Barbara and I were chatting about band weaving and she mentioned that she wanted to weave her own labels using the instructions from Weave-Away’s post. Armed with that information and a copy of Linda Hendrickson’s tutorial, I pulled out my Palmer Tablet Loom, tablets, and some spools of polyester interlock thread.
What you see above is the result of about 6 hours of weaving with 24 cards. What you don’t see are the warm ups (aka false starts) that I cut out. I had modified the alphabet Linda provided in her tutorial a bit to better match the font in my blog masthead. Letters are a little lighter weight and the “g” is a bit more stylized. The graph was still not perfect but it was enough to test it out and see how it will work.
Anyway, it’s an interesting idea, but I can think of much better ways of spending my time. I can weave a towel in under 2 hours, probably closer to 4 towels in 6 hours. Even if I get faster with more experience on the tablets, it’s just not the best use of my time. I can’t imagine weaving these labels for all of my projects.
My current method works okay — just okay, but it works well for towels. I don’t like labels on scarves (they always show no matter how artfully you arrange it) nor clothes (they always itch and scratch in the most uncomfortable places). If I were to ever sell my handwoven goods, I will order some woven labels. Until then, I will continue to use my little iron-ons on twill tape. If I have something really special that I want to label, I might, just might, pull out the tablets again and weave my own labels. Before I do that though, I will need to tweak the letter templates a bit more to better match my masthead font.
In any case, I am ready for my tablet weaving class with John Mullarkey at CNCH next month!
