Creative Friday: A Stick Weaving Tutorial

Welcome to Creative Friday!
When I was little, about seven or eight years old, my mom bought me a plastic weaving kit. It consisted of a few straight pieces of plastic about the same length as these wooden dowels with small openings on the ends. Long lengths of wool were attached through the openings on the ends of the plastic sticks. Do you remember these? I used to weave myself and my dolls scarves and little carpets and after all these years, I can still remember how much I loved this process of weaving. I don’t know what happened to my little weaving set, perhaps I must ask my mom if it is somewhere in her garage, it’s possible:) Yesterday, I thought it would really be fun if I made my own set using wood. I bought a few dowels and my wonderful man helped me to cut and drill the dowels last night.

We have been having tremendous fun today weaving this rainbow scarf. It really is a wonderful project that anyone can do, even Kye who is 5, sat down and loved wrapping the wool around each individual stick. I am going to cut another six pieces and make a table runner, should be fun.

This is how we made our weaving sticks:

I used a 10mm dowel that I bought from the hardware shop.
We cut the dowel into six pieces, each measuring seven inches long.
Sand off the rough edges.
Sand the one end to make a slight curve.
Drill a hole about half an inch up from the base of each dowel, drill straight through each dowel.

Weaving:
I used chunky, natural wool and threaded it through the holes in each dowel, I doubled the wool and it is about 1 metre long, hanging double. This is what your weaving will go around as you move it down the dowel sticks.
Tie your first colour of chunky wool to one of the side dowels and hold all of them together. This can be a little tricky as nothing is holding them firmly yet, but as you weave they become sturdy.

Once the weaving is about half way up the dowels, you can just gently move it down one dowel at a time. Hold your work and gently pull up each dowel, make sure you leave some weaving on the sticks, don’t move everything down because this will make the sticks loose.

When you want to add a new colour, tie it on at the back of the work and cut the old colour, leave long pieces so they can be sewn in and continue weaving.

Once you are finished weaving, tie the colour to the work and tie the white wool together, through the end of the colourful weaving, leaving tassels, so that it does not unravel.

Happy weaving!

Pin It