Waste From Weaving

As anyone who knows me or has read this blog will know, I hate waste.  There is always something you can do with leftover pieces of whatever project you are working on.  Food scraps go to animals or compost.

But the short bits called thrums that are left on your loom when you have finished weaving and cut your project out, what can be done with them?

They're not short enough for me to be comfortable with just discarding, even into the compost bin.  But they're not really long enough to do much with.  I had been keeping them in a bag and using the odd strand as a marker in my knitting or to tie up the tomatoes but the volume was distracting and I needed to find a better use for them.

I was reading one of the books I got with my loom.  It had a section on the thrums in it where they recommended re carding and re spinning your thrums.  What a wonderful idea!

It's not exactly easy to pull apart the ply and card these threads.  It is a very long and slow process and one best suited to several days with nothing better to do. The resulting thread is uneven but very pretty. Hopefully it will make for a lovely rustic project at some stage.

I did kind of like the way the carded thrums looked on the combs though (this process did not work in the drum carder by any stretch of the imagination).  So I decided to try out how it would come out felted. Previously I had tried just laying down some loose thrum threads on some carded wool for felting.+

Both of these have become cat beds, just as pieces of felted wool. While they reduce the amount of time my cat spends dominating whatever project I'm working on, he still needs to sit or sleep on every woollen thing we have.

A New Project

I was working in a pretty toxic environment.  I would go to bed thinking about work, very angry about it and be unable to sleep.  Then I would wake up very early in the morning, still angrily thinking about work and unable to go back to sleep. When I woke up in this state at about 5am one Sunday morning, I found myself offended that it was invading my weekend and I was allowing it to happen. So I started casting about for other problems to solve, things I could think about that weren't work related.

I found myself thinking about the poncho I was making for my sister.  It was part of her lockdown list of requests and one I had tried doing about four different ways already and hating it more each time. It was going to be clunky and I would most likely not have enough of my homespun green wool to finish the project if I continued in any way like I had been doing.

I thought about fleshing it out with other colours or different shades of green, but as I was knitting it at that stage, the different strand thickness would create a host of other issues with it. Then it struck me, why not weave it?

I woke up inspired and went searching through the mega stash for shades of green. I found a bag of some partially pulled apart knitting.

I think I should pause here and explain the mega stash, in case I haven't done so previously.  I am the person other crafty hoarders destash to.  I can and do find a way to use any small odds and ends.  I have made them into stripes in socks, hearts and flowers on jerseys for my granddaughters and the obligatory granny square blankets. There is almost nothing I cannot find a use for and I hate waste.

As a result, any time any of my friends is having a clean out, I am given their cleanings.  A good friend's brother went to a garage sale quite a few years back and couldn't resist the stash he picked up there.  Someone's Grandmother's abandoned stash.  After my friend picked out what she wanted, I was given about four or five banana boxes worth.  Some were half finished projects, complete with needles, but never with the pattern.  Some almost completed projects that didn't take much know-how to finish.  A few that someone was in the process of unravelling.  You can tell by the crimp in the balled yarn.

As the only yarn crafter in the family, I got my Grandma's stash.  When my friend's mother passed away, I got what she didn't want out of that stash.  Needless to say, I haven't bought any yarn in years and have promised myself that I won't until I have made an impressive dent in all of this.

As a result, I have a room that is almost entirely dedicated to what I lovingly call my mega stash.  This also includes my own wool.  I have sacks of wool that I have washed but not yet spun and boxes of balls that have been spun but not yet used or set aside for a particular project.  At the moment, in the height of my "frantically washing the last shearing's fleeces season", you can barely fit in the door.

So I found this pillowcase (yes I got it that way) filled with a partially unravelled project in a dark bottle green that I thought would go beautifully with the emerald green of my homespun. I found a few other random balls of other shades of green that I thought would go nicely as a contrast.

I set up my loom and began weaving in a pattern.

There is a point in every project where I doubt everything about it.  These colours or pattern are terrible, what was I thinking? I haven't done this wide or long enough.  I've overcommitted and I'm going to run out and it will be an obvious flaw.

All of this went through my head, although the main one was "Omg, this looks like that upholstery on dining room chairs that was fashionable in the 80s". But the sister I was making it for loved it, so I persevered.

It wasn't wide enough, so I did two side panels to be added on afterwards.

I left a slot for a neck hole that I crochetted a collar onto.

When it was all finished, I threw it into the washing machine for a hot wash, to shrink and felt it somewhat. We all thought the finished project was stunning.

My other sister came for a visit before I'd been able to present the finished project and she loved it.  She also fell in love with some wool I was dyeing for another project.  I promised to make her a poncho too, but didn't think I'd have enough of the blue she loved for her poncho and we discussed a few other colours that I did have plenty of.  We were potentially looking at a red and white striped poncho.

It turned out that I did have a fair bit of the blue left over. Not quite enough for a poncho for her, but it could work with all the other little bits of blue in the mega stash. I ran low on blues so some pale violet and pinks popped up here and there.  And as an experiment, I used some of those fancy "feathers" yarns and loopy yarns that seem to be fairly popular but are hideous to knit or crochet with.

I kept everything about this project secret because I wanted to surprise her with her 'not red and white like she was expecting' poncho.  She didn't want a collar, so I cut and blanket stitched a neckhole.  I think that makes it a far more flexible poncho.  It can be worn as horizontal, vertical or diagonal stripes.  It is completely reversible.

I will be offering more for sale as part of another new project that these ponchos have inspired.