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.