Inkle time

As I suspected, my interest in band weaving continued to rise as a result of the last Yarnworker WAL. I finished my colorwork band key fobs, and immediately threw more yarn on the Cricket to make another set. You can see that some progress was made in terms of technique - the teal/yellow-green ones were woven first, and the blue/silver came next:

My biggest takeaway here is that I get better results when I ease up on warp tension a bit, but concentrate on getting really good weft tension. Believe it or not, those bands are all made with the same weight yarn - 3/2 mercerized cotton. 

I turned them all into key fobs using hardware and a special pliers that came with it.

These fobs are laid out in the order I wove them. Sharon chose one and, perhaps because I have trained her so well, she picked the one on the right, which is the last one I made and definitely the best of the batch. 

After a lively discussion at my knitting group one evening, I was offered an inkle loom that was sitting unused on someone else's shelf! It is an Ashford Inklette, and I happily accepted. I warped it up right away, using the same yarn and pattern. Through the process of weaving this band, I learned a couple of things to improve upon. Look at the arrows:

The left arrow shows that the heddled and unheddled threads don't meet on the same plane - the heddled threads are higher than the unheddled ones. This means that the down shed is nice and big, but the up shed is smaller and more difficult to get a shuttle through. I need shorter heddles.

The right arrow shows how I had the "tension flap" (that bigger block of wood) positioned for warping. The band becomes shorter as it is woven, because the weaving process creates take-up. This means it's helpful to be able to release tension on the warp. I don't have that much tension available to release, because of where I positioned the flap when warping. The upshot is that I wasn't able to weave this entire warp, because there came a point at which I was no longer able to advance the warp. It was just too tight and I couldn't loosen it any more. 

I finally found a way to secure the loom on a table so it wouldn't slide around on me. It works on this little table, placed on a bit of shelf liner, and clamped with one of the many warping peg clamps I have in my kit now: 

You can see the clamp in the bottom left of the above photo. Here is a lower view of its position:

After this practice project was done, I started again... this time with 5/2 cotton I had left over from a long-ago towel project. I adjusted my heddle-creation approach. What ended up working best was using a coaster as my template. You can see that the heddled and unheddled warp threads are meeting up quite nicely this time!

Also, I started with the tension flap in a more extreme position, which allowed me to weave the entire warp length comfortably. Success!

I also tried a different pattern. I found so many on this blog. Here are my final bands and key fobs:

For my next band, I'm going to work on getting a tighter weft at the very beginning of the weaving. Only one of these three bands was easy to get into the hardware. I could also reduce the width of the pattern - this project had 37 ends, so maybe try 35 or 33. 

Weaving colorful little bands is so much fun!