card weaving

Learning a new craft form is always exciting to me!

The book I am using to learn with.

I ran across this book while perusing Amazon on weaving books. It looked super interesting so I did a search online to see what exactly this art form entailed. Boy was I impressed with what I saw!!! I immediately wanted to try it out for myself so I ordered this book and…

Weaving cards.

these weaving cards. I started reading the book just as soon as it was delivered to my doorstep. This ancient form of weaving has been around for a VERY long time. The earliest known card comes from a fourth century B.C. Spanish grave, but there is evidence of early card weaving that has been discovered in North Africa, Egypt, Europe, Asia, and Iceland.

Separating the threads.

It was a time consuming process getting the cards threaded up. There are only 10 of them, but each one has to be threaded in a specific way with a specific order of threads. Just to give you an indication of how easy and straight forward my first sample will be, by contrast some of the fabric discovered that was created by this art form had 272 to 340 threads PER INCH!! And some of the bands with this thread count were between 2 and 5 inches in width. WOW!! Can you imagine how difficult it would be to thread all those cards (remember, 4 threads per card)?

So…after threading the cards, one side of all the threads are tied to a stationary object like a door knob (as seen in the above picture).

Tangles mess at the end of threading the cards.

Then the tedious process of separating the threads at the other end so you have a nice smooth set of threads that you can use as your warp threads. The picture above clearly shows that I had a LOT of work ahead of me to get them all sorted out.

Ingenious Idea.

I finally got them sorted after about an hour. Now, the directions call for the weaver to then tie the other end of the warp to their belt (remember the front end is tied to a door knob). Well…my life with 5 kids, does not allow for me to be tied to a door knob for any length of time. I spent awhile thinking about how I would secure both ends while still being able to weave periodically as I walked by. I came up with this idea – it is one of my student cricket looms – both ends of the warp are tied onto the bars and I can advance them whenever I please :o)