Card Weaving

I’m going to start this by saying it is entirely Jaspenelle’s fault. For Peter’s 28th birthday, Jaspenelle gave him a tablet weaving setup – and he got interested in the craft. Then I got interested, because at this point Peter was a cute guy that I liked and tablet weaving actually seemed pretty awesome. I talked him into making me my own loom. A little over two years later, and I still thread up and work on a card weaving / tablet weaving project every now and again. It’s not an everyday thing, because, frankly, threading it up can be a real pain because the cats want to be so darn helpful. Once it’s threaded up, though, it’s a great project for knitting night or entertaining myself on the bus.

My brother-in-law gave us a set of beautiful hand-made wooden cards to use. Peter has threaded up a project, and while they are a little more sticky to use, they’ll be great for re-creation items where we are going for “more authenticity”. Usually, we use a basic playing card that’s sliced to square and punched with four holes. I have yet to figure out a way to make them in bulk and get the edges smooth. Luckily, most of the time, we don’t have to re-make the cards very often. About once every three or four projects.

The basic idea of card weaving is that you can control each individual thread in a weaving pattern in eight different ways – four threads, each that can be turned forward or back. This means you can make lots and lots of awesome patterns, some of which vary front-to back, others that are the same. Either way, the straps are very thick, strong, and flexible. Is anyone interested in a tutorial?

In either case, here’s a few of the projects both Peter and I have done.

As usual, plenty more photos on the Flickr set.