One of the ideas I had from the very beginning of this project was to enable as many people as possible to participate. Not everybody can knit or crochet, and while we’ll be happy to show people at the con, I wanted to have a few crafts available that are more easily accessible for people of all ages, so everyone can help.

I remembered that my old childrens’ weaving loom was still living at my parents’ place, so I asked them to send it along and started to play. Here’s the loom with the piece in progress:

What you can create on this kind of loom are simple weft-faced fabrics, but that turns out to be just fine for relatively quickly covering some ground on our model. This is another brillant project for using up all those small leftovers. Remember the big box of them I got? Most of the threads in this came out of there – some are so short that I only was able to do a couple of rows with them, but in that case that’s a feature, not a bug!

For patterning, you can create gentle slopes by not weaving over the whole width of the fabric, which you can see well in the grey part in the middle, where I inserted the wide black/grey tape in the middle of two slopes.

I also decided to use two warp threads in each hole in the loom. This comes in handy if you want to add some knotted flowers – you can see them in pink/green at the bottom and in blue/green at the top. The stitch I used is called a rya knot (tutorial), and I just added a single one here and there between rows of normal weaving using a green and a coloured piece of thread together. To make them, you will have to cut the thread a bit longer to start with, but they can easily be trimmed later. I really like the abstract effect of flowers or high grasses.

Here’s the full piece immediately after taking it off the loom:

I made sure to have all the ends on one side, and I just knotted them together to secure them and didn’t cut them off. They’ll be fine hanging over the side of a platform, and can always be trimmed later if needed.

I then pulled the short ends of the warp at the button up and knotted the warp ends at the top, leading to this:

I loved the playfulness of this project, and will definitely bring the little loom to Dublin for people to play with!