If you follow me on Instagram, you would have seen a little tiny weaving project come together a little while ago. I’ve been wanting to try some weaving after seeing lots around the Net recently, and I also needed to replace the fob on my keys so I created a tiny woven piece that will hang off my keys and help me keep track of them.
What I Used:
- Piece of cardboard
- Scissors
- Stranded embroidery thread (DMC 3765)
- Yarn from my stash: Flurry from Moda Vera and matching 8 ply yarn
- Large yarn needle
What I Did:
I started by cutting little slots in my cardboard about 1mm apart. I cut 15 slots on each side.
Then I wrapped my embroidery thread around the card into each slot to create the base threads for my weaving.
I started weaving with my plain yarn leaving a tail of an inch or so and using my yarn needle to help me go under every second thread in my base. At the end of each row I gently pushed the yarn towards the top so there were no gaps between rows.
After a block of plain yarn I left the tail hanging and started weaving the flurry “fluffy” yarn, again leaving a short tail. This yarn was a little trickier to weave with because the fluffy ends made it harder to see what I was doing but it looks so cute done.
Finally I switched back to the plain yarn to finished the block.
With the weaving finished I just had to work out what to do with the ends and how to remove it from my cardboard “loom”.
Where I switched yarns I had tails hanging. these I simply tied together and trimmed. The knots are hidden by the fluffy yarn. The finishing and ending tails I carefully wove down the side of the block of weaving so they were hidden and wouldn’t unravel.
Here’s what the back of my weaving looked like. I cut all the thread in about the middle. Then I took two threads at a time beside each other, slipped them out of the slots in the cardboard and tied them together in a simple knot. (See picture below)
After I had done this to all the threads on each end, it went back and tied alternating pairs of threads together. My goal was really to stop it all unravelling. This seemed to be enough.
I had originally imagined that the ends would be like fringing, but I realise that they weren’t quite long enough to give that effect. Next time I would make my cardboard loom larger so that the ends would create fringing when I got to this stage.
With my mini weaving fairly secure and unlikely to unravel, I attached a tiny safety pin and a slip ring so that I could hang it on my keys. It is a pretty little thing but it is making me smile when I grab the keys each morning.
Now I’m itching to try a bigger piece of weaving! Any tips or tricks for me?
