Thursday, April 14, 2016

A New Adventure - Weaving Fabric

Hello friends!!! As you know I love fabric and with Quilt Market coming up in May and I'm deep in sewing projects…right were I love to be. Sewing is my passion, it really sings to my heart and soul. The samples are being made with the new line of Tim Holtz Eclectic Elements fabric and is called "Correspondence". You can find it in stores now. 

I was looking on Instagram one day and came across some fascinating post from Tara Curtis aka T_JAYE on Instagram.  She is a Master of Modern Weaving so I went to her site and did some research. I bought a book and some weaving needles. I was ready to try my first project…. many weeks went by and finally I started my weaving. 

I drew lines on a piece thick foam core board at the angels specified. 

Using a Bias Strip Maker I made lots and lots of 1/2" strips. Did I say lots! 

Then I started weaving off a diagram in the book I had purchased. Here is the first layer. 

Then I wove the next layer. At this point I was thinking I sure hope this is right because there is no resemblance of a star yet. So I kept weaving on the leap of faith that it would all turn out the way I wanted. 

I started the third and final layer. Here is a view of the weaving in progress. The pink thing is the weaving needle that I purchased from Tara. I can't even imagine how you would do this without the weaving needle.  
You can start to see the star now. But at this point I decided that my fabric choices weren't that good. There was to much white space in my dark fabric. So back to the drawing board I went. 

I made more strips. 

I did a little trial run with some different fabric choices and I think this is going to be okay. 

I started again but this time I went back and looked at a video. So much easier to weave this way. The first layer was a piece of cake. 

The second layer was also pretty painless. All was good except for the little error I made in the middle of the piece, of corse it's in the middle. Right? After it was all fixed I was on to the next layer. I learned it's not a good idea to be distracting while weaving! lol

Now the third layer is complete. I really love the way the striped fabric added a new pattern to the piece. A happy accident! 

So worth all the work. 

After the piece was stabilized with iron on interfacing on the back and stay stitching around the outer edge. I trimmed the piece to size and sewed on the binding. 

I'm really excited how it turned out! It was well worth all the work and I can't wait to try another! 

To find out more about Modern Weaving head over to Tara's website, there is so much inspiration and information there! 
Thank you Tara for all the words of encouragement throughout the process.  

Thanks for stopping by!
Richele