Friday, September 29, 2023

Weaving with Fibres

 Hello


Welcome to my little crafting place! 
 
I thought I'd share a few photos and info on how I made the woven section of this card, plus some thoughts on what I'd if I did something similar again, as this was very much a trial and error king of thing,  even though I made it into a card!


 
I have a large collection of tiny spools of fibresthat I've collected over the years - I use them mainly for decorating the spines of books I make - though to be fair its a long time since I actually finished one of those!
The weaving turned out colourful and very textural so I didnt think it needed much else to work ok.  So I went throungh a bag of pearly and glittery card scraps and die cut some stars in different shapes and sizes, and a few little hearts for good measure.
 
I started by making a frame using pairs of card strips.
If I do this again I will use dies to cut square frames - it would be simpler in the end.
I would also make the squares quite a bit bigger than I needed the weaving to be, so it would be easier to cut the finished piece out of the frame

Next I fixed the vertical fibres to the top and bottom of the frame - I used glue for this.  They need to be well stuck before adding the horizontal fibres.  I always have a pot of 'bulldog' clips at hand as they are so useful in many ways
I started weaving the horizontal fibres in the middle because I planned to keep gaps between the rows and starting in the middle helped me keep the rows even
I'm not a great fan of threading needles and as I was using lots of different kinds iof fibres with different thicknesses and 'fluffiness' it would have been a real pain! So I cut a narrow strip of card and punched a small hole in one end.
With this tool I could simply pull whatever type of fibre through the hole with tweezers then weave easily over and under the vertical fibres with the card strip.
Asain I used glue and a clip to secore each end
I just continued until the whole frame was filled.
Next I spread PVA glue overthe centre of a piece of card the same size as my card blank and pressed it down on the wrong side of the weaving.  I put a paperweight over it and left it to dry
Once dried I cut away the pieces of card that made the frame
 this is where I learned that I should have made the weaving fram bigger and stopped weaving to leave a good 2-3cms margin around  the interwoven part - that way I could have used a smaller square of card for the backing, and it would have been much easaier to cut away from the frame too.

That's it, I hope you'll let me know if you have a go!

Thank you so much for coming by

 Happy Crafting, Take care of yourself,
 
Kathy xx

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