It isn’t unusual to hear a weaver say “My selvedge(s) keep fraying and breaking!” This is an issue that often is caused by a combination of yarn/weave/threading that results in the outermost thread on one side of the warp slowly unplying, while the twin thread on the other side of the warp is slowly plying itself tighter and tighter. You can easily see if this is going to be an...

At some point in your weaving life, you will take a piece of fabric from the loom, then sigh when you notice that there is an error in it in the form of a float that shouldn’t be there. Don’t be too worried about it, it happens to the best of us, and for some, (ahem….me) it happens on a seemingly regular basis. There are lots of reasons for these...

Looking for study resources? Here are Tien’s top ten books for studying color in weaving, visual design, and the design process. Color Theory Color and Fiber, by Patricia Lambert, Barbara Staepelare, and Mary G. Fry. The best book available about color in the fiber arts, it covers color theory extensively and discusses how each aspect of color theory applies to the fiber arts. While it is not specifically about color...

Have you ever seen a piece of weaving with a lovely border, then looked at the border more closely and discovered it was simple plain weave? Did you wonder why the weaver chose to add that border? The weaver may like the neat, ordered look of a plain weave border. Possibly they were looking to tidy up their selvedges on a weave that has inconsistent floats at the selvedge. They...

There are a lot of fabulous twill drafts out there, but how do you create something that is truly your own? In the past, a weaver would sit down with some graph paper and start sketching. It takes significant time to fill in the threading, tie up and treadling, then fill in a repeat or two in a drawdown. If they weren’t happy with it, they simply started all over...

Ice dyeing is a fun and easy summer project that requires very little room, time and equipment. The results are delightfully unpredictable and never the same! How it works: Ice dyeing is done with cellulose fiber such as cotton, linen, hemp, and rayon using fiber-reactive dyes. Silk can also be used, but colors will impact silk differently. The high amount of soda ash used in ice dyeing may also weaken...

Handpainted knitting yarns are SO tempting. You go to a yarn shop or knitting conference, and walls of luscious handpainted yarns leap out at you. Next thing you know, you’re clutching a receipt and bag full of gorgeous, colorful painted skeins. Can you weave with handpainted yarns? And WHAT can you weave with them? The bad news is that hand-painted knitting yarns, understandably, are generally designed for knitters, not weavers....

If your stripes are wide, it makes sense to wind them one color at a time, holding however many ends you prefer to wind at once. But what if you’re mixing colors together thread by thread or very nearly, as in color and weave? You could wind the warp one thread at a time, starting and stopping with each color change, but that takes a ton of effort and is...

How do you count your warp ends? Here are six tips for getting the count right every time. No more coming up a few threads short!