Inkle Weaving

Winter quarter class was over on Tuesday so I decided to treat myself to a day off work and take part in an inkle weaving workshop taught by a member of the Seattle Weavers Guild. The class was held in the recently reopened Southeast Seattle Senior Center's loom room.



In this two and a half hour class we were able to warp up our looms and start weaving. Inkle weaving is mostly a warp faced weave done on a fairly simple loom using string heddles and our hands to make two sheds.



The class warped up 3 types of weaves so we could at least have an overview of the different types by looking at what the others were doing.


We found out rather quickly that even though the weaving is simple, in warping the loom attention needed to be paid. We all made some kind of mistake which were turned into "teaching opportunities" by our instructor Marilyn.



First two photos are basic stripes, the next two were a warp pattern and the last the most tricky and time consuming to weave was a pick-up pattern, where you have to manually pick the separate warps to create the pattern.



I liked the class well enough to stop off at Weaving Works on the way home to buy some warp that was a little bit thicker and colors I preferred to work with. If you're going to look at something for hours, I would rather it be pretty.