Visiting my my creative friends Clifford & Sally Boehme is always a huge pleasure - their home is brimming with their creative makes and chatting with them always gives me a seed of an idea to run with. During my last visit early last year, Sally & Clifford introduced me to the simple joy of 'stick weaving' and I found myself very taken by weaving textiles with these simplest of tools. It's a very compelling craft that can make use of a vast array of 'yarns' and making a pouch to keep my sticks in seemed like a useful and easy first make.
I ordered my first set of weaving sticks just before the first UK lockdown and completely forgot about them until they popped through my letterbox a month or so later. What a delightful distraction these simple tools became in the weeks that followed. A weaving stick is simply a wooden dowel with a point on one end and a hole in the other. A warp for the weaving is threaded through the hole to give a double thread for each stick. The warp threads can be any strong yarn, that are best cut quite a bit longer than the fabric piece required.
The number of weaving sticks and their size will determine the width of the fabric. I started with six medium size sticks that fitted comfortably in my hand and enabled me to quickly build up a rhythm. The weft 'yarn' can be anything that is strip like and can be compacted down as the weaving grows. I chose a skein of colourful Hullabaloo yarn by Collinette that I'd purchased in a tiny Irish wool shop many years previously. To start the yarn was tied with a double knot to one of the outer sticks.
The weaving begins by holding the sticks firmly in one hand and weaving the yarn around the sticks with the other - I used the yarn double to give extra bulk. I found that to start it was best to hold the sticks firmly around the bottom and to allow to splay a little at the top - the yarn could then be slid off the stick points as I weaved and easily slid down the length of the sticks.
And then the yarn is wound round the opposite outer stick and back towards the first stick so that all the sticks now have yarn around. And this is the whole weaving process - to be completed many times!
The bit that takes a bit of getting used to is holding the sticks tightly enough at the beginning to keep the weaving reasonably compact across the width - the compactness down the length gets sorted out later as you will see.
Once the weaving has grown a few inches, the sticks become much more stable. The weaving grows pretty quickly and when it's a few inches off the top of the sticks, it's time to move some down onto the warp threads.
This said, trying to push the weaving down is actually rather hard work - it's much easier to pull up the sticks one at a time and hey presto, the weaving is moved down in seconds! The most important thing to stress when doing this is to always leave some weaving on the bottom of the sticks to continue weaving up against.
And so weaving continues until the length of the fabric required is reached - twice the length of the sticks and a few inches more for a flap to go over the top. When checking the length of the weaving, the weaving density needs to be considered - I found it best to keep stretching the weaving out and stopped short of gaps appearing.
When the length has been achieved, the weaving is completed with a simple knot onto one of the outer sticks.
Then all the weaving can be completely moved down off the sticks and onto the warp threads, so that there is at last 3 inches of warp thread beyond the weaving.
Once the warp threads are cut, the ends of the weaving can be stalised by threading the warp threads onto a tapestry needles and stitching them back down into the weaving. Catching bits of the weft wool along the way holds them in place and then the ends can be trimmed off where the needle has been brought through the body of the weaving.
Finally to make into a pouch by folding nearly in half, leaving the fold over for a flap at the top. Then stitch up the sides by using pieces of weft thread and a ladder stitch to pick up a few of the warp turns on alternating rows all the way up the sides. Strips of weaving can also be joined together and to make a wider fabric - I ended up with weaving sticks in a number of different widths and needed a bigger pouch! I also added a couple of buttons and plaited loops to secure the flap.
An in case you are wondering what else stick weaving fabric can be used for, here's a very comfy stool pad I made using just two weaving sticks and carpet wool - the long strip was coiled on its end. This coil could be extended to make a rug of any size, although I would strongly recommend that this is done in sections to avoid massively long warps to push down.
I also tried out one of Clifford and Sally's idea to make woven strips into a frame mirror using recycled Sari yarn - mine was a very much smaller version of theirs. I covered one side of a piece of picture backing board with wadding and silk and glued a mirror and the woven strips to the front. I am sure that there are many more possibilities for these tactile woven strips and I would be delighted to hear about other ideas. For anyone who fancies having a go at this craft this winter, I have weaving sticks for sale from my
Somerset Levels studio in fine, medium and chunky and I am able to post within the UK.
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