New Year of Crafting

Work's been keeping me super busy as of late, and while I've had time to craft, I haven't had time to blog as much. If you're keeping up with the Geek Girl Crafts Podcast, you'll hear most of what I've been doing there.

The latest piece of news is that my sweet DH decided to get me a loom for the holidays. Yes, a loom. After I said that I wasn't planning on weaving anytime soon. Apparently, he'd been listening to the Purlescence Girls too much.

It's an Ashford 24" Rigid Heddle Loom. The Purl Girls helped me do my first warp, and here's the finished product, which is a 9" scarf, which uses the same Cascade 220 red & black marled yarn as the warp & the weft.

It's really pretty, but after a while, I got very bored weaving it, as it was the same pattern repeatedly.

In addition to the loom, he got me the book, The Handweaver's Pattern Directory. So after I finished the scarf, I flipped through it, found a 2-color tabby pattern I liked, and started warping.

The warping was relatively easy, although I had a slight problem when running the top yarn through the middle bit of the heddle (I missed one) that I didn't realize until I started weaving...ah well....

It's actually working out relatively well, and I will take the mistake as a learning topic.

I figure that I can use some of my extra stash that's been sitting there unused for a while (esp. the Cascade 220) and play with the loom.

So far, so good.

I will make an attempt to get the last of 2011's projects up onto the blog.