Whidbey Weavers’ School :: Day Five

***Originally published on September 10, 2015***

Today was the day we got to learn about yarn (calculating yardage, which types of yarn will work best, etc.) which is a part I’d been looking forward to all week.  One of my main motivations for coming up to take this class was because I’ve known for years that I carry the yarns that weavers seek out, but with no knowledge of how to put them to use on a loom.  Now that I know how to use one of these, the fact that I have this array of yarn at my fingertips is dizzying.

I got to start the afternoon by weaving this sample, a super fun combination of lace and stripes, with varying degrees of opacity.  I love how you can see the stripe colors so solidly in the warp, and then they become tweedy once the weft is embedded.

Then there was this one, the one with the “windows” that I’d had my eye on all week.  I knew I wanted to make it on there by 2pm, which was our deadline for finding our last loom so that we’d all be ready to finish off the sample before wrapping up the class and parting ways — and I was able to jump on just in time!

The warp yarns for this one look so cool, even just by themselves.

Then it was time to bring the samples for each loom back to the classroom, and separate them so we could each take home the samples we’d been working on all week.  This is where our signature yarn comes in: before and after weaving each sample, we’d weave a few rows with our “signature yarn” that we’d carry around with us (in my case, pale yellow).  That made it easy to figure out whose sample was whose, after each had been cut along the signature yarn.

And here we all are, proudly showing off our favorite samples:

This entire week was such a true Lindsey vacation: even after the amazing week of weaving I’d just had, I got to enjoy a beautiful ferry ride back to the mainland,

a drive through back country roads to the little town of Mossyrock where Jesse was working on a vacation home for the week, and I got to conveniently dip in, stay the night, and say hi to my boys,

And then keep on driving back towards town, and then onwards to Laurance Lake where I joined some good friends for night 2 of a camping bachelorette party in the woods.  I’d been living out of my cooler for a week, had 3 different vacations worth of clothes and entertainment stuffed into my little Ford Focus, and my head is still swirling from this huge life skill I’d spent the past week wrapping my head around.