So you’ve dressed your loom and ready to weave! We have a few tips to hopefully help with weaving your Kaleidoscope “log cabin” scarf for the Winterful Weave-Along.
#1 Juggling two weaving shuttles
The first thing to notice when you are weaving log cabin is that you’ll need to prepare a shuttle for each weft colour. If you’re using boat shuttles, I would simply prepare two boat shuttles — one for the border colour and one for the pattern colour. Then wind bobbins for all the colours of your pattern weft and border weft.
When you weave with the two shuttles, I always set myself up with the convention of placing the shuttle that I just used closest to me on the web of the loom. So basically, I throw a pick, beat, change the shed, and then place that shuttle right on top of the cloth in front of me. Then with the second shuttle, I throw, beat, change the shed, and then place the second shuttle closest to me on the cloth, nudging the first shuttle away from me. Then I can pick up the first shuttle and weave a pick.
By always placing the most recent shuttle closest to me, I am automatically causing the two weft colours to interlock at the selvedge. Of course, this interlocking of weft colours at the selvedge also depends on which shuttle was thrown first and from which direction. If you find that your weft yarns are not locking together, you can also try starting your weft yarns from the other side.
#2 Beat to square
Weaving log cabin is the same as weaving plain weave. The goal is a 50/50 balanced weave. As you weave your first few blocks, stop and check to make sure you’re getting the same number of picks per inch as ends per inch.
You can weave and beat each pick, aiming for spaces that look like squares in-between the warp and weft threads. You can also look at the overall appearance of each log cabin unit — those should look like squares too.
And finally, if you loosen the tension on your web just a little bit and then measure your picks per inch and ends per inch, you should also be getting a nice consistent measurement. If you measure under tension on the loom, it might not be as consistent. You can imagine that as you release some tension, the cloth will settle or change a bit, so I would measure when the tension is loosened a bit.
We would love to see how you are doing with weaving log cabin! Post and share your weaving and works in progress on Instagram at #winterfulweavealong.
