Some while back when I had a backlog of posts to publish I decided not to post about the 8-shaft weaving certificate course samplers. I am having fun and learning heaps, and maybe at some point I’ll do a catch-up post.

I’m also toying with the idea of weaving an item in some, if not all, of the structures we explore. The first was twill, which I’ve woven plenty of times but I’ve never made anything that utilised a tabby binder. At the last Guild meeting of weavers on Zoom the subject discussed was weaving with handspun. Some of the oldest yarns in my stash are handspun, and I’ve been wanting to use up older yarn. Somehow the three ideas – twill, handspun and using older yarn – came together, and after the usual planning I got stuck into winding the warp for two scarves using a corkscrew twill in Strickler that looks a bit like tyre treads.

Before I could get that on the Lotas, however, I needed the loom for a class sampler. The colour-and-weave sampler was meant to be done in the Guild on one of their floor looms, but since we’re in lockdown and I have the same type of floor loom, I offered to be ‘one less student to worry about’ and do it at home.

The sampler was meant to be 50cm long, and since the loom waste is 50cm, it made economical sense to increase the length to the warp and make a scarf. Though I tried a whole lot of fun varieties of colour-and-weave and designed my own, none jumped out and said “do me for the scarf”. It was a project for pinwheel towels in Handwoven I found while researching colour-and-weave that caught my attention. I decided my scarf would be made up of 20cm sections of all eight pinwheel versions – or seven if I didn’t have enough warp.

It turned out to be quite addictive and fast to weave, but I had to make myself not weave the entire thing in one sitting and cause a back flare-up. As I suspected, I only had enough warp for seven of the pinwheel designs, but that’s fine. Odd numbers often look better than even, anyway.

One of my favourites for the year, I reckon.