I spent quite a while hanging out with members of the Northern Colorado Weavers' Guild, a number of whom I met at the Estes Park Wool Market Sheep to Shawl; I also got a second good look at the shawl they made at Estes, which won the blue ribbon. They had brought some spindles and fiber, so of course I had to stick around and spin for a little bit. Can't walk past a pile of roving, no, I can't...
One of the things I saw there was a group, local to Loveland I believe, called Hand Tech, High Tech (correct me if I'm wrong, please), who was doing something high-tech (which I didn't look at) along with a table where a charming young lady was demonstrating weaving for kids. She had set to LARGE circular weaving frames, one on a repurposed hula hoop and one on a length of PVC tubing bent into a circle and secured with duct tape. That was kind of neat, and a lot of kids were stopping by and weaving lengths of doubled yarn into the giant circular mats that were developing as the day went on.
That gave me an idea. As my fellow Sheep-to-Shawl mates know, I have a thing for what I call "accessible weaving". Although I own both a rigid-heddle loom and a 4-shaft floor loom, I love exploring and demonstrating approaches to weaving that don't require high cost or specialized equipment. In our booth display, I often include a section called 'Many Ways to Weave'. If someone gets bitten by the weaving bug, there are ways to start weaving NOW. Today. For example, stick weaving sticks can be found, bought inexpensively, or made; card-weaving cards can be cut from file folders, or even old playing cards, a rigid heddle can be also cut from a file folder (a bit too floppy, though) or a cereal box.
Seeing the hula-hoop weavings made me think, though-- how to scale it down in a functional way? Then it came to me: embroidery hoops. An odd number of 'spokes' to form the radial warps could be looped through each other at the center and pulled tight, and away we go. When finished, the 'spoke' yarns can be secured by tying each single yarn to one of it next-door neighbors (Yes, I've seen circular weaving done with a paper plate, but the yarn was just wrapped around the plate through notches on the edge; I don't know what would keep the 'warps' from being able to be pulled loose. And paper plates are not especially rigid and buckle easily.)
So I scrounged up a plastic embroidery hoop and gave it a try. This is a small one, so I can see it being a mug mat. Bigger ones, if wool or cotton, could be hot-dish trivets (acrylic yarn MELTS if you plop a casserole on it fresh from the oven--found that out years ago, the hard way!).
Here it is, so far. It's fun, it's fast, it's portable--what's not to like?
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