weaving plastic yarn

Diane Gilleland gives us a better cardboard loom tutorial than the plastic bag rug tutorial that I originally linked to. Using yarn and a needle, she achieves a very neat final result.

I recommend checking out her tutorial before setting up your cardboard loom (unless you're old hat at cardboard looms...)

Using the plastic bag yarn I made from last post and cutting silts every 1/2 inch, I strung up my loom like so...

I'm using a strip of cardboard, woven into the warp, as a spacer. So when I cut my finished piece off of the loom the ends will be long enough to tie easily.

Diane used a needle to weave her cloth, but I chose to make a shuttle out of cardboard. This is essentially an oval with grooves cut into the ends to hold plastic yarn.

A shuttle is easier to use if you have a shedding device (see last post for explanation), but a needle is better if you're going in and out of the warp threads by hand.

Here I'm using the cardboard strip as a shedding device, however it'll only work half of the time:

I turn the strip sideways to raise half of the warp threads and then pass my shuttle underneath. For the next row, however, I need to raise the other half of the warp threads and my cardboard strip just can't do it.

I manually wove the other half of the rows, which was frustratingly slow :-(

I attempted making a cross pattern, but the already loose weave of plastic yarn made it unpractical to skip threads. You could still do strips or plaid, however, by changing colors.


Warning: no matter what you do your weave will warp a little. So you know, make your loom bigger than what you want your final project to be. I lost two inches of width from 15" to 13".


Summary: I made two plastic mats on my loom, each measuring 13x15". The entire project took less than 1o plastic bags (the extra is shown on the side), but took forever! And by forever I mean like 3-4 hours per mat. That seems like a lot, but weaving without a real loom is slow work!!