New Spinners and New Weavers all in one week.

This past week was a veryveryvery busy one. Chelsea was out of town. There was knitting to do and Tour de Fleece to keep up with.
Thursday was the second class of my accellerated beginning spinning class.

There was great progress. We learned about plying, worked more on spinning a smooth yarn, tried spinning from the fold and some other long draw techniques as well as talking about skein finishing.

It was a great group and we had lots of fun and ate chocolate too.

Heather came and we had our first knitting lesson. I hope she's practicing.

Friday evening was the day to start our Andean Backstrap Weaving class with Abby.

I started learning this last year after SOAR. I had a couple of hours the first day and then would put it away a lot. It was hard and frustrating so I often found excuses for not practicing.

Well this group was dedicated and it's probably the quietest class we've ever had at the Spinning Loft.

I had some break throughs in my personal weaving. I could finally see what was happening and got to the point, with the simplest pattern, of felling confident in my decisions.

Abby's prep was fantastic and took a lot of time but the planning behind the class is brilliant. Each of us had 3 prewarped which were given to us one at a time. The looms got increasingly sparser so that we had to add things like a strap and then heddles and then set up from the start until we got to the point of warping our own.

This is Amanda and Ezara as warping partners or ayllwi-masi on Abby's portable warping board.

This is one of the more complicated patterns we worked on.

Maggie joined the class on Sunday and made good progress working with the loom and doing plain weave. She's been practicing again today and actually has almost woven the entire length.

This is where Abby keeps her needle. She also always has a one handed knife in her pocket. I am at a disadvantage since I have very short hair that won't hold the needle and my clothes seldom have pockets. I think I will have to weave myself some little bags I can attach to my waist.

Abby is a fantastic weaver. A better weaver than she is a spinner. That is not an insult at all and she will agree with me here. She's fast and skilled.

These are the weavings I did during class. The one at the bottom was the one I set up all by myself. I can see huge improvement in my selveges there. The green, gold and red weaving is the second warp we got. The bottom S was woven by Abby and the rest is my weaving. The second S is a mirror image and I'm happy with myself for figuring out how to do it.

The middle blue, gold, red warp is the first we got. the bottom is Abby's weaving then I did a couple of plain rows and was off and running - that's actually the result of about 3 hours work but the bottom one on the last day i was able do weave that much in a bout 30 minutes! Good progress. The gold and rust warp is the most complicated pattern we worked on but I was lazy and didn't work as diligently.

At the very top is a handspun warp I made. I made no progress. The yarn was fuzzy and broke a couple of times and retied the heddles several times until I got crabby and walked away. I obviously need to work on my spinning for weaving.

Abby mad me this - because of love...in less than an hour, warp and all. Show off.