"...And Sewing Is Half The Battle!"

If anyone needs to boop more things to achieve silly internet cred, I am spam-boopable! I need to be booped 135 more times to get my second gauge to MAX. 🎃🎃🎃

Good work, team!

These are smocking patterns. If you stitch these patterns into flat fabric and then pull the threads to gather the fabric, it will produce these patterns on the finished fabric. Smocking manipulates flat fabric into three dimensions.

The beautiful fabric that looked like dragon scales on costumes in the tv show Game of Thrones were produced by smocking, by sewing a particular pattern into the fabric and then pulling those threads just the right amount to gather the fabric into that pattern.

Despite or perhaps because of her best efforts (trying to eat my weaving notebook) I got the warp maths wrong by an order of magnitude in at least two places, but it's fine, it's fine it's fine

An evening and a day spent warping. First time warping from front to back, many learning experiences were had, unclear whether I have learned from them.

(It might look like stripes right now but it's not gonna be stripes)

Aaaaand we're off! I told you it wasn't going to be stripes.

The thing to understand is, this is two separate fabrics. The green warp only ever weaves with green weft, the yellow warp with yellow weft, and ne'er the twain shall meet. This is a piece of loosely woven yellow cloth which intersects a piece of loosely woven green cloth in very specific ways, forever moving over and under each other but never on the same plane, always locked in a dance. You can stick your finger between the layers at the edges.

It's my first time using wool (previous projects were linen or cotton) and it is a pain learning experience.

Nearing the end of this warp, I forgot that I had broken a warp thread at the beginning of winding on. The weight keeps it under tension even though it isn't wound around the warp beam with its friends.

And here is the cloth underway -- I've mostly done random patterns (often computer-generated-randomness). I don't know how much it will shrink, it might be neither an awkwardly wide scarf nor an awkwardly narrow shawl.

It's off the loom! I am getting so much braver about the sewing machine!

Very late finished photos! After hemming he went through a gentle cycle in the washing machine, which made him softer and denser and rounded out the shapes a lot. He is very cosy and a wonderful big scarf.

SOUND ON

This is funnier than both Deadpool movies combined

Celebrating with @andsewingishalfthebattle and popcorn after #animemagic.

Enjoying our new popcorn bowl! 🤣