First go at weaving

I've been pottering away for the last couple of days on an old Spears weaving loom I bought a few months back on ebay. I hadn't even bothered to open the box until yesterday. The loom itself appears to be in good order although missing the shuttle - my wonderful boyfriend stepped up to the mark and set about making me a substitute out of plastic which works brilliantly!

Needless to say there's no instruction book in the box but there are some instructions for how to warp the loom in different ways on the inside of the lid. Luckily enough the person who had it before me had set up some cotton thread warps allowing me to just get started - a bit like plug and play!

This is the first weaving I've ever done. The yarn I used was one of the multicoloured Opi sock yarns and I have to say it looks quite good.

After that I tried warping the loom myself. The loom is 25cm x 32cm and I wanted to try a scarf. So to make the long threads (apologies for my lack of knowledge regards weaving terms) I wrapped wool vertically around one of the living room doors so I could get roughly the same lengths. I decided to do 8 strands of green, 16 of purple and 12 dark red. Then once I was happy they were roughly even came the task of threading them through the heddle and then making sure the tension was even as I rolled them up. I tied them to our shoe rack to get them all even as I wound because it was low enough on the ground and could take the tension and would not move when I was winding the threads onto the loom. I tried to set myself up so I could be a bit self sufficient and not have to rely on others to be around when I wanted to start a project.

After that it was just a case of choosing a colour to weave. I was only going to use the light yellow to begin with but felt that was going to get a bit boring so alternated it with bright red and blue. I started some of the weaving late last night and then spent a few more hours on it whilst watching the reruns of It's Not Easy Being Green (great show!) this morning and managed to do about 1.5m. I'm happy with the results and am now going to have a hunt for a better loom to use.