#admittedly i am biased by sharing my house with three cats

[trashpandacraft]

I found fibrecraft tumblr after searching drop spindles because my dad *didn’t even know what that was.* And despite having been firmly of the opinion that I didn’t intend to learn it, y’all have me getting ever closer to giving in. However, I’m also growing ever more enamored with the idea of weaving - and despite recently deciding to give knitting and crochet another go - I think it looks the most fun of the fiber crafts. My issue is that I have absolutely no space.

But I’m beginning to realize there’s a lot of different looms and types of weaving. So I was wondering if you have any resources or tips for small space methods and storage?

welcome to fibrecraft tumblr! it's fun here, we have enablers.

i will admit that while i love knitting, weaving is amazing, and is much better with regards to instant gratification—weaving for an hour gets you a lot more fabric than knitting for an hour.

so let's talk about weaving, because i have great news for you: you can 100% totally weave in a small space if you want to, and you even have options for how you do it. i'm going to go through basically all the small space weaving options that i'm aware of in roughly size order, and if you make it to the bottom of this you'll have a pretty good overview of space-saving weaving methods.

the first question to ask yourself is what you want to weave. maybe you're not sure yet, which is totally fine. if you don't immediately have strong feelings about it, though, maybe consider if band weaving strikes your fancy. this is pretty limited in size, but lets you weave belts, straps (like camera or bag straps), lanyards, etc.

if you think that sounds neat, it's worth looking into tablet weaving, an inkle loom, or a band/tape loom. tablet weaving takes up no space at all—if you can fit a stack of index cards into your life, you can fit tablet weaving. the tablets are small square cards, often made out of heavy cardstock, and even with a project on them, you can probably fit them into an index card holder.

inkle looms are larger, and to be honest i've never used one and don't know a ton about them, but they're also used for making woven bands. the looms can also be very aesthetically pleasing, if that's something you're into. they can be very big, but the ashford inklette, for example, is only 36 cm long and maybe 12 cm wide.

tape looms are—in my experience, anyhow—larger than tablet weaving but smaller than inkle looms, and even the larger ones are only about shoebox size. they vary widely, from gorgeous, complicated little looms to a handheld paddle that you use to create a shed, which is what you put your yarn through when you're weaving.

if that doesn't sound like good times, consider a frame loom. these are pretty simple—if you ever wove potholders out of stretchy cloth strips as a kid, you probably used a frame loom to do it on. frame looms are generally inexpensive and readily available, and can be used for small woven objects like potholders, coasters, placemats, etc. they can also be used to make some truly stunning tapestries. while you can buy a huge frame loom, you're still only talking about huge in two directions—it might be as wide as your armspan, but it's still only a couple inches thick.

another option is a pin loom. these don't get mentioned a lot, and i'm not totally sure why. pin looms are shapes with a bunch of pins (metal points, usually) coming out of them. on one hand, you're limited to making things that are the shape of the loom, but on the other hand, if you've been hanging around fibrecraft tumblr, you've seen all the things crocheters get up to with granny squares, right? there's no reason in the world that you can't do all those things with the squares made on a pin loom. or the hexagons! or the triangles! i've been kinda thinking about getting a little hexagon or triangle pin loom and using it to sample my handspun, then turning the shapes into a blanket.

if you hate all of that, that's ok! we have more options.

you could consider a backstrap loom, which is an ancient way of weaving that's still practiced today in many places. backstrap looms are cool because you can weave probably 24 inches wide on them, but even with a project on it, they take almost no room at all. backstrap looms are fairly easy to diy, because they're basically a bunch of dowels, so they can be a good low-cost way to try out weaving. backstrap looms will let you make longer, wider fabric than anything else we've mentioned so far!

another option—stay with me—is a toy loom. there are a number of cheap looms for sale on amazon/ali express/some local places that are actually fully functional looms. recently i've seen a number of people (like sally pointer, though i'm sure i've seen someone using one of the brightly coloured harness looms, as well) who've used them and report that they're functional, if basic, looms. you're fairly constrained in terms of project size, since there's not a lot of space for the finished fabric to wind on, and there's a very limited width, but the looms are quite small and tuck away easily.

ok, but so what if you hate all of those options? don't worry—there are more options! this is the part where things get expensive, though.

as looms go, rigid heddle looms are actually quite reasonably sized. i think the smallest one i've seen is a 40cm (~16") weaving width, which is about 50x60 (20x24") in length/width, and 13cm (5") high. so that's more space than anything else we've talked about, but it's still not a ton of space, you know? a 40cm rigid heddle will let you weave lovely scarves and things of that nature—table runners, placemats, strips of woven fabric to whipstitch together into a blanket, etc.

but maybe that's enough. so let's talk about table looms. some of them are quite large—mine, for example, is about a metre square and sits on a frame that it came with. it is not what you would call space efficient. but many of them, especially modern ones, are very compact, and can even be folded up into something more or less briefcase sized. (weird way to consider it, since the last time i saw a briefcase was probably the 80s, but you know what i mean, i bet.) the cool part here is that you can weave damn near anything you want on a table loom. the less cool part is that for the compact ones that fold up, you're looking at hundreds if not thousands of dollars. the smallest one i'm aware of is the louët erica, which folds down to 42x62x42cm (16.5x24.5x16.5") and gives you 40cm (16") of weaving width. i feel like that's impressively small. you'd have to decide for yourself if that's enough to justify the $500 usd/$800 aud price tag, though.

finally, we've come to folding floor looms. i don't think someone who's never woven before should run out and buy one of these unless money is just literally not at all a concern for you, but they are basically the dream for those of us trapped in crappy rentals, and it seemed weird to leave them out when i'd come this far.

some floor looms are various levels of collapsible. to be clear, this does you absolutely no good at all when you're actively weaving, because you have to unfold them to weave, but it does you a lot of good if you'd like to have a floor loom and still have the ability to, say, walk through the living room when you're not actively using the loom.

most relevant to our discussion about small weaving footprints, some looms fold up entirely. they are incredibly fucking expensive and incredibly fucking cool. the two that i'm most aware of are the leclerc compact and the schacht wolf line, both of which fold up to about half of their unfolded depth. they're still not small—i think that they're both the better part of 75cm (30") wide and tall, so even if they fold down to 40cm (16") deep, they're still 75cm wide and tall. which is Fairly Large, though much better than having something 80cm deep sitting in the middle of the floor.

this was a very, very long post, but hopefully makes it clear that there's a surprisingly wide range of options, and they all have advantages and trade offs. if you're asking my opinion, my suggestion would be to try something—anything—with a backstrap setup and see how you feel about it. maybe you love it and keep at it forever, in which case you're in good company: there are entire cultures that weave exclusively on backstrap looms.

if you like producing cloth but don't love the backstrap setup, or don't like using your body to tension the warp, you have a lot of other options, and you're out maybe ten dollars of dowels.

personally, my next loom is probably going to be a pin loom. unless i win lotto, in which case it's going to be a house that has a weaving studio and like four floor looms in it. but probably a pin loom.

#weaving #i really hope that this was helpful #i get so excited about solving problems that i sometimes go way too hard #but i love thinking about this kind of thing #sorry for infodumping #also weaveblr i didn't forget about warp weighted looms i just don't think that they're super practical #admittedly i am biased by sharing my house with three cats #but also all the learning to weave content is...not on those #if it weren't for the cats my next loom would be warp weighted tho #fibercrafts #fiber art #textiles #smartest raccoon i know #(it's an ironic tag)

[hauntedbunkbeds]

Day 1: Thin Walls

Writing Prompt: Day 1, Surreal and Mundane: In today’s work, take something mundane and make it surreal, just like it says on the box. Play around with something normal until you make it strange!

Thin Walls

The floor of my first apartment was covered in a dense, beige carpet that I wanted to hate, but I couldn’t. I loved the way I could slip silently from my room to the tiny hallway bathroom like a cat. I loved lowering my feet to the floor in the morning and scrunching up my toes in the shag. I had always dreaded getting out of bed in my dorm room, where the floors were an ancient grey tile that made me feel like I lived in a janitor’s closet. The tile was always frigidly cold in the winter, and weirdly moist in the summer months, a result of an overworked A/C window unit. I had come to college in the city expecting a more idyllic experience, surrounded by hardwood floors and tattered paperbacks, the sound of coffee brewing while I would sit writing, blowing cigarette smoke out the window of our eighth-floor dorm room. I don’t even smoke. I don’t know what I was thinking. The dorms were shit, of course. My roommate was a business major with a Disney obsession that bordered on fetish territory. Instead of the vintage maps and photos I would have gathered from thrift shops on lazy Saturdays, our room was covered in Moana and Finding Nemo posters. On the deadline to renew our space in the dorm, neither of us asked the other if were going to continue living together. I felt somewhat panicked about the prospect of finding an apartment in the city, but I knew the alternative was hating my life. I’m a nester, and I was trapped in a cage with nothing but torn up newspaper for bedding.  

My first night in my new apartment was exhilarating. The blank walls, the vast expanse of beige carpet--it felt like a newly-stretched canvas begging for a Pollock-esque attack of color. I had spent my freshman year living like a monk, saving every penny from my job stacking books at the school library. Even still, the only apartment I found in my price range was, by any first-world definition, a complete dump. The carpet was, admittedly, hideous and filthy. The oven face was half-consumed with rust, the fridge howled like it was in its death throes, usually in the middle of the night, and as I set my last box of things down in the middle of the living room floor, I heard two voices through the thin walls. They were fighting.

 Hey, I thought, That’s the city! This will be character building.

I don’t mention this as an excuse, but I am from a small town a couple hours out from the college I enrolled in. My father was a farmer, my mother sold MAC cosmetics, her eye on a pink Cadillac that would never materialize. I don’t feel like a country bumpkin, as a coworker would meanly (he thought endearingly) sometimes address me. But in retrospect, maybe in some aspects I was overly naive. I suppose the reason I’m writing all this is so you can be the judge. Are my experiences tainted by my inexperience? Or are they, as I suspect, a little...off?

I ask because I am biased, mostly due to the fact that I am terrified.

Too exhausted to put together the cheap IKEA bed frame I bought the weekend before, I slept on a mattress in the middle of my bedroom floor. “Middle” is literal but not what you think. On three sides of my mattress there was less than a foot of carpet before you reached the wall. At the foot of the bed, there was a generous yard of space before you reached the door. I could literally jump off the bed and into the bathroom across the small hallway, if I wanted to, which I did, but I was scared of scaring the people who lived below me. I was on the fourth floor of a building that reminded me of the Happiness Hotel from The Muppets Take Manhattan (if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s not what you think, i.e. “happy”). I saw a couple other students there, but none that would make eye contact with me, or return my polite, tight-lipped nods in the long cement hallway that led to the underground laundry room I was secretly terrified to use. Mostly, the building housed adults in their late twenties to early thirties who looked so beaten down by life it made you wonder if they were ever innocent, or if something happened when they were born that stole that from them. There were not many older residents, as the building had no elevator, but the people who lived there were ancient enough in their stone-faced weariness to feel as alien to me as an octogenarian. It does not help that I am also painfully shy.    

As I fell asleep that first night, the voices on the other side of the wall were no longer fighting. They seeped through the plaster as a warm, muffled hum. I couldn’t make out the words, just the cadence of two voices in a rhythmic back-and-forth, speckled with occasional laughter. I enjoyed the seeming ease of their conversation, something I rarely enjoyed in my own social life. I just wasn’t good at talking to people. I got lost in my own head, and none of what I found in there felt good enough to say out loud. There were always awkward silences, and I felt boring.

That first night in the apartment, I was exhausted and happy, and drifting off to the sound of their muffled conversation was oddly comforting to me. I dreamt about throwing my first party. I would introduce everyone by their first and last names, everyone would dress up without being told to, and we would debate philosophy and drink martinis. Note to self: Take a philosophy class, figure out what a martini is.

The next morning, I made an entire pot of coffee. Not because I would drink an entire pot of coffee, but because I loved the sound of it hissing and bubbling, and I wanted it to go on for as long as possible. I had spent almost every penny in my bank account on the move from the dorm, and cheap thrills were all I had. When it was done, I poured myself a cup in a mug I had found at Goodwill (“#1 Grandpa”) and began unboxing what few things I owned. It wasn’t long before I heard the voices again.

The first voice that spoke was a man, the second was a woman. This made sense to me, as it seemed that the apartment building I had settled in acted as some kind of beacon for couples who looked more like cellmates than lovers. The men carried themselves like middle-aged coal miners trapped in the bodies of twenty-something weed dealers. The women squinted like they were trying to harness their telekinetic potential. I later learned that the squint was a warning: Look at my boyfriend and I will spit on you. I learned this the hard way.

I easily assumed the couple with whom I shared both a living room and bedroom wall with was one such couple. I felt an smug superiority to them. I was nineteen: A glowing, vibrating ball of potential. They were....some other age: Two gas station Bic lighters, burning the finger of whoever tried to keep the little flame alight for too long. In retrospect, I was grossly pretentious and judgmental, and while I blamed my shyness for the fact that I didn’t have a lot of friends, I can admit now that it was definitely also my own fault.

As I arranged my books in alphabetical order on the mismatched thrift store bookshelves I had acquired, the voices raised again. This time I could make out words, some phrases.

Your job.

Stupid.

Gone.

(or was it “Done?”)

Fucked.

You do it.

We do it together.

No, your job, you do it!

Fucked forever.

Back and forth, an endless game of tossing blame to each other. My superiority complex tingled as I envisioned the day I lived with my future (hypothetical) boyfriend. We’d be renovating an old Brownstone together, a herculean effort for two graduate students studying English and Egyptology, but we’d cobble together our resources and return the property to her former glory on a shoestring budget. A montage of playful paint fights and blanket forts played in my head as I arranged my books to the sound of my neighbors screaming at each other over something one of them had fucked up at their dead-end job.

Later that afternoon, I went for a walk. Down the street from my building there was a hospital, and I discovered on accident that behind the building there was a small courtyard where patients could smoke, but almost never did. It became my secret garden, this patch of grass with a smattering of benches marked with bronze plaques bearing the names of people who never made it out of the hospital. I would read there, the peaceful silence only broken by occasional wailing, which was something I had grown used to since I moved to the city.

I had been in the apartment for a month when classes started back up. I had settled in, a stack of unwashed dishes and a cleared path from the bedroom to the bathroom cut between mounds of unwashed laundry were the tedious reality of life on my own. The fantasy of living on my own unmasked for its true monotony.

It was nearly Christmas, and the frigid weather outside made my increasingly-sad little apartment feel finally, suddenly, precious to me, as it had been only in my fantasies, and only because winter had metamorphosed the world outside into something so ruthless and unpleasant that even the dingiest of apartments felt like a vacation retreat. When classes let out for Christmas break, I tried not to leave the house unless absolutely necessary. It was then that I heard the familiar sound of my neighbor’s voices through the walls again, yelling at each other as if this argument were the one to end them all (though I knew better than to think that, at this point). I wasn’t sure if the walls had grown thinner, or their voices had just grown louder, but for whatever reason, I could hear them more clearly than ever.

She: Worthless bum!

He: That’s not fair. I’m trying. I’m trying to help us! I want to (unintelligible).

She: You had a job to do and you didn’t do it.

He: I need more time!

She: Time? You’ve had time!

He: (Unintelligible)

She: (Laughing cruelly) You’ve had hundreds of years!

The voices stopped suddenly, as if they had been caught, and my bedroom fell silent. Alone in my bed, I swear to God I could feel them staring at me through the walls. I held my breath, willing them to keep arguing. I didn’t move for what felt like hours, and they remained silent. As I finally fell asleep, the only sound was the ticking of the radiator pipes.

The next day my mom picked me up to drive me home for Christmas break. I gave her a tour of my apartment, to which she responded with an enthusiasm that felt very sad and forced. I almost didn’t show her the bedroom, but she pushed the door open ahead of me and stepped inside. I had cleaned up in anticipation of her arrival, but the room still looked very sad. I was seeing it through the eyes of an outsider for the first time, and I felt embarrassed.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “What happened here? This doesn’t look good.”

She gestured towards the wall, in the direction of where the voices had come from last night. A dark, amorphous stain had formed on the wall around eye level. It was a sickly brown, the kind I had seen before, when I pipe burst in our bathroom at home and on our dining room ceiling the ring of water damage bloomed until my dad finally had to cut out a huge section of the plaster.

“Oh geeze,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”

She touched it.

“This is moist,” she said. “You better call the super ASAP or whatever burst could ruin this whole wall.”

I reached out toward the stain, but couldn’t bring myself to touch it.

“This is a shared wall,” I said. “I can hear my neighbors on the other side.”

“Well,” my mom said, turning to return to the living room. “You should tell them, too.”

Christmas break was perfect. I hadn’t realized what a relief it would be to fall asleep in my childhood bedroom again. The nights were so quiet it almost freaked me out. I joked with my dad that I needed an ambient sound machine that just playing ambulance sirens now. I helped him out with farm work (even the cold felt less oppressive out here, in the open air) and my mom and I got our nails done at the salon inside Wal-Mart. They let me drink wine with them at dinner. Mom bought me a trunk-full of groceries. She ordered Chinese food on New Years Eve. The smallest things felt so opulent to me. I hadn’t realized how completely broke I was, how adding cream to coffee had become a budgetary extravagance.

Returning to the city was like being sentenced to another year of hard labor. My mom helped me carry the groceries up to my apartment and tearfully hugged me goodbye. It was dark when I finally opened my bedroom door and saw it.

The water stain on my bedroom wall had grown to nearly triple its size. Now, it reached from eye-level to knee-level, its brown rings of soggy blotches drooping towards the floor. But it was not only larger. It had changed. Once just a shade or two darker than the yellowish paint, the spot had taken on the color of whatever it was that had begun seeping through the plaster surface--a dark brown, black in spots. I didn’t have to touch it (I wouldn’t touch it) to know it was wet. Parts had dripped onto the carpet, leaving dark stains on the beige shag.

God, I’m so fucked, I thought, remembering my mother’s warning to tell the building superintendent about the water stain, which I had immediately forgotten as soon as I locked the door behind me. I grabbed my pillows and blankets off the bed, thinking it was probably a good idea to sleep in the living room, and I was about to retreat to the safety of my couch when I heard it.

It was the woman’s voice, but she was alone.

She was alone, and she was laughing.

The next morning I called the superintendent, who took far more convincing than I had expected to agree to come look at the damage. I had imagined him rushing up with an old metal toolbox, sweaty and panicked, furious at me for my negligence of his precious building. Instead, I was met with a series of, Now you’re sure? I almost began to doubt myself, until I opened my bedroom door to peek in, just to remind myself that I wasn’t overreacting. I was almost knocked back by a scent I recognized from working on the farm--wet, decaying earth, alive with rich rot and mold.

The super was up in forty-five minutes, setting the record for slowest climb up four flights of stairs in recorded history. At the risk of becoming a lazy narrator, he was exactly what you might imagine the superintendent of the worst apartment building you’ve ever been in to look like. Instead of a toolbox, he held a bag of sunflower seeds.   

When I opened the door to my bedroom, his face didn’t change, but he said “Mama Jama” and shook his head.

He reached out to touch it and without thinking I cried out, “Don’t touch it!”

“Why not?” he said, looking back at me with a squint that made me think I was going to be spit on soon.

“I don’t know,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

He shook his head and touched the wall. His fingers came away wet and stained with a black mucus-like substance.

“I thought maybe a pipe had burst,” I offered.

“No pipes in this wall,” he said, popping a couple sunflower seeds in his mouth thoughtfully.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, what about the people in the other apartment? Have you heard anything from them?”

“Which apartment?” he said, not looking at me, still eyeing the stain like it was a stand-off.

“The one that shares this wall with me,” I said. “Do you think something this big would affect them too?”

He shrugged.

“It could,” he said. “If there was an apartment on the other side of this wall.”

A wave of goosebumps made me involuntarily shiver.

“This wall,” I said, pointing in the direction of the massive brown mass that took up most of it.

“This wall,” he said, tapping the stain, his fingers making a soft squelching sound. “Why would you think that? The other side of this wall is just insulation, wiring, and brick.”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Anyway I’ll try to have someone out here tomorrow to get this...issue, taken care of,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t sleep in this room.”

“Okay,” I said.

As soon as he left, I packed my backpack and went to the hospital. I sat in the garden and read until my fingers were shaking so violently from the cold that I could no longer turn the pages of my book. In the hospital lobby, there was a vending machine that would spit out paper cups and fill them with hot coffee with that hissing, bubbling sound I had grown to love. I put in three quarters, got my coffee, and took my little paper cup to a chair in the corner. A nurse was typing away at a computer and hadn’t noticed me yet, as far as I could tell. I wondered how long I could feasibly stay there, sitting in that chair, sipping my watery coffee, before someone asked me to leave. Hours? Days? If I could just wait it out until the repairman came, I wouldn’t have to see, or smell, the stain again. Even still, that didn’t solve the larger issue, which I could not name.

I sat there, reading the same sentence of my book over and over again, tearing my now-empty paper cup into smaller and smaller shreds, until exhaustion finally took over.

If I go home, I reasoned, and I’ll be so tired at this point that I’ll fall straight asleep on the couch. I’ll be too tired to worry about whatever the fuck is going on with my neighbors. The super was wrong. He just got the floor plan confused. It’s a big building, and he seemed pretty out of it anyway.

I compiled a convincing list of explanations, convincing enough that I was able to return to my apartment, unlock the door, toss my backpack down, and flop down on the couch without realizing that there had been two voices yelling when I arrived, and that they had suddenly gone quiet. I had fallen asleep so fast I had not noticed when the two voices began whispering again, when they became frantic. In fact, it was not the voices that woke me at all. It was the tapping.

It was still dark when I woke, and I was in such a haze I did not recognize the sound that had done it. It was rhythmic, but not mechanical.

Tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap. Tap tap.

I sat up on my couch, half wondering if the mechanic was already there, if I lost track of time and it was already morning. In my half-dream state, I tried to find the source of the sound. I wish I had not looked towards the wall. I wish I had not noticed the vintage map (that I had so sought after for so long) which hung above my couch, gently quivering. Quivering in time with a tap.

Tap.

Tap tap tap.

Coming from the behind the wall.

I stopped breathing.

And everything was quiet for a moment.

Until the whisper.

“She’s awake.”