Weaving Today : Handwoven Scarves

The Weaver's Playground

Anita Osterhaug — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:00:00 GMT

How to Weave a Scarf: Seven Handwoven Scarves from Weaving Today

Scarves are the weaver's playground: a chance to explore color and weave structures to your heart's content. When you weave a scarf, you're not committing your loom for weeks or months, and you don't have to spend a fortune on yarn. They're quick to warp, quick to weave, fun to give and to wear. They don't take up closet space, so you can have scarves for every mood and season.

For your weaving and wearing enjoyment, we've updated our free eBook, How to Weave a Scarf. With these fun-to-weave and fun-to-wear projects, you can fill your closets with a variety of hand woven scarves. There's Joan Sheridan's Serendipity Scarf, made with sock yarn: wearable, washable, and who doesn't have a bit of sock yarn in their stash? Joe Sullins's Shetland scarf is a beautiful, soft waffle weave, Liz Gipson's basketweave scarf pattern can be woven on a rigid heddle or floor loom, and Madelyn van der Hoogt's Big Bumps scarf and felted lace scarf provide sneaky lessons in fulling, wrapped in bundles of fun. The latest addition to this smorgasbord of accessorizing possibilities is Ramona Abernathy-Paine's Warped and Twisted bead leno scarf pattern; made with artisan hand-dyed alpaca yarn, this scarf is a great way to learn a new technique and a great way to use some luscious hand-dyed skein from your stash or your own handspun yarn.

For me, the question is never really how to weave a scarf. It's which scarf to weave first, and where to stop. These free scarf patterns are a great place to start, whichever you choose to weave first. And the joy of scarf weaving is that you never have to stop! So let the fun begin.

Weaving Expectations

Anita Osterhaug — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:33:00 GMT


Allison Irwin's Sun and Stars Pouch may be my holiday weaving treat to myself.

I love this time of year––the sparkling lights in the long, dark night, holiday music, weaving cozily while storms rage outside, and visiting with family and friends. I try to avoid the holiday hype: crowded malls and those appalling TV commercials implying that one cannot be a successful friend or parent without gifting the ultimate trendy toy or gadget. Early in my adult life, December was a stressful month because I went a little crazy trying to create a "perfect" Christmas and Hannukah for my family, not with gifts but with too many expectations: too much cookie baking, gift making, decorating, and entertaining. All the self-imposed pressure sometimes made my attitude more grinch than Santa.

I've learned that the more I let go of expectations, the happier our holidays become. We're building new traditions that express our values. On "black Friday," when crowds are at the mall, my sister-in-law and I walk into the small town where she lives, go window shopping along the main street, buy a few stocking stuffers and books from local businesses, and do the bulk of our holiday shopping at the fair trade store. Rather than buying wrapping paper, I save the butcher paper and newsprint that many mail order businesses now use for packing instead of styrofoam. My daughter and I bought fun rubber stamps at the craft store to decorate the paper, and I recycle beautiful holiday cards from previous years as gift tags. My holiday wardrobe consists of scarves I've made, favorite garments purchased from other weavers, or finds from the resale shop. "White elephant" gifts from the thrift store provide tons of fun at guild or office parties. (Check out what I got at our Interweave gift exchange. It's almost indescribable.) Holiday decorations at my house are evergreen boughs, pine cones, and holly from our woods with a few bright ribbons and favorite ornaments, and friends get simple gift baskets of our Oregon hazel nuts and wine plus a bright handwoven towel or other household item.


	Susan Leschke's huck lace ornament is festive and quick to weave.

Gift-making should be a pleasure for the maker as well as the receiver. My idea of heaven is to queue up CDs or playlists of medieval carols and settle in to weave gifts on a winter afternoon with no pressure to meet impossible deadlines. The gift can be handwoven scarves or towels, pin loom potholders, or tablet-woven bookmarks or ornaments, whatever my mood dictates and time allows. No expectations.

If (and only if) you're yearning for some holiday weaving projects to satisfy your soul, our Handwoven e-books offer some lovely and simple possibilities––towels and placemats, scarves, cute bags, fun holiday weaving, and other quick projects––and you can visit Weaving Today for free downloads of all kinds of projects.

Life provides us with enough pressures; we should find pleasure whenever we can. After a holiday dinner last night, a friend wished me a happy holiday and reminded me, "Be gentle with yourself." I'll second that wish for you and add one more: "Be joyful with yourself."

Speaking in Color

Anita Osterhaug — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way––things I had no words for. ––Georgia O'Keefe

Color inspiration: Karla Stille's clever

see-through rep weave rugs will be featured

in the next issue of Handwoven.

A couple of years ago, my weaving guild surveyed members to find out what kinds of workshops they most wanted. It turned out that the number one topic on our wish list was a workshop about working with color, which was not surprising to me, and I'll bet it isn't to you either. Color is ubiquitous, evocative, and deeply personal. Friends who've taken textile judging classes tell me that the first lesson is how difficult it is to be objective about color: even the best judge will inwardly cringe while pinning a blue ribbon on an exquisitely made entry in a color that he or she despises.

As weavers, we are blessed with myriad ways to explore color. Painted warps or stripes make plain weave anything but plain. We use color to give depth to graceful twills, trick the eye in shadow weaves, and lend block weaves the appearance of more blocks than our looms will weave. Variegated yarns let colors flow, combine, and pool, while Jacquard weaving can create photorealistic images from minute flashes of yarn color.

My subtler-than-planned twill scarf is a

lesson in color and the need for sampling.

Color can surprise or confound us, and either way, we learn. I'm finishing a scarf with two luxurious yarns that contrasted well in the skeins, less so in the cloth (the inevitable consequence of not wanting to sample with expensive yarns). The undulating twill pattern is meant to evoke the red-browns and greens of north Pacific kelp forests. I have hopes that fulling will tighten up the greenish-gray ground cloth and show up my kelp leaves, but if not, I will wear my whisper-soft scarf, congratulate myself on its uncharacteristic subtlety, and contemplate the colors (and samples) I will weave for the next one.

The May/June 2013 issue of Handwoven will celebrate the mysteries and possibilities of color and design. We'll have some advice from color experts, but the beauty of color is that each of us has our own unique color sense and approach. Handwoven contributor Rebecca Fox wrote me this week about her adventures in learning to love green and orange together, and how she gets herself out of color ruts. In the upcoming November/December issue, Karla Stille gives depth to her rug design by allowing the rag weft to peek through the rep weave.

I'm sure you have color tricks and triumphs of your own so, in anticipation of next year's color issue, I'm giving you all a challenge: take an image of your choice, interpret it in your favorite weave structure, and share the results. You can evoke the image with shapes, through your materials, through texture, or anything you want to combine with your color exploration. Along the way, please share your insights and results on the Weaving Today Reader Showcase, in the weaving discussion forum, or in your Weaving Today study group. We'll be watching for projects to showcase in next year's color issue. I know you'll make discoveries and weavings that are wonderful beyond words, and I can't wait to see them.

Look Who's Talking

Anita Osterhaug — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Virginia West and weaving friends having a
weaving conversation in the 1950s,

"when we wore pearls."

A Biblical scholar and linguist once told me that in some translations, the quote from the Book of Genesis, "In the beginning was the Word," comes out as "In the beginning was the conversation." Perhaps because I am a communicator by trade (and without getting into the niceties of Greek or Aramaic or the theological implications), I cherish the idea that humanity and the exchange of ideas are inseparable. Certainly weaving has been shaped for millenia by interaction between people, their environment, their culture, and their times.

Our weaving community continues to be shaped by many factors. Conversations within the European Arts and Crafts movement, the Bauhaus movement, the Cranbrook Colony, the Folk Schools movement, and other social and economic trends have all left their marks in recent centuries. One of my favorite articles in Handwoven was entitled "When We Wore Pearls." It talked about weaving in the 1950s and showed a photograph of Virgina West and a group of weavers wearing "pumps and pearls" while admiring their handwoven table linens.


	e-Textiles such as Syne Mitchell's light-up scarf are a new trend in handweaving.

What draws many of us to the craft is that you can explore for a lifetime and never run out of new things to learn. This joyous diversity exists because of centuries of exploration, innovation, and conversation. A great personal joy for me is to make Handwoven and Weaving Today a part of that dialogue, a place for weavers to share ideas and inspire other weavers. But weavers don't sit still (even at the loom). Our times, our interests, and our communities are a-changin' all the time. We don't wear pearls to guild meetings, modern technology and world markets offer us new fiber choices, growing numbers of us use computer-controlled looms, and many, many use computers to help create and share drafts. Our conversations are as likely to take place in cyberspace as over coffee or tea.

To serve this vibrant and ever-changing community well, we need to keep up with you: to understand who you are, what you want, and how you weave today. So I invite you to take five minutes and lend your voice to this conversation by taking our 2012 Weaving Today Survey. There are eleven short questions about what you like to weave, what kinds of looms you use, your weaving goals and aspirations, and what you need from us to help you achieve them. The survey will be available until July 11th, and when it's finished, we'll share the results to help all of us, writers, vendors, guild leaders, and teachers, better understand the needs of weavers today. Please lend your voice. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sleeveless in Seattle

Anita Osterhaug — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:00:00 GMT

By the time you read this, I will be headed over the river (the Columbia) and through the woods of Oregon and western Washington, to have Thanksgiving with my family in the Seattle area. Over the long holiday weekend, we'll bundle up and walk around the town where I grew up, enjoying the holiday lights, sights, and sounds, and holiday shopping at our wonderful local fair trade store. There will be coffee, and knitting, and gossiping with my sisters-in-law and friends. Perhaps this year I'll take along my little rigid-heddle loom and weave a scarf or two for gifts.The family will gather in the evenings to play games and drink more coffee and "vi-ssit," as Grandma Osterhaug used to say. (Where there are Norwegians, there are coffee and butter cookies. It is a law of the universe.)


Handwoven, hand-dyed fabrics from East Africa.

Fabulous fair trade fabrics are on my holiday shopping list.

It will be a happy, busy weekend, but this year I also have to make big plans: what to weave for the 2012 Handwoven garment challenge: "Look, Ma, No Sleeves!" There's no time to waste because I've seen the results of the 2011 garment challenge in the September/October issue, and I know how creative and resourceful you all are. I can only imagine what you'll come up with for next year.


	Ruanas, and mantas, and shawls, oh my!

Waistcoats are sleeveless, as are tabards and quechquemitls. Vests, long or short, fitted or draped, retro or rugged. Ruanas, and mantas, and shawls, oh my! Slipovers, sleeveless banyans, and fiery boleros! The possibilities are endless, and I know the competition will be fierce.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I will not be eligible for any of the fabulous prizes with which our sponsors will likely tempt you. I'm just in it for the fun. But some of you clever, talented weavers will win prizes and a place of honor in next year's September/October issue of Handwoven. I hope you will put on your thinking caps right now and begin planning your entries for next year's garment challenge. Your Handwoven staff and celebrity judges will be looking for creativity, quality, and originality. The details will be posted soon at weavingtoday.com.

So that's it, folks. It's unlikely that anyone will really be sleeveless in Seattle this November. But this year, while zoning out on tryptophan from the Thanksgiving turkey, I'll be in a sleeveless state of mind. I hope you will, too. And whether or not Thanksgiving is part of your tradition, may you, too, have much to be thankful for.

Weave happy,

Learning as I Weave

Christina Garton — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:59:00 GMT

Recently my father-in-law came for a visit. It was during this time that much of Northern Colorado was covered with a heavy layer of snow, the sort of nasty, wet, heavy snow that breaks off tree branches and snaps power lines. While my family was lucky enough to keep power, the Interweave offices were not as lucky, and I found myself enjoying an adult snow day.

What did I do with a whole day off? Weave of course!


My first handwoven scarf; can you spot the mistake?

As we watched the news to see all the havoc wrought by the storm, I brought out my lap-sized rigid-heddle loom and finished weaving a scarf with a log-cabin pattern. My father-in-law sat next to me mesmerized. He watched as I completed each step from weaving to finishing, asking questions about what I was doing and why.

What really wowed him, however, was when I seemingly effortlessly re-warped the loom using the direct warping method. Little did he know it took more than a few “learning experiences” from previous projects to get me as comfortable on the loom as I appeared.

When my first rigid-heddle loom first arrived, I prepared myself by reading Jane Patrick’s The Weaver’s Idea Book cover to cover at least three times. Armed with Jane's advice, I decided my first project would be a sampler that explored color-and-weave and hand-manipulated techniques, and I warped the loom accordingly. Or at least I tried to.

On my first attempt I was so excited I attached the warp to the cloth beam instead of the apron rod and didn’t notice until I was nearly finished. Midway through my second try I left to have some lunch, and when I returned I found a guilty-looking dog, my loom on the floor, and a tangled mess. The third time was the charm, and once I started weaving I fell in love.


	Second time was the charm! Even sett, better selvedges, and only one float.

I focused on finding my rhythm, experimenting, and generally figuring things out as I wove. I learned a lot in the experience, and made plenty of mistakes. When I finished the sample, I made sure to leave them all in. The sampler now serves as a reminder, not just of the mistakes, but also of how much I’ve learned since then. I still have so much to learn about weaving and I’m quite certain I’ll make plenty more mistakes.

In preparation for these new discoveries, I’ve armed myself with Jane Patrick’s book and Hands on Rigid Heddle Weaving by Betty Linn Davenport. They guide me through the process as I push myself slightly farther, and if something goes wrong, I can find the solution in their pages. After my few projects, I’m still far from perfect, whatever my father-in-law might say, but I’m quite happy to learn as I go.

Now if only the books had warned me not to leave my beautiful laceweight baby alpaca yarn where the new puppy could grab it.

A Free eBook for Twenty-First Century Weavers

Madelyn van der Hoogt — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:00:00 GMT

How to Weave a Scarf from Weaving Today: Six Handwoven Scarves

I've said many times that weaving is unique in its appeal to two widely divergent personality types: techy people who love structure and pattern and touch-feely people who love color and texture.

Liz Gipson's lacy Mora wool
scarf uses basketweave to
create an elegant accessory
with a beautiful drape

In looking back, I think the 1990s were the decade of Structure and Pattern, the first ten years of this century the decade of Color and Texture.

In the 1990s, the biggest explosion in resources for weavers came in the form of books, magazines, multishaft looms, computer weaving programs—all the tools that build knowledge about what threads can be made to do with a loom: i.e., Structure and Pattern. We Structure/Pattern weavers were in heaven, always looking for (and finding) the next great weave structure to try out. In general, we wove with cotton and wool, more rarely with silk and linen.


	Joan Sheridan’s colorful Serendipity Scarf shows that sock yarn is no longer just for socks

Then came the twenty-first century.

Instead of looking for the next new weave structure (we sort of ran out of those), we were bombarded with new yarns: Tencel, bamboo, alpaca, cashmere, buffalo, angora; space-dyed yarns, eyelash yarns, ribbon yarns—even sock yarn wasn’t just for socks anymore. Suddenly, instead of hoping they’d make a dobby loom with 40 shafts instead of the 32 I had, I got to know my inner Color/Texture person and my 4-shaft loom.

My favorite experience now is seeing what happens when different fibers are wet-finished. Whereas my former favorite weaving project was coverlets, now it’s scarves. A scarf is narrow. It doesn’t take a whole lot of yarn or a long time to weave. With scarves you full, you don’t even have to twist the fringe! You can hang scarves around the house when they aren’t on you, and they make great gifts.


Madelyn’s wet-felted merino scarf is a fabulously easy-to-make fashion piece

If you haven’t experienced the joys of weaving scarves, try the six handwoven scarf projects in this free eBook. All of them can be woven on a 4-shaft loom, three of them on a rigid-heddle loom. They include waffle weave (on a rigid heddle with simple pick-up), basket weave, collapse weave, and more. Originally published as Scarves of the Month, these six are now combined in a handy free download. Weaving a scarf is about as close to instant gratification as a weaver can get.

Fashion Trends in the Handweaving World

khdonde — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:20:00 GMT


Tien Chiu's Kodachrome Coat is one of the fashion-forward designs you'll find in the September/October issue of Handwoven.

Any week now, those mammoth September issues of the big fashion magazines will be straining newsstand shelves and clogging mailboxes. The fall fashion trends – and a new season of Project Runway – are upon us. Wouldn’t it be fun to see handwoven scarves and garments featured in a few of those voluminous pages or popping out of Tim Gunn’s little velvet bag of tricks? Alas, the fashion editors haven’t come knocking at my door, and I suspect not yours either. Fortunately, handweavers are accustomed to setting their own trends. To help spot some, I asked a few weavers what they are seeing in their little corners of the weaving world.

Color, big, bold and bright, is a common theme. Hand-painted and space-dyed knitting and weaving yarns combine with bold solid colors and even each other for dramatic results. In the retail studio I share, customers respond to color first. Inspecting the goods more closely, they may notice the intricacies of the pattern, but it is color that gets them to the merchandise. Using color successfully is also high on weavers’ need-to-learn lists. While textured novelty yarns are still popular, particularly among the legions of new rigid heddle weavers, shaft-loom weavers are creating texture with weave structure and collapse techniques. 3-D isn’t just for movies anymore. Think differential shrinkage or woven shibori with polyester yarn. The desire for loom-controlled imagery may be driving increasing interest in complicated weave structures designed with non-traditional computer drafting tools like Photoshop®. Meanwhile, multi-shaft compu-dobby weavers, and those anticipating affordable jacquard technology, continue to push the limits of how yarns can interlace.


	Shibori in velvety chenille makes Teresa Kennard's handwoven dress sleekly luxurious.

Even the growing numbers of small loom aficionados are incorporating more complex structures, whether they’re weaving with tablets or backstrap, rigid heddle and inkle looms. Daryl Lancaster said she had students from the U.S., U.K. and France in a recent inkle loom pick-up class she taught live online. And speaking of online learning, wouldn’t Mary Meigs Atwater and Harriet Tidball have taken their Shuttle Craft Guild to amazing heights with a laptop and a webcam? OK, sharing information with other weavers online is certainly not new, but it’s growing as more weavers embrace e-classes, blogs, YouTube videos, social networks, e-books, library things and fashion websites.

All of which brings us back to fashion, and for the handwoven variety, the biggest trend seems to be combining media, mixing fabric structures, and applying surface-design techniques, sometimes all in the same garment. For those working the juried show circuit, it is increasingly taking more than beautiful handwoven yardage and top-drawer sewing skills to catch the discriminating juror’s eye. (And to help hone those sewing skills, check out our latest eBook, Designing to Weave and Sew by Jean Scorgie.)

You can get a healthy helping of handwoven fashion and inspiration in the upcoming September/October issue of Handwoven, featuring the winners of the Väv 2011 garment challenge. Then grab some barbells or get to a Pilates class. The September fashion rags are also great design tools, but you’ll need a healthy back to get them home.

P.S. Thanks to Robyn Spady, Daryl Lancaster, Syne Mitchell, Tien Chiu and Madelyn van der Hoogt for sharing their insights.

Fiber Fondlers (not) Anonymous

Anita Osterhaug — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:00:00 GMT

Everyone has their own path through the textile arts. For example, I am a filthy fiber fondler.


Perfect inspiration: my own yarn handspun from roving dyed by friend Klaus Kronenberg.


Perfect vacation fun: weaving a handspun scarf on my sweet little rigid heddle loom.

It's true. I would belong to Fiber Fondlers Anonymous if I could be quiet long enough to remain anonymous. So I was a spinner before I was a weaver, lured by the chance to fondle and twist anything fuzzy, fluffy, soft, silky, or shiny. I waited eagerly for every issue of Spin-Off, and learned not only about spinning, but about weaving, dyeing, and other aspects of textile art. Years later I took a weaving class from Madelyn, and while I knew from the first throw and beat that I would be a weaver forevermore, I am a different weaver than I would be had I never spun. I love looking at a yarn and understanding it from the fibers out. I love to be inspired by my own handspun, often woven together with beautiful commercial yarns (because who would sully handspun with yarns that weren't beautiful). I cherish the ability to create pieces that are mine from fleece to fabric, designing the color, texture, weight, and drape to suit my exact needs.

For me, spinning led to weaving. For some of us, weaving is a path to spinning. A member of our handweaving guild taught spinning classes several years ago as part of a study grant, and a close-knit and enthusIastic group of spinning weavers has grown from her efforts. Which points to another aspect of the spinning/weaving synergy: while weaving is often a solitary pastime, weavers tend to enjoy the company of other weavers, and spinning is a sociable endeavor. Many a great conversation springs up round the spinning circle at our guild retreats.

I asked some of the other spinning weavers in our guild how they think spinning affects their weaving, and everyone had a different tale to tell. Betty Davenport, rigid heddle weaver extraordinaire, says "When I do spin it is to achieve a yarn that isn't available commercially. In recent years, I spun some multicolored silk fiber quite finely to weave a scarf with overtwist wool weft for collapse. I also enjoy spinning colored cotton very fine with a tahkli spindle. I enjoy the display of all the different shades of colored cotton. Maybe some day I will use the little skeins to weave something."

My thoughtful friend Eva Douthit sent a great quote from Jack Lenor Larsen: "A power loom is simply a hand loom with a motor attached to it. If you feed it the same material, the result will be exactly the same." And he concludes that "the great loss of the industrial revolution was not hand-weaving, but hand-spinning." Eva said, "I had taken my spinning wheel along for the trip to Vancouver Island, where I found this book, and as I was spinning on the rooftop of the hotel in Vancouver BC, looking out over the city, I gave plenty of thought to the concept that handspun yarn is dramatically different from machine-spun yarns, not only in terms of uneven touches of the human hand, but also in terms of preparation of the fiber. However, I did disagree with his premise about the power looms, because looms cannot manipulate the weft the same way the human hand can. It all made me think seriously about what kind of yarns to spin and how to weave them."

And exquisite weaver Mary Cooper also learned to make perfect, even yarn within a few hours at our last retreat. (I'm thinking this is a case of karma, and that she was a master spinner in a former life.) Mary says that although she hasn't yet woven with her handspun, "I am spinning every day and am quite obsessed – but there are worse things to be obsessed about!"

Are you a spinning weaver? If so, how do you use your handspun, and how do you think spinning informs your approach to weaving? Or did you spin long ago, and give it up to devote yourself to weaving? Either way, would you take a break from your solitary loom and click on over to Weaving Today to share your stories and thoughts? (And check out this article on spinning for weaving, from the latest issue of Handwoven.) We love to hear you spin yarns of your weaving lives.

Learn the Secrets to Designing Handwovens!

Anita Osterhaug — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:15:00 GMT


	Robin Lynde takes design inspiration from Georgia O'Keefe.

To be a “Designer” of handwovens, you don’t have to be able to draw, you don’t have to be “good” with color, and you don’t have to have years of experience or classes in an art school. You can start designing today with the March/April 2011 issue of Handwoven: “Designer Secrets.”

This issue presents a first-ever “Designer’s Notebook” series. In this group of articles, designing weavers share their foolproof methods. You can use a painting, a section of the color wheel, a piece of fabulous pottery, or a set of yarn wraps, among other techniques, to get dazzling results. You’ll find all the directions you need to weave the striking projects shown in the issue, but you’ll also learn the steps for creating your own successful designs using the same methods designers use.

Summer and winter pillows on four

shafts by Sarah Jackson

Four of our experts started with a color palette (Pantone’s 2011 Spring Fashion Forecast), creating projects in warp rep (Rosalie Neilson), a clever 4-shaft twill and basketweave (Robyn Spady), ply-splitting (Barbara Walker--no loom required!), and twill and plain weave using variegated yarns (Daryl Lancaster). You’ll be amazed at the different effects achieved with the same colors, depending on choices of weave structure and yarn.

Designing doesn’t stop with choosing colors, either. Some weavers love designing on the loom. Find out how to create set of towels in which each one is unique because of varied treadling orders and pattern and tabby-weft colors in overshot.


	Warp-rep rugs by Rosalie Neilson

And there’s more! Design secrets don’t stop when the cloth comes off the loom. Find out how to make incredible fabric textures (bubbles and bumps) by wet-finishing special yarns.

And still more! For those threads left behind on the loom when you rushed away with your perfect fabric? Well, you can make those into jewelry the way Robyn Spady does.

With this issue of Handwoven by your side, your weaving designs will soar.

––Madelyn

Twill and basketweave towels on

four shafts by Robyn Spady

Bubbles mat by Anneke Kersten