Two Rabbit Holes

For many years, I have thought of weaving as my next craft. I delayed the start of my weaving adventures for fear of abandoning all adult responsibilities.

Well I’m taking Weaving I now & I’m signing up for Weaving II when registration opens later today. Strangely I’m not driven to weave a great length of fabric. I weave a few rows and stop to try to figure out how the pattern draft relates to what is coming out of the loom. It is fascinating. My instructor is great about answering all my questions that veer far from the curriculum.

I have not abandoned all adult responsibility because I have not brought a loom into the house (yet). I spend the week between classes planning what to try next. I create pdfs for my plans & load them into KnitCompanion so I don’t waste any valuable class time. There must be weaving software available but I’m trying not to dive too deep into the rabbit hole (yet).

The next statement may be a bit controversial… building excel spreadsheets can be much fun as knitting. If I have an interesting project/goal, building a spreadsheet is absolutely addictive.

My current spreadsheet generated the drawings above. It is a 6×6 tabby weave structure & you customize colour placement. I created this to teach Woven Knitting.

Then I realized that this drawing facility could be helpful as a designing tool. My next steps are to allow variations in weave structure, dimensions and colour specification styles. Generating visual representations of my ideas will save a lot of swatching time.

Unlike knitting, I need blocks of uninterrupted time when work on this & my family may not see me for days. Fingers crossed I can get this to work.