Rewards of Teaching Card Weaving

I recently received an email from a student which contained a picture of bands they had woven since my class with them.  What is so cool is that there were four!  This in less than a month's time!  I was in Bloomington IN with the Bloomington Spinners & Weavers Guild at the beginning of April.  I've been there before, and it is a great group of weavers.

Card weaving is such a specialized weaving technique, and there really aren't that many of us dedicated to it when you look at the broader weaving population.  So I'm always thrilled when I get at least one student in a class who really likes it enough to start exploring it on their own.  And I'm more thrilled when they share what they've been working on with me.  Kathleen was one of those students.  And she's told me that she is going to demonstrate at an art fair for students.  Even better!

This is why we teach.  If you asked me to not talk about card weaving, I don't really think I could do it.  So the fact that I'm allowed to share my passion with other people, and see that sometimes they share that passion as well is a reward beyond measure.

More sharing next week with the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild in New Jersey!  I can't wait!

PS:  Alright Daryl! Bring on the "Battle of the Bands!"  Tablet woven bands are much more boss than inkle bands!

Ply Split Braiding Fun

Last weekend I enjoyed a St. Louis Weavers' Guild workshop on Ply-Split Braiding with Louise French.

I had taken a quick course from Linda Hendrickson at Convergence several years ago, and it looked interesting, but I wasn't willing to split any time away from my card weaving.  And the idea of making the cords that were to be split looked quite tedious.

Well, let me tell you how wrong I was!  The cord making is actually very fun and makes up a huge part of the creative process in ply-splitting.  Plus, there was great fun in just playing with the different splitting techniques.

I knew that many card weavers were also ply-split braiders, and now it makes sense why.  We (card weavers) split the plys with the weft as we are plying the threads in each card.  The draft tells us what color threads go where.  But one can take a card weaving draft, create cords to ply split using the draft and get the same pattern!  The only problem is that unlike card weaving where I can change the direction of my plies from Z to S (turning cards forward and back), the ply direction of the cords for splitting is stuck in the one direction I created it.  Hmm, seems to be an opportunity here to figure out a way to make a cord with different ply directions.

As soon as I get some card weaving drafts translated and cords made and split into something interesting, I'll post pics here.

 Actually finished this necklace.

Great Cord Monster!

Someday this will be a small basket.  Actually it is almost finished.  One or two more rounds are all that are left.  This was taken end of day two of the workshop. Go Gripfid!