Textiles, Fiber Arts, and Needlecrafts

Mhhhhm... Something seems wrong with my nålebind project.. 🤔

To the best of my knowledge, most of the contemporary work in ply-split braiding is being done/talked about there. They have frequent show-and-tell Zoom meetings and always seem to be trying new things with the technique. Especially some of the 3D stuff, that really seems like it's at the forefront of handmade textiles in general. Of course, I'd love it if some of them would come post here too! 😝

The Nashoba Valley Weavers' Guild is hosting a really cool event combining two topics: deflected doubleweave and zero waste textiles! Deflected doubleweave is a technique where you get all these cool organic shapes that only really become apparent once it's off the loom:

I don't know how common this might be, but I do my nalbinding (nålbinding/naalbinding/etc) quite a bit differently than any instructions show. I keep my working loops on a long long knitting needle, and hold that the way an English cottage knitter does. I use a small tapestry needle for my naal, and I mostly work with thinner cotton yarns. Since you can't wet splice those, I Russian join the segments together. The whole thumb-hold thing never really worked well for me; even when it went right, my fabric would be all loose. That's probably just a skill issue that I could overcome with time, but my way works now, so I stick to it lol. Also, it helps me keep track of which loop is which. If I'm doing it correctly, this ought to be Mammen stitch. I hope.

Chances are, there's a chapter near you of some group dedicated to a specific niche textile. Many of these arts are a little neglected these days, so groups dedicated to them are usually really happy to get new members. Plus, they'll usually have something cool like "Guild" or "Society" in the name, which just feels neat to be a part of lol. This group linked here is having a Lace Weekend on 11/2-11/4, with lots of different crafts present. If I make it out there I'll report back, with pics.

A weird thing about Tunisian crochet is that the flat and in-the-round variants are quite different from each other! Flat uses a singed ended hook, and round uses a double ended hook. Flat builds up stitches on the hook in one direction, and removes them from the hook in the opposite direction. Round builds up stitches in one direction, and removes them in the same direction, but off the other side of the hook. There are patterns you can produce in round that seem impossible to do in the other, and vice versa. Here, I'm trying to guess at one possible flat method to mimic this traditional in-the-round pattern.

Usually tablet weaving is done with square tablets that have 4 holes, but 6 hole tablet weaving is known from various times and places throughout history. It opens up tons of possibilities for new color patterns and strength. The late great Peter Collingwood's book The Techniques of Tablet Weaving goes into some detail about it, but the patterns are quite daunting! As you can see in the pic, though these are 6 hole tablets, I'm only using 4 of them for now. Working my way up lol. Not even a particularly fancy pattern on this practice piece:

I made this mostly as a way to practice as many Tunisian in-the-round stitches as possible. It is a pretty comfy purse though! The yarn is interesting, I found these enormous spools of it at Goodwill. It's very fine, maybe lace weight, except it's slightly fuzzy? It's not very strong but once it's worked up into a reasonably dense fabric, it'll hold up. Gives the finished object a soft and fuzzy feel.

This is a very versatile technique in which you use a special tool (a gripfid) to split the plies of a yarn, and then feed other yarns back through. You can do some pretty amazing colorwork and stitch patterns with it. Everything I've made so far has this very pleasant and unusual "squishiness" to it. Most commonly it's done with 4-ply yarns, splitting them in half each time, but there are tons of other variations. Linda Hendrickson's books on the topic have been a huge help! Something I do that I don't think I've seen mentioned elsewhere is dipping the free ends of the yarn segments into hot wax. This keeps them from fraying as you work, makes them easier to insert into the gripfid, and makes them less likely to come loose.

A bag made with interlaced sprang weaving, and a braided drawstring. Sprang weaving is amazing!! My brother abused the heck out of this thing for years and it held up really well. It's perfect for bags (and pants), because it's super stretchy width-wise and completely inflexible height-wise. I learned most of what I know from one of Carol James' books , but there's so much I haven't tried yet. Basically, the concept is that it's like weaving, but with only warp threads and no weft. You start with a warped loom, but then you twist the warp threads across each other. Each row you (usually) twist the threads across each other in a different way. Like maybe on row one you twist each thread with it's neighbor, and then on row 2 you skip a thread and do it again so the pairs are different, then on row 3 do the original pairs again except twist them the opposite direction, etc. In yet another example of modern historians wildly misunderstanding/undervaluing the "women's work" of ancient textiles, check out this amazing article on the history of tight-fitting colorful clothes! Spoiler, it was probably sprang.