#dragon does crafting

[stormsfordragon]

Another rainbow!

This one is 2" wide, 78" inches long. I have no idea how I managed that when most of my bands are roughly 60". There's 192 threads in this pattern. Took me about 6 hours to cut the threads and string them up on the cards. Pattern repeats took about 45 minutes each. 21 repeats for about 22 hours, probably more if you include loading the shuttle. Made with crochet thread.

The pattern is one of my own modified ones! I took a relatively simple pattern and expanded it to include 6 colors instead of 2 the first time I made it. But it wasnt twist neutral and simply reversing the pattern to make it so gave it odd spots and looked clunky. So I mixed it up to make the twists alternate directions at different times and it looks so much more natural! Especially since the sections are relatively short all considered. I was worried I was going to be unhappy with it and that's a lot of work that I had to trust the process on. But I really like it!

[stormsfordragon]

Very upset that I cannot find where the heck I put this thing. Made out of something called Milk Cotton yarn? Truly dont know. Its SO SOFT and squishy bc its 4 layers due to the way tablet weaving makes thicker bands than inkle weaving.

[stormsfordragon]

So this one is made with embroidery thread! I had it in my mind that each skein would do 4x warps and bought enough skeins to do the pattern I wanted. After I got home I discovered that these specific skeins only do 3x warps! So I skipped a few pegs and made the whole thing shorter.

And then I thought I was going to run out of weft thread, sent my mom off with the empty spool bc she was going into town anyways. She comes back with the same color but different weight! The labels weren't even the same color!

But it turns out had about a foot left when I finished and I definitely would have run out if I'd gotten the full warp lengths so it all worked out! And then I went back to return the wrong spool and the cashier laughed a lot bc he'd absently noted that it wasn't the same one but it didn't click for him until it was too late.

Even if I had run out I couldn't have used the thinner thread, which is metallic embroidery thread, because the pattern skips 1 hole and so the weft sparkles through the weave in places! Its so pretty!

Here's the pattern I used!

[stormsfordragon]

Another gift! Made of crochet thread, it's a double headed dragon pattern. Dragon head pattern is a pretty common one, I did a single dragon as one of my earliest ones, but friend suggested this one and I desperately wanted to do green and gold based on a pair of trees I'd seen on a drive home to my parents' place. 75" long!

[stormsfordragon]

1 iteration of the pattern so far. I just desperately wanted to weave so I dug out some free yarn I was given. Apparently its Peruvian wool! Takes me roughly 2 hours to get the warp strings threaded, took me about an hour to do that pattern repeat. It'll be somewhere between 60-70 inches when its done I think. The 2 lighter wool have color variations in the wool which is really pretty. The dark one is solid.

Homemade loom and shuttle, it folds down for storage!

[stormsfordragon]

So I was going to wait to post this one for when I managed to ship it out to a friend's as a gift, but I've woven 2 more since then XD

This one is another I've done on bamboo rayon yarn bc i adore how soft and silky it is. Here is the pattern for this one! I found it elsewhere on the site and adapted it bc it wasn't twist neutral. Friend plans to turn it into a camera strap, hope it works!

[stormsfordragon]

So when I claim tablet weaving is fun and easy (for me)! I do not mean these ones. These were a nightmare and I had so much fun and want to do another. XD there are 2 bands in this photo, one is roughly 1/4" smaller than the other and they're the exact same pattern. The only difference was how tightly I wove the second one. The 2 black bands on either side have 4 threads per card, the rest of the band in the middle has only 2/4 of the holes strung with thread! And most of the time the ones strung are opposite each other so each card wants to sit rotated in the opposite direction. Normally once I've turned the cards I can let go and they just sit there. These ones, as soon as I have let go, they spring against the tension, so I have to hold onto them constantly or loop an elastic on them to hold them together.

Pattern is here and there's lots of info about tablet weaving in general! Done in cotton crochet thread. 40 cards.

I can't decide if I like the back or front better. This is also the one where I had to trust the process bc I strung it up upside down and wove the whole thing backwards!

Here's the cards out of whack lol (pls excuse my desk I got distracted)

[stormsfordragon]

This one is made of rayon yarn from bamboo! Its super silky, to the point the warp thread actually came undone on one of them. It makes for wonderfully smooth tablet turning! The way the pattern twisted the warp makes different parts of the pattern bevel inward so it looks and feels 3D on top of the colors helping with it. 28 tablets, 80 turns per pattern repetition. 2 hours to string it up and about an hour per pattern repeat for a total of around 10 hours!

Unfortunately there's a very limited selection of colors for this specific brand in this material so I have to get clever about it next time.

Here's the pattern I swapped the colors out on: