be ‘unwound’ simply by letting the spinner spin.
In this case I just attached the spinners to a rod held onto the table by small clamps. When the tension builds (excess twist) it is simple to slide something from each card towards the spinner and at some stage it slips and releases all the spin. This test band only has 10 cards; with larger amounts of cards more spinners would obviously be needed and a more advanced approach to space them out in rows would be required.
I still have to add a coat of varnish to the beater so that color from the yarn doesn’t stain it and find a better front attachment – I’m currently using a mid-sized clamp that works fine but gets in the way when sitting at the table.
Other work for the day was some more threading heddles and sleying the reed for the tartan throw – slow but steady progress there. I also sewed the bias binding edging onto the Florida tartan place-mat/table runner set. It worked out well so now I’ll finish the rest so that this house-warming gift can be delivered.
