As mentioned in my previous posts, I am attending the
Vävstuga Immersion program, where I get to spend all my time weaving for 15 weeks (yes, it is amazing!). This was the first project we did using wool, which I was super excited about.

For this project, we started our design process using paint. As someone who had never really painted before, I was not excited about this at all. I found mixing the paint to match the yarn colors extremely frustrating, and, although I painted some design ideas that first day, they were rushed and not good at all. I definitely should have recognized that I needed a break, but I did return to it a few days later. With a fresh start, I actually got really into painting, and found it a great way to try out a bunch of variations on an idea. Once I had my idea, I also did a wrapping with my yarn.

Since my design was so simple, coming up with the numbers was easy, and pretty soon I had a warp wound. Since this blanket was wide (130 cm on the loom), I had to wait for one of the large looms to become available. Once it did, it was already starting to get chilly in the barn. Becky (our wonderful teacher) took pity on poor little raised-in-Texas me, and moved the loom outside into the sunshine. Who says looms aren’t portable!

Weaving with the wool was quite different. For the blankets, we didn’t really beat in the wefts at all– it was more of a gentle squish. We used the entire warp, with the loom waste becoming the fringe. Once my blanket was off the loom, I noticed that I had a couple of treadling errors that I found really glaring. I took a single thread (the weft was doubled), and threaded it through with a needle. This made the error almost invisible.

After fixing my mistakes and doing the fringe, we fulled the blanket a bit in the washing machine. Now I have the coziest blanket ever– and I made it myself!