More Sidetracking

I've spent this last week working on my pouch. It was supposed to be a quick project, but after spending all day Friday on it I sort of lost my enthusiasm. Last time I posted I was practicing some new embroidery stitches. I did some more practice, then I printed out an outline of my leaf and punched holes in it to trace it onto my fabric

 My chalk pencil is really quite blunt, but I couldn't find a pencil sharpener anywhere in this house! I ended up punching the holes with a pen that had run out of ink, then pushing the chalk pencil through. Then it was time for the embroidery! I used some old yellow crochet cotton that I've had lying around for ages. I bought it for making lucet cords but found that it kept snapping from the friction against my lucet. Perle cotton seems to slide around my lucet a lot better so I've been using that instead. Anyway, it's a really good colour so I decided to use it for this. It's three plys, but I only used two for the veiny insidey bits of the leaf.

Once I'd finished the embroidery, I strung up some cards! I think I'd done about two cards before I nearly died from the tedious, so I dread to think what stringing up fifty cards is going to be like when I get around to finally starting my belt. Anyway, after asking the internet I decided to use eight cards, and I threaded them alternating S and Z. Then I just started weaving. I felt a little bit like I was going in totally blind, because there weren't many tips to be found on the internet about how to actually do this whole weaving edges thing. There was just a whole bunch of people saying they'd done it with finished pictures. So I made it up as I went along. My loom was too long for the length I was weaving, so I tied one end to the coffee table leg, and then had this brilliant idea to tie the other end to my belt, so I could easily climb in and out and stuff, and I wouldn't need to waste a whole bunch of weft by tying it around my waist. On Saturday morning I realised this wasn't such a brilliant plan, when I had to go to work without a belt because it was tied to my weaving. It's also a little bit hard to explain to people, that my pants are falling down because I tied my weaving to my belt. Anyway, here's a picture:

I was quite pleased with my embroidery, although the split stitch with only two plys worked a whole lot better, which actually makes complete sense. I don't know that I want to try it with a single strand, that just seems way too tedious for me. I got the look I was after, even if it does look a but chunky. I tacked the edges of the pouch together, just to hold everything together while I did the weaving. What you can't see from this picture is that I really did need a few more cards. My stitching is visible and it's not very neat at all and I don't like it. While I had it tensioned really well between the table and my belt it was quite consistent in that the weaving joined to the fabric on the back, and the stitching was only visible on the front. I thought it was doing it that way because of the direction I was throwing the weft through the shed, maybe I was consistently pulling in one direction. Then I hit the corner.

I untwisted my weft just before the corner, and got some bubbles. I'm too used to being able to separate my cards with the teeth on the end of my loom, but this time I had them all tied together so I couldn't indivivually tension my cards. I just guessed with the corner, I'm sure there's some sort of trick with weaving around corners, but I couldn't find any tips at all. This was the point where I realised that I could no longer control the tension with it all tied to my belt. You can see the fabric pulling already because I was still trying to hold the tension as if it was still straight. It was also around this point that I realised that the other pack was getting looser and looser the more I turned the first one. I decided to catch up with the other side, and from then on I alternated packs with each pick.

I also encountered a problem with my lining. The whole point of weaving the edges is to create a neat edge, so I didn't finish the edges of the fabric beforehand. It was fine along the sides, but when I got to the top the linen lining wasn't sandwiched between the wool anymore. That was when the stitching started just pulling the fibres of the linen apart and it all frayed. At one point there's a whole where the lining isn't even attached, but mostly there's just a messy looking fluff all the way along the top inside edge. The second corner worked out a lot better, and I think that's because it's easier to join two packs of cards together than it is to split them. By this time I'd given up on tensioning the weft with the belt, I basically held the pouch between my knees as I stitched and pulled the weft through the shed, then I held the corner to tension it as I beat it. My theory about the direction I was throwing the weft being related to which side the stitching was visible on fell apart as I wove down the last side. The weaving sort of travels all over the place along the seam

The end result is fine in that the pouch is still very much useable and it was always going to be a possibly dodgy project, but I don't know that I want to enter it into a competition. I feel like competition worthy projects should be of a high standard, and I think I'd be a little bit ashamed at entering something substandard. However, my documentation is 95% finished, because I did it alongside making the pouch. At the moment I'm leaning towards entering it anyway, with no expectations of coming anywhere close to winning, and a paragraph at the end of my documentation outlining what went wrong and how I will fix it for future attempts.

It still needs drawstrings and a hanging cord. I've made one drawstring and I dun wanna do anymore. I'm also pondering whether I want a multicoloured hanging cord. I'd going home tomorrow so I'll be able to pick up some purple thread then, but I might just go with green. All in all this has been a useful learning experience at least. I've wanted to do tablet woven edges for a long time, but next time I will definitely go for 12 cards and whip stitch the edges together before I start weaving. The wonky corners don't bother me so much, I think it's just the nature of trying to weave around corners.