I’ve already made a personal donation to Save the Children’s Haiti effort, but I am also jumping on the bandwagon over at Ravelry and have added a pattern to the Help for Haiti drive.

(I’m donating throuth StC rather than MSF/DWB because StC accepts funds easily through PayPal, and PayPal has waived transaction fees for these donations)

I will pass on 100% of the proceeds from the sale of Heartbeat patterns to StC’s Haiti effort until February 28, 2010.

Heartbeat is knit in worsted weight yarn and is a great starter project for those who haven’t previously tried beaded knitting.

The pattern can also be worked without the beading, either knit plain or with your own chart inserted instead (one of the early projects posted on Ravelry used a skull and crossbones design!), continuing to follow the bottom and top shaping as written.

Two options for making your $5 purchase:

Directly from me, PDF will be emailed within 24hrs of payment

Through Ravelry, PDF will be added to your Rav library and a download link will be emailed immediately upon payment.

Along with chopping my hair off and dying it pink/blonde/orange/red (this is an older photo, it’s currently light reddish brown), this has been an exciting year for me in knitting land: getting published in Twist Collective (my first publication!), having another pattern accepted for a print mag next fall, and getting a bunch of new patterns out there for the world to see, thanks to some advertising purchased on Ravelry!

I’ve just finished up an online course on How to Teach Online Courses (yup, teehee!).. and 2010 holds some online expansion for me, as I plan to add classes for some of my patterns (starting with Piper), techniques (including the Stitch Sampler workshop I’ve taught at Maiwa for the past two years), and possibly other things (bust shaping options, perhaps?).

Pattern design will get back up to speed once the Olympics are over - Chris and I are going full-steam to finish things upstairs before Lauren (of Lolly Knits Around) and her Kris come to stay.. and I’ve got a couple patterns that got through testing but are waiting for photos and formatting, plus another half-dozen already crowding that part of my brain!

Mid-January 2010 will also be the end of an era: I’ll be handing in my keys to the UBC Aquatic Centre, teaching my last springboard diving class, and ceasing to work in Aquatics. I’ve decided that the time spent travelling over an hour each way to the pool, for just a couple hours of work each trip, could be better spent working at home developing patterns and classes. Wish me luck!

I hope you and your family have had a joyous holiday, and that your New Years Eve celebrations are wonderful. Happy New Year!

Thanks Diane, aka GrapefruitGeek on Ravelry - I like the simple design of this participant button!

Yes, I have joined the ranks of slightly insane people who are pledging to knit a full sweater in the month of November. A take-off from NaNoWriMo, this has been going for a few years courtesy of Shannon Okey, designer and great mind behind the knitgrrl blog.

There’s a knit-along over on Ravelry here, and I’m planning to blog tidbits fairly frequently right here.

Want to see what I have planned? No swatches to show just yet, but you can see my brainstorming page here.

I still don’t have the full design finalized yet, but the bottom hem and the main body pattern are ready to go… almost… just going to do a swatch tonight of the main body pattern to check that it IS as cool as I think it is (it got a total revamp this morning, after I got pouty about how what I was working on didn’t look right, and I didn’t have ANY plan, and then I reread my Rav notes with C looking over my shoulder.. and he pointed out that it looked like I had a pretty reasonable amount of plan built, and I didn’t really need to be so upset)… and then I’ll sketch out my schematic and get to it!

No hat designing for this month, I’m giving myself a break… okay, aside from the two that are 80% ready for testing, and the three in testing right now that will be ready by this Wednesday.. but that’s all!

I’ll leave you with a picture of one of the upcoming designs This is Pemberton:

Bandit is the third asymmetrical hat that I have designed in the past three years.

The first hat hasn’t made it online yet, though one version (in Malabrigo Worsted) has seen a season of snowboarding under my helmet, and another version (in Green Mountain Spinnery’s Alpaca Elegance) went home with Zoe of Three Bags Full because she loved its flattering fit.

The second hat has turned out to be popular: Piper, published online in the Fall 2009 issue of Twist Collective.

And this, the third? Well… I have high hopes that it will do as well as, or even surpass, Piper.

Piper IS pretty cool (okay, I’m secretly THRILLED at how many people like Piper…) but it is also a fairly girly, dress-up-ish hat, with a strong vintage flavour. Bandit is also cool, but in a more daily-wearable way: the saucy styling will go well with a sporty outfit when knit in something tweedy (as shown) or you could choose a smoother yarn in a glam colour and knit a sleek hat for dressier occasions!

Bandit is also flexible in the way it can be worn, and I wish I had thought to take a picture when Francesca of Three Bags Full popped it on her head with the narrow part forward. Again with the comparison: if you did this with Piper, the turban effect would be pretty powerful. With Bandit, it is a much subtler flavour: is it a turban reference? Or does it suggest the bandanna of Rosie The Riveter? Or something rockabilly?

I’m looking forward to seeing the photos that will be appearing on Ravelry soon, from all of my test knitters. This round of pattern production saw two hats and a hooded scarf all ready to go in early September, and I made use of Ravelry’s Testing Pool, Hats Hats Hats, and Just A Scarf groups to find testers. 24hours after I posted a request for testers, I had 20+ responses! A couple of testers haven’t returned my emails since the initial pattern sendout, but the rest have come through with questions, comments, suggestions, red and blue and green ink, and a glorious amount of support for my designwork.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the work these people have done on my behalf, and just for the love of knitting (and as many of my patterns as they’d like…), the challenge of working through a possibly-glitchy pattern, and the desire to mark up other people’s writing with red ink all over the place! Bandit in particular was suffering from some small holes near the top of the band, where I had failed to write down the correct type of short-row wrap, and both hats had issues related to lazy cut-and-pasting - when I start writing up a new pattern, I’ll often begin with an older pattern of mine and just replace the instructions - in these cases, some uncorrected issues included confusiong statements about which size of needles to use (even though the hats only use one size) and how to use the cast-on tail to do something that it really really can’t.

I feel like my brain is overflowing with design ideas.. and I’m glad to have brought this one to life! I hope you enjoy

Visit Bandit’s pattern page for more details on the project, and for the link to purchase and download through Ravelry.

FINALLY I get to tell you about this! Do you know how hard it is to record a podcast about knitting design, and the goals that I have been setting for myself for my Year Of Goals… and then hit one in the first two months and not be able to tell you about it?! Heehee….. it makes me laugh now, but I really suffered for a while!

Piper is available for purchase here.

The story of the hat:
I was working on a collection of hat designs in Fall 2008, and I had picked a couple handfuls of suede-covered buttons from Button Button as inspiration. I had been imagining button-trimmed hats, though more of a handful of smaller buttons scattered or lined up on the brim rather than the one-chunky-button styles that were already making the rounds. After a delighful hour of realizing that almost all of the buttons had a perfect colour match available, I had an armful of Cascade 220 Heathers from the glorious wall of Cascade at Three Bags Full - browns and rusts and greens and lighter teal-ish blues - to take home.

The heathered brown yarn was one of the few yarns I had picked out that didn’t have a button match, but the heathered orange had a perfect mate, so I already had an idea of using the two colours together, and on a scale where the brown was used in larger amounts and the orange would be the trim. After a bit of swatching, I knew that I wanted to create piping for the hat.. and after some manipulating of the piped swatch, the image of buttoned pleats came to me! The pleated and piped hat was born!

When the Call for Submissions for the Fall 2009 Twist Collective came out in January, I looked at the style boards and realized that this hat would be a good fit for one of their ’stories’, and put it together with a couple other design ideas to submit. Here’s the project description that I sent in with my submission package:

Pleated and piped hat

-Worn with the button to the front, it is a quirky turban, with the button to the side or back, it resembles a vintage cloche
-Circular construction, knit top down
-Contrast colour is knit for a few rows, then knit together to form piping
-Hem is worked on smaller needles and then stitched in place Hat is shaped with short rows to minimize bulk within pleated section
-Pleated section is stitched in place and trimmed with a coordinating button
-Bottom up construction is also an option
-Other colours (deep navy or plum with silvery grey) and button choices (vintage metal or cut glass) would look great, too!

…and the sketch (drawn over a face/head shape that I traced from a “How to draw Fashion” book from the 60s):



.. and the photo:

I had sent the package via email before the submission deadline arrived at the end of February. Mid March, an email from Kate Gilbert arrived, accepting the design! Whoop! I was pretty excited, and ran around telling all of my friends and family that I GOT IN!!! I was going to be PUBLISHED!!! This would make me FAMOUS!!! Heehee

I asked Kate if I could blog/podcast about the submission and acceptance process, and she asked me to wait until the pattern had gone live - sometimes unforseen glitches happen and patterns don’t get used, and there was also the delightful element of surprise that readers get, when they open a new issue and see patterns that haven’t been previously leaked! Fair enough… so I sat on it. (okay, I may have mentioned it a teeny bit on the podcast, but I didn’t name names, or describe designs, or anything!)

The hat as-knit didn’t actually fit me, though it suits Francesca (co-owner of Three Bags Full and my boss) perfectly… so I asked her if I could knit up a shop sample to display once the issue went live, and we picked out some delicious Ultra Alpaca by Berocco to use. As I started working on the sample, I decided to play with the sizing and shaping to get something that WOULD fit me… and so a second circumference and depth option became available.

Even though the design work and writing was done, I still needed to format the pattern to match Twist Collective’s style guide. Easy enough, as the guide was very thorough: I knew where periods did and didn’t belong, when to use ‘k’ instead of ‘knit’, and how to write a pattern key to use their common terminology. When it came time to work with the technical editor, Sandi Rosner, our main challenge was to accurately describe the disconnect between the stitch count (and the width it would provide, when knit to gauge) and the actual hat measurements (once the finished hat was thoroughly blocked). Sandi had some great suggestions, and the edited pattern moved on.

The next stage was to take a look at the finished pattern as it would appear in PDF form. Mary Joy Gumayagay was the person responsible for pattern layout, and she had a brilliant system set up for group editing, using Google Documents and a table in which the to-be-edited chunk could be identified by location in the pattern, labeled ‘Major’ (pattern will not knit correctly if we don’t fix this) or ‘Minor’ (would it look nicer over here?), and the suggested correction added, along with an area to discuss the correction if needed. At this point there were a few easy catches of glitches that had come through when the pattern was reformatted, and then a bit of a discussion again about how best to describe the sizing options and help the knitters to have a finished product that would fit!

After a couple rounds of editing the PDF, I made my last few requests and signed off on the final version, and then waited.. and waited.. and waited… and oops, here’s an email from Julia Farwell-Clay asking for the designer headshot that I THOUGHT I had sent in back in July when it was due, but apparently did not… and then finally late last night, as I got back from a delightful mini-vacation in Seattle, it was live!!

I am really thrilled to have a pattern in Twist - hopefully this will only be the first of many - and I’m giddy reading everyone’s comments on Ravelry and elsewhere about how much they love the issue, and that they think Piper is pretty cool! Hooray!

A final note: the name “Piper” didn’t come easily, but when it did, it was a perfect fit: I wanted something to describe the hat (which began life as “the pleated and piped hat”) rather than just an unrelated name.. but I was hoping for something a bit less.. bland. I spent an evening playing with online dictionaries and thesauri, looking for words that meant ‘piped’ or ‘pleated’ or ‘folded’ or ‘gathered’.. and wasn’t coming up with anything brilliant… … but somewhere along the way, perhaps while taking a break to catch up on blog reading, I ran across something written by Kim Werker, crochet and editor goddess… (who has been mentoring me on building my knitting design business) .. Kim *P* Werker…. Kim PIPER Werker!!! .. and it all fell into place. I had a hat with a fun, quirky, suitable name, and I could honour the woman who had coached me through the submission process and gotten me to this point probably two or three years earlier than I would have made it on my own. Thanks, Kim!

I am REALLY loving this summer: great weather (okay, today it is actually raining, and that’s a nice break from the crazy heat wave we had for a couple weeks last month.. but the average has been good), lots of good times with friends (Katie’s wedding yesterday, Navi’s a few weeks back, new folks joining my hooping class), and a spiffy new home on its way (in the form of renovations, with the house competely filled with plaster dust and bits of wiring right now).

So, life is busy, but there is still time for knitting! I’ve been working on a couple of hooded scarves and a hat or two for self-publication, and I’ve got a couple things coming out in knitting magazines soon, woohoo! When each one goes live, I’ll be able to blog about the design process and share a bit more about my (great!) experiences working with each publisher.

I have new podcast episodes on the way too, with some book reviews and a second-hand account of a new designer’s first visit to TNNA… whenever I can find the time!

How’s your summer?

The 2010 Winter Olympics are coming to Vancouver, and I’m stoked!

1 - I have auditioned for the Opening Ceremonies as a hoop dancer, and blogged about it over on my hoop site.

2 - Lauren, aka Lolly, and her husband will be staying with us! I read her post on Ravelry asking about Vancouver accommodations (since all of the hotels have been completely booked by the organizers already), so I did a bit of research to find out what the city bylaws said regarding part-time B&B status.. and it turns out that they’ve recently been amended to allow people like us to rent out one room to a maximum of two people during the Olympics. Woot! There are more knitters in the 2010 Olympics group on Ravelry looking for places to stay, so if you’re in the greater Vancouver area and have a suitable space, go get connected!

3 - Dale of Norway has apparently gotten the go-ahead to do an official sweater design for the 2010 event. I’m not sure if I’m likely to knit their design, but it will definitely be inspiration for the stranded colourwork sweater I AM planning to get done for this winter!

In non-Olympic knitting land, I’m planning to take my microphone to work with me today, so I can finish recording Episode 9 of Christa Knits inbetween classes.

I have also completed my Laminaria-inspired top, and am in the final stages of finishing a ponchette for summer, knit in the indigo-dyed slubby silk I brought back from Japan last summer. Pics of that to come, but here’s the Laminiaria top:

Thanks to Francesca of Three Bags Full for taking the photo. I was modelling a shawl knit in Indigo Moon’s yummy laceweight silk, and I’ve never felt so glamourous!

Click on the Laminaria tag below to see all of my posts on this project!

“Christa Knits - fresh patterns for delightful knitting” is the phrase I have been using in my ads that have been appearing on Ravelry.

(Assuming that you’ve seen one of the ads) hopefully this made you curious: Who is Christa? Let me see some of these so-called “fresh” patterns! How do they make knitting “delightful” anyway?

I’ll address some of those questions further down the post. First, I want to share the story of getting into Ravelry advertising, how I came to create this tagline, and then provide any of you who are emerging designers with a tool for developing your own.

Oh, you’re not a designer? Just a knitter interested in buying patterns? Well, if you’re like me, then perhaps you’ll find this look-behind-the-scenes intriguing. I always enjoy reading the beautiful, glossy books in the design section of my favourite bookstores, and checking out the section where they show the first concept sketches and talk about the original vision and pitch to the client, then share the in-progress tweaks and final version.

Back to our story:

In December or January, I was toying with the idea of designing a hat that would be suitable for Valentine’s Day gifting. February 14th is still chilly enough in most parts of Canada that the gift of a new knitted hat would be appreciated. I didn’t want to cover it with red hearts though, because I thought that might limit its everyday wearability.

Heartbeat was the answer that finally came up: a simple beanie shaped hat, with beading or duplicate stitch in the classic rhythmic wave that we always see in TV shows on the little beeping machine hooked up to hospital patients. A bit of research in the medical sites online helped me get the chart right, and soon the knitting was done.

Next step: let people know about it!

I was looking at the Advertisers Caboodle group on Ravelry, checking out the pages with all the information on deadlines, pricing, and image requirements. Featured Pattern ads were listed for a half-month for $40, and one was available starting in mid-January. $40 for two weeks of exposure? That’s just eight patterns at $5.00 each to break even. I can do this! (A side note: I’m not really sure how I lucked into snagging that one so easily… I was more recently trying to get a Featured Pattern ad for April 1, and between getting in and out of the bathtub one morning, they had opened for sale and then sold out!)

Writing the copy (words that go in an ad) was easy for the Featured Pattern ad: Ravelry’s design guidelines stated that it could only contain the name of the designer, and the name of the pattern. “Christa Giles. Heartbeat.” Done.

Designing the layout (arranging the words and pictures within the given ad space) took longer. Ravelry supplied the required size (225×175 pixels), so I created a blank canvas in Photoshop and started playing. Out came the photos that my sweetie had snapped of me wearing the hat, cropping and colour tweaking occurred, and a picture was selected.

The words needed to be plugged in next, and colour and font selection were easy, too: I love Mixage, a font that I purchased a few years ago when I was getting started in my self-employment as a hooping instructor. It has good readability and still looks interesting when blown up to a larger size for titles. The words for this ad would be red, to match the hat in the photo and to reference Valentine’s Day.

Layout? The photo I selected has a bit of a ‘peeking’ effect: my head is tilted forward to show off most of the hat, and I had cropped out most of my body. I placed the photo so that its bottom edge was at the bottom of the ad (no floating half-bodies for me!) and aligned it to the right side of the space. Aside: did you know that when people view paintings (or ads), their eyes tend to travel in a clockwise direction as they take in the details? Second aside: does anyone know if this is still true in places where people read from right to left? The photo placement then dictated where my words could live: I wanted to leave a lot of white space for a clean look, and I wanted the shape of the words to relate to the shape of the image. The name of the pattern was most important (I don’t have much name recognition yet) so I made it the right size to fit the space, then made my name small enough to line up the first letters and still tuck into the space without overlapping the image.

Finished product:





End result? As of today, it has been favourited by 182 people, queued by 51, and there are 9 projects in the works. 12 people have bought the pattern so far, and I had more sales of other patterns while the ad was up than in an average month. Does the $20 profit cover the amount of time it spent putting the ad together? Not quite. Will those other 30+ people with it queued come back to purchase it? Hopefully, yes. Will I place more ads? You betcha!

Next up was something cheaper: $5 Marketplace ads that would go up in the Ravelry shop area for a whole month. The twist? There were less restrictions on what the ad could contain! I didn’t want to go overboard with “Sale!” “New!” “Check me out!”, but I did want to add something beyond the picture that would tell people what I was about, and what they could expect to find if they followed the link.





I needed help, in the form of a giant list of words that might be suitable. Something called “The Happiness Show” turned out to be an amazing resource: it offers an enormous list of positive adjectives! Click that link, then scroll down to check it out. See any words that resonate with you?

“Delightful” came out of that list, and I started playing around with ‘delightful patterns’… but it didn’t feel right, so I kept looking around for a better fit. “Fresh” may actually have come out of one of the many Project Runway shows that I watch while knitting - I can picture Rita Silvan, one of the judges on PR Canada, using it to describe one of the designers’ pieces. So, wording now in hand, I tried it on: Do I feel comfortable saying that my patterns are fresh? I don’t see a lot of ‘classic’ or ‘inspired by history’ in my work, and when I look at my designs I do see clean, modern styling that is in line with current knitting trends, so yes, ‘fresh’ fits.

What about ‘delightful’? This one was easier to answer, as I continually get feedback from my customers about how much they enjoy following my patterns, how pleased they are with the finished result, and that they really were tickled by a new technique that they learned while working through the project. “Fresh patterns for delightful knitting” worked.

(That Marketplace Ad? 1,767 people saw it, and 67 clicked through to visit my site!)

There is my latest, a finished Forum Banner ad, a bit smaller than real life to fit into a centre-column blog page instead of a full-width Ravelry page, but you get the idea. For $10 a month, it will rotate with others into the space at the bottom of each page when members read the forums in the top 6 boards. Some of the discussion in the Advertisers Caboodle group seems to say that these ads get a great response, as do the Notebook ads (I’m doing one of those in April, too), better than the Featured Pattern. Since I wasn’t able to get a Featured Pattern this time, I thought I’d spread the same $40 budget around into other ads, and see what winds up being the most effective way of bringing knitters to my patterns, and to this website.

Advertising through Ravelry feels good for a number of reasons: this is the place where my target market goes pattern shopping, the ad rates are good, the statistics they provide in terms of sales and clickthroughs vs impressions are helpful, AND I get to support Casey and Jess and the rest of the Ravelry gang so they can continue providing this amazing service without having to hold down other full-time jobs to cover their costs.

Interested in design and layout for producing your own ads? (and patterns, for that matter?) The reference book that I read years ago, and stuck with me, is The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice by Robin Williams (I’m guessing NOT the comedian). I dug out my copy when I was making the latest batch of ads, to see how well I was doing at following her basic guidelines. While I’m still not fully happy with my designs (better photos would go a long way), I think they do look decent, and are hopefully eye-catching enough to garner a second look.

Do you have feedback for me about my design and layout of these ads? I’d love to hear it! Questions about some specific details about their production? Bring it on! First-hand experience with successful ad campaigns? Please share! I would particularly be interested to hear from those of you who are NOT on the seller’s side of things: as a consumer, what sort of advertising do you want to see? What will attract your interest, and earn a few moments of your time for a second look or a click? Thanks in advance for your input, I really appreciate hearing from you!

Several months ago, a shipment of Koigu arrived at Three Bags Full. Luckily I was working that day, so I got to spend most of my five-hour shift unpacking the boxes and rearranging the new colours up on our Wall of Glory (which is what I call the Koigu section in my head)!

We have a Charlotte’s Web shawl in the shop, so I began playing with combinations of colour, in groups of five skeins each. I started adding extra skeins (since that shawl is a bit undersized for me), and wound up with a group of nine that I really loved. Turning to Francesca, I asked if I could design something using the nine, in a beginner-friendly pattern. She gave me the go-ahead, and off I went! About a week later, the wrap was complete and blocked, and it was AMAZING!

Did I mention that the project is all-knit, all-the-time? Yes, NO PURLING!

The double-stranded Koigu blocks out to have a lovely drape, but still springy and stretchy and cozy and full of OOOOHness! (technical term there, “oooohness”) Since the sample wrap has been living in the shop, many of our customers have put together their own colour choices, and getting to see each new wrap has been a lot of fun!

Some hints for choosing nine colours: pick a skein you love, pick another one that you think will look good next to your skin, and pick a third that will be a darker anchor at the hem of the shawl. Now, fill in the gaps: find colours that bridge the gap from one to the next, sharing a few colours in common with the skeins on each side. Don’t be afraid if one colour seems to jump out a bit - this adds a visual sparkle to your wrap!

This is a free download, available through Ravelry (though you don’t need to be a member). If you ARE a Ravelry member, it would be great to see your completed project photos! If you aren’t on Ravelry, what’s keeping you?!

Click here for Free Download of ColourFlow Wrap pattern.

Go here to see the Colourflow Wrap project page on Ravelry. Hopefully others will post their projects quickly so we can all ooh and aah over the glorious colours!

Many thanks to Megan McPeak for allowing me to take photos during the final stage of her project!

Now, the tutorial! Please note that this does not include enough information to create the wrap, you will need to download the PDF and read through the pattern to get started. This WILL help you out when it comes to the final stages of cutting and fringing. Enjoy!

After you unravel the final 10 stitches, the 11th loop should be at the top of the column of twisted stitches.

The tail end of yarn has been threaded through the last live stitch, so all cast-off stitches are now secured and will not unravel. Live stitches on the left will be unravelled after cutting, to become the fringe!

The white arrows indicate the columns of wrapped stitches. The cut line is 10 stitches away from each of these columns.

The pink line shows the column of knit stitches that you can follow as you cut. Untie any knots as you come to them, and trim these after the fringe has been knotted.

Starting at the end with live stitches, pull out one row of stitches at a time until you have reached the cast-on edge (which gets pulled out, too!)

Whee! Isn't it nice to have this happen on purpose, instead of by accident?

Make the first layer of knots close to the knitted fabric, using 8 strands for each knot. Fudge the number of strands as you get close to the end if needed (your row count may differ from mine). You can see how the first bundle in the second row of knots is thicker than the rest - this will be true of the first and last bundle, as they will have all the strands of the edge bundle plus half of its neighbour. You can choose to knot all of the first row before beginning the second row, it won't affect the final outcome.

PS - wondering about the spelling? You say Colorflow, I say Colourflow - ’cause I’m Canadian, eh?

Along with finishing the bottom portion of my Laminaria top-to-be (photos are coming), I have been spending the weekend setting up my new loom, and building gear for it.

Saturday was going to be Measure Warp Using Upside Down Kitchen Chairs day, but instead Chris suggested that it wouldn’t take long to put together a proper warping board.

The two books and various magazines I checked all showed similar designs, but didn’t appear to have any hard and fast rules about the sizing, so we set about figuring out what parameters we’d use.

1 - I wanted to be able to wind a warp long enough to do a bedspread, so at least 7 feet plus loom waste (yes, I think in Imperial measurements for many things)

2 - I wanted to be able to wind the warp standing up, possibly with the board attached to a door (since the doors are some of the few areas that don’t get things piled on them, much)

3 - I didn’t want to bash my knuckles as I passed through the pegs (my recently-dislocated finger is still a bit swollen and doesn’t like getting knocked)

Scribbling, measuring of doors, and placing mugs a few inches apart to figure out minimum hand clearance requirements all led to the successful design, with fabrication to follow, of my new warping board. During production, I learned how to use a stationary belt sander to round off the edges of the pegs, and revisited the drill press to half-hollow places for the pegs to sit.

(It just occurred to me that in the way that other people murder knitting lingo when they try to describe something they don’t really know enough about, I’ve probably just done the same to woodworking language. Sorry.)

Glueing up and clamping done, the board rested overnight and then I started warping this morning.

Things I learned about warping:

1 - Do crosses at both ends so if you figure out a better way to warp without having to tie extra knots, you can implement it without having to rechain all of your warps.

2 - As a beginner warper, mohair is not your friend.

3 - You know that part in the books where they remind you to pull the back apron up over the back beam before you start lashing on? Yup, they mean it.

4 - If you’re going to ask your partner to help you wind on the warp, have all of the various warp threads under control BEFORE giving him the 5-minute call. Also, be prepared to spend some time discussing the wisdom of the method you are following.

5 - Venetian blinds appear to make great lease sticks for popping inbetween warp layers to keep them from imbedding in each other. They may, however, not be needed at every 1/4 crank.

In total, I think measuring the warp and warping the loom took around three hours. Cast On, Its a Purl Man and Lime n Violet’s podcast all kept me company during the process. Chris came back to help out during the heddle-threading and tieing to the front beam, and it was so much easier to have a second set of hands - one could seperate the yarn from its neighbors, and the other could do the threading or sleying.

First impressions on weaving with the floor loom? (A Leclerc, made in Canada! I was tickled when I found the maker’s mark.)

1 - Whoa. Totally cool having my hands free to just manage the shuttle instead of holding the rigid heddle up or down.

2 - Crazy! I was making weft-faced fabric without trying - the beater is a crusher if I don’t hold it back a bit!

3 - Sweet: Chris was having a turn at the loom, weaving twill, and just as I said, ‘I wonder if you can switch…”, he was about to try reversing the treadling directions to make the twill slant the other way. This synchronized thinking happens fairly often

Old knitting needles make great lease stitcks to work a quick header.

I'm not sure how pedals are normally tied up. These cords came attached to the upper thingys (though some weren't in the right place for plain weasve), so I used some split rings to attach them to the treadles.

Hot Man Weaving Action Shot!