Something From Nothing Projects

Day 253: They say that hindsight is clearer than foresight, and I'm here to tell you just how true that is. In fifty-plus years of weaving, I have thrown away thrums which, had I had the good sense to turn them into something useful by tying them end for end, would have measured in miles and pounds as opposed to yards and ounces. Oh, I managed to half-life quite a few of them, taking three-foot lengths of leftovers from the floor loom and using them for warp on the rigid heddle, but even then, I was discarding enough to make my Scottish conscience grimace. I crocheted some into potholders, used some to tie quilts, but by and large, my stash of thrums was growing faster than I could find ways to employ them. Recently, I discovered zanshiori, the art of making functional cloth from waste thread. I so enjoyed my first project (left) that I immediately warped for a second longer one. And, if the truth be told, I still haven't put a very big dent in the mass of thrums I've accumulated just in the last year or so. I've dubbed the bags I'll make with this cloth "Something From Nothing" projects.

Leftovers

Day 66: Leftovers are always good, whether they're cold pizza for breakfast or thrums from the loom. With a bag of three-foot long warp tails in hand, I set up the rigid heddle loom using natural 6/2 cotton as my warp with the intention of making paired but random six-throw stripes to use them up. I spaced each pair with six throws of natural, and because I thought I had forgotten to roll up my stitch counter at one point, I wove straight through a 34-inch length. The piece will be cut in half and seamed up the sides to make vertical (not horizontal) stripes on two small bags roughly seven inches square. The bags will be lined with a lightweight fabric. I still have a lot of thrums left in these colours to make some sort of strap/handle. As a sidebar to this, it looks as if I'll have two or three other projects finished up by bedtime, leaving several open spaces on my crafts calendar. I wonder what other long-ignored needleart I can drag out of hiding to relieve pandemic ennui?

Using A Nuke To Kill A Spider

Day 308: Fresh off the loom, three 40" lengths of cloth are destined to be shoulder-bags. Both warp and weft are standard knitting worsted and when sewn up, will make bags roughly 11 inches square. Each one will be lined with heavy twill and will have a button-down flap, perfect for a knitting tote or even for Morris bells and hankies. Weaving them went even more quickly than I'd imagined, and now I'm tasked with creating the straps. It would be much easier if I had a small rigid heddle loom or even a 10 dent-per-inch reed to use with a backstrap, but as we all know, this is not a perfect world. No, instead I've warped up 17 ends to make a strap 1.5" wide on my four-foot floor loom. This is what I call "using a nuke to kill a spider." It gets the job done, but constitutes a classic example of employing way too much resource to effect a solution.