I am so glad to see February on the calendar! It means we are that much closer to spring! Yay! Being indoors all the time in winter does have some perks, I got to try out a new hobby. Weaving! And in honor of Valentine’s Day coming up, I made a simple heart weaving wall hanging.

Funny thing is that I have my youngest son to thank for getting me interested in weaving! He tried it in art class and was talking about how much he enjoyed it, on a couple different occasions! Because of that, we decided to get him an inexpensive loom and some supplies for Christmas. Anything on the Christmas list other than video games is a plus in my book! 😉

It took a little researching to figure out what supplies he would need as I had never done it either. While I was researching, my interest was piqued as well. I think I was just as excited for him to get this gift! Ha! After he played around on the loom a bit, I decided to give it a go.

Since this was my first time weaving, I wanted to do something fairly easy. Little did I know that a heart is not the easiest thing to weave! I looked around for some patterns but was coming up empty handed so I had to figure it out as I went along. That made it take a little longer as I had to take out some of the weaving that I did a couple times. Ugh! In the end, it turned out well and I am looking forward to doing another project in the future.

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

For this project you will need:

• Loom kits like this, this or this
• Cotton warp string
• Red and Cream Yarn
• Scissors

This is not going to be a “How to Weave” tutorial. You can find plenty of those online and on YouTube so I am not going to go into that. More so it is a chance to show off my new hobby and to provide a “pattern” for the heart that I made. I say pattern lightly as it is not truly a pattern, only telling you what worked for me. 🙂

I found the loom kit for our son at Hobby Lobby. It is an adjustable loom kit made by Prima Fiber Arts. I could not find it online but you may still be able to find it in the store. I also linked to a couple other options for starter looms in the supplies list above.  This loom allows for projects to be 15 inches wide. Since I wanted to hang this on my mantel, I went for the full size. My original idea was to draw a heart onto the strings and just weave up to that line. While it did not work exactly like that, it did give me some guidelines to follow. I traced a wood heart that I already had around for my template.

It is a little hard to see in the pictures but there are black marks on the warp strings of my heart outline. I started my weaving at the bottom by doing 3 rows of plain weaving.

I wanted some fringe at the bottom so next I added two rows of fringe to make it look a little more full.

Then I continued the plain weave until I got to the marks where my heart would start. So far so good! 😉

I wanted the heart to stand out from the plain weave so I decided to use the Rya loops weaving method for the heart. This method consists more of tying knots than weaving. You use two warp strings to do one loop so it made making the heart a little more challenging, especially on the point and curves.

I started with one loop on the two warp strings for the point and went out to the next warp string on each side in each subsequent row. I quickly started to realize that I was outpacing my heart template so I knew I was going to have to make adjustments eventually. However, I continued this pattern until I was left with two warp strings on each side.

As I went along, I continued with my plain weave on each side as well. As you can see in the picture below, every once in a while, I would weave the cream color all the way across the whole weaving. This helps to secure the Rya loops heart so it doesn’t get to be too loose and wide. The trickiest part of weaving is not weaving too tight or else your sides will start scrunching in. My weaving started to do that at the bottom slightly so I tried to correct it in the higher rows.

At this point, I thought I would start bringing the heart in for the curves, but later found out that would not work. So I ended up having to come back and fill in some of the heart later. 

After 13 rows of the largest area of the heart, I brought it in on each side by one warp string and left the middle strings open. Then after some weaving and taking out rows, I figured out that I needed to repeat that pattern for two rows four times. The top three rows in each curve are single rows taken in two warp strings on each side.

It may not be perfect, but I was happy with how it came out! I hope this was not too hard to understand. Really you can look at the pictures and count the rows pretty easily to figure out what to do. 😉 After you are done weaving, clean up the back by weaving in any loose ends and clip them off.

 

I was fine with the gaps around the heart, I thought they matched the ones in the fringe. I believe there is another technique to avoid this by interlocking the two colors together but I am not that advanced yet. LOL!

Speaking of the fringe, you can cut it off to make it nice and level but I kinda like the wild and unruly look to the fringe so I left it.

I hung it on a dowel and braided 6 strands of yarn to hang the weaving from.

This weaving only used regular acrylic yarn but I am excited to try another weaving with some chunky and different textured yarns. The possibilities are endless!!

I hope you like my weaving. It was fun to make. I should add that it is not a quick hobby as it took me about a week to complete working on it on and off. But that is with having to figure out and redo some things. Just like with anything, I am sure one would get quicker with more practice. 🙂