handmade by stefanie

Sometimes, when you plan a project, it goes horribly wrong. For example, I was really excited to weave with some yarn I've been given at the Creativation trade show at the start of this year; my plan was to make a soft and squishy bath mat using some recycled organic cotton yarn as the warp and t-shirt yarn as the weft. However, my plans quickly fell apart when I started warping my loom and discovered that I had completely miscalculated the amount of yardage I would need for this project. I ran out of yarn pretty quickly, and discovered that it was nearly impossible to purchase this yarn online, either from a yarn store OR via someone's destash on Ravelry. It would have been such an awesome project... The problem with running out of yarn mid-warp is that you can't really take it off the loom and re-use it for something else. Once it's on, it's on, because it's such a pain to get off that you're better off just cutting your losses, quite literally. Th...

Not too long ago, I was sent a lovely box of yarns from Antonio and Molly Manzanares of  Shepherd's Lamb , a family-owned and -operated ranch in New Mexico. They raise a flock of Rambouillet and Navajo-Churro sheep to make organic their organic yarns which are processed and spun in the USA, then hand-dyed with low impact or natural dyes on site. I've never worked with Navajo-Churro before, so I gravitated towards these 6 colors and decided to do a gamp-style woven scarf (for any curious non-weavers out there, here is a great definition of a gamp ). The mix of natural/undyed yarns and naturally dyed colors was really fun to work with, and I have enough yarn left over to each one which I can use in future projects. Now that i know how each color interacts with one another, that will make choosing colors a lot easier ( click here to see what colors of Navajo-Churro yarn they currently have available ). I'm guessing that many of my readers have not worked wi...

At the start of 2017, I purchased a rigid heddle loom, determined to learn how to weave. Like any craft, the basics are fairly easy, but there is always much to learn and improve no matter your skill level, especially if you want to move beyond the basics. After a year of mostly-consistent weaving, I would label myself as a novice at best, and as I started looking at all of my weaving projects from 2017, I realized that each one taught me something valuable that I can take into Year Two of weaving. I hope other beginning weavers find this helpful, too - maybe it can shorten the learning curve for you just a bit! Project #2: Destash Scarf I may have gone overboard with planning this project to make up for not planning the other one - I very painstakingly went through my bits and bobs of leftover worsted weight yarn to select the perfect gradients of blue and green with some black and grey for good measure. Unfortunately, I didn't take fiber content into consideration when pla...

This scarf has been off the loom for quite some time, but I procrastinated the finishing touches (weaving in the ends, tying off the fringe, and blocking). I used the leftover yarn from a few of my previous weaving projects (one of which is also still in the finishing pile, oops!) to create another fun multicolored scarf. The warp is a gray commercially spun merino yarn, and the weft is mostly handspun, with a little commercially-spun yarn mixed in here and there. I'm not sure if I will keep this one or not; yellow really isn't my color, but I do like how it turned out! I also warped for another project over the weekend while my parents were visiting. My dad has been thinking about taking up weaving when he retires, so I thought I would show him the process, step-by-step! This is my first attempt at a handwoven cotton towel of some sort, and I think I probably should have gone down a heddle size (oops!) - it seems like a towel should be a bit more tightly wo...

I finished my third woven project! Carl at Bijou Basin Ranch asked me to weave a sample to be displayed in their booth at the Intermountain Weaving Conference in July, and I couldn't resist the change to try weaving with this luxurious yarn! Since I'm still a total novice, we agreed upon a very simple scarf using two skeins of Lhasa Wilderness in one of my favorite new colorways, Joseph. I'm still really nervous to have my weaving work on display for Real Weavers to look at (gulp!), but at least I won't be there to hear them remark on my still-figuring-it-out selvedges. This is what I tell myself, anyway! I loved weaving with this yarn - it's a yak/bamboo blend that is a bit slippery, so it did take some getting used to. In my sample, you can totally see where I started to get the hang of it: Thankfully, my finished scarf looks a lot better than the above swatch. If you want to try weaving this scarf project, I've shared my calcs and supply ...