Cooooool....

The weaving project I've been working on lately is a set of coasters. Or rather, several sets, since they're 4.5" wide and I warped the loom with enough yarn for a long scarf. I wanted to be able to practice keeping my selvedges and beating even, as well as having an opportunity to experiment with the way stripes in the warp and weft interact. Coasters seemed like more fun than a sampler.

To begin with, the loom was warped with alternating stripes of green and purple (Cascade 220, from stash), each stripe 2 ends wide. After I got tired of that, I cut what I'd done off the loom and rethreaded it so that the stripes were just one thread wide. There's a weaving draft (pattern) called log cabin where both the warp and the weft are made up of stripes that are one thread wide. In plain weave, which is what I'm doing, you get a result that looks like the first photo on this page, with alternating blocks of horizontal and vertical stripes. It looks way harder to do than it actually is. Furthermore -- and this is what inspired me to post -- if you turn the fabric over, the directions of the stripes are reversed so that what were vertical stripes on the front are horizontal stripes on the back.

It reminds me of when I learned how to do ribbing when I was just learning to knit. I like being at a stage where everything is new and interesting.