Christmas Fiber Swap

My wife and I belong to the Tall Pines Spinners and Weavers guild in Spring, Texas. For the past two years we have done a double fiber swap for Christmas. The format for this year was that everyone brought in a fiber of some sort to the September meeting. These were swapped in a blind random draw so that we each walked out with a bag of fiber from an unknown member. Only the one member who organized this knew who's fiber was who's.


Between September and October, each of us had to dye their swapped fiber in some way we thought was interesting. Then at the October meeting, the dyed fibers were blind swapped again so that we each had fiber from at an unknown member, dyed by a second unknown member. We had to take that fiber and make something from it that we could give back to the original owner as a Christmas gift at our December meeting / Party. Its a challenge to be given a yarn of random type, color and thickness and try to come up with something as a gift for an unknown recipient.


My fiber this year was a ball of 100 yds of red and 100 yds of blue single ply generic wool. The fiber had been tie-dyed so there was some variation in the color at random intervals. Since I am not skilled with pointy sticks (knitting) or hooked sticks (crochet) I usually weave. Last year I made a woven tote bag. This year I decided to make a rug

The 200 yards of wool were certainly not enough for any reasonable sized rug so I raided the stash and found a white and a charcoal grey wool that were nearly the same weight as the the dyed fiber. I had a rigid heddle loom already warped up with some light wool, and with only one month of spare time work until the party, I took the lazy man's way out and used that. Now all I needed was a design. As usual, I let the rug make up the design as I wove it. My usual motif is Navajo so that is not as hard as it sounds. Everything is symmetrical in width and length so if you fill in one quarter, you know what the other three quarters should look like.

Also as usual, I just barely finished on time. It came off the loom at 8 this evening and the party starts at 10 tomorrow morning. I am reasonably pleased with the result even though the last 4" of the rug got away from me when some of the warp stretched out and the tension went bad. With a little ironing and a little blocking, it doesn't look too bad. The picture to the left shows me at the loom and the finished product is shown below. I hope that the anonymous member I made it for likes the work.








I'll post my return gift after the party so you can see what became of my fiber.