#Best yarn for afgan loom how to#

Suzie Liles in her Sweet Honey in a Waffle Blanket used 8/2 cotton, as did Kathleen Farling in her Baby Blanket in M's and O's from Handwoven May/June 2010 although Kathleen used a heavier crochet cotton for weft. A very small percentage are woven in acrylics, and the particular acrylics used aren’t available any longer, though I’m sure similar yarns are available now. A few baby-blanket projects are woven in 10/2 cotton, a few in 5/2 cotton, and several in Lily’s Sugar ’n Cream. 8/2 cotton tends to have a matte finish after repeated washings, however, and may end up looking more like a towel than a blanket. The reason for this is certainly washability and absorbency. I looked through all the issues of Handwoven for baby blankets (and for baby wraps), and interestingly enough, most of them are woven in 8/2 cotton. Suzie Liles used 8/2 cotton in her Sweet Honey in a Waffle Baby Blanket from Handwoven May/June 2012.

Most of the time, though, you would like the blanket to be used, in which case it needs to be able to endure repeated washings (and by machine, not by hand). You might be weaving one to give to a mother for a brand new baby and want it to be more beautiful than functional. It seems everyone has an opinion and they're all different-some use weaving cottons while others swear by acrylics and I've even seen some woven from bamboo! I just want something soft and easy to wash-what do you recommend for baby blankets?Ī baby blanket can have different purposes. As of writing this, I have about 4 more squares to weave, and I plan to savor each and every one.I'm planning a baby blanket and am trying to figure out what type of yarn to use. While this is longer than it typically takes me with other yarns, I find I enjoy the slightly slower pace and handling this wonderful, soft yarn now that the weaving process is so much less stressful. While I will not say that weaving with a fluffy yarn is as easy as using a more traditional yarn, I’d say it now takes me about 20 minutes to weave a square. I just needed to accept that mistakes would probably happen despite my best efforts. While the fluff makes weaving difficult, it also hides floats extraordinarily well. Pulling the weft through with the dental floss.įinally, I realized that while long weft floats were not advisable, having a skip here or there wouldn’t make or break the project so long as it wasn’t on an end. The weft yarn slid through easily with not a skip or float in sight. I tied my velvet weft as tight as I could to the dental floss and then used the overhang on the opposite side to pull the weft through and repeated the process with the last pick. Then I finished weaving with the velvet yarn until I got to the first pick of dental floss. I used the floss to weave what would normally be the last two picks, making sure to leave overhang on either side. I threaded the needle with enough dental floss to weave 2 picks with a bit of extra. I wove my first 2 picks as normal with the velvet yarn. I raided my bathroom and then got to weaving. I’d remembered seeing in a Facebook group about how a weaver used dental floss to guide her weft yarn when weaving got tight. Second, I needed to solve the problem of the last 2 rows being too tight to weave accurately, even with my increased manhandling. For my second square, I used my weaving needle to push the middle layer aside so I could actually see the bottom layer ends that my weaving needle needed to go under. While the velvet yarn looks thick, the core is very fine, making it easy to shove yarn not being actively woven out of the way to increase visibility. Instead of despairing and giving up or choosing a new, less cuddly yarn, I thought about what I went through and how I could improve the process.įirst, I realized that with my first square, I was too gentle, treating the yarn as if it were as dense as it looked. The last two rows were so tight that it was a struggle to get through, and I had floats galore when I was done. I had to keep pulling the needle out and starting rows over again. I think it took at least 45 minutes to weave my first square because I just could not see where my needle was going. This fluff makes my velvet yarn perfect for a soft stuffed animal and terrible for visibility of the bottom two layers wound onto the loom.

What exactly is it about this yarn that makes it so difficult on the loom? Well, this particular yarn has a fine core and a fur-like fluff that radiates out of it.

#Best yarn for afgan loom how to#

Through trial and error-and plenty of practice-I’ve figured out how to effectively weave fluffy yarns on my pin loom. The yarn is wonderfully soft (and washable!), but it’s a bit of a bear to weave with-at first. The project is based on one in the upcoming Little Looms Holiday 2021 issue, and the yarn required for the project is an extra-fluffy velvet yarn. Recently, I began weaving squares on my pin loom to make a soft toy for a friend’s imminent baby.