Weave your way to create unique home accessories

As with macramé, weaving is a skill that’s being hauled out of the 1970s and back into your home. And, also like macramé, it’s a pleasing way of adding homespun cosiness to your space. The techniques are as simple as they were back then, although the colour palette and styling may have shifted. The materials are easy to come by, too. You will need a loom though – follow the instructions below to make your own, or try eBay and Amazon for beginners’ lap looms.

To make this wall hanging, you will need:

A simple lap loom
Various shades and thicknesses of wool
Doweling
String
Scissors
Wool shuttle or embroidery needle

1 Using the string, tie a knot around the top of the loom. Making sure it’s tight, start to warp up your loom. To do this you will need to feed the string up and down, looping around the notches on either end of the loom. Make sure your tension is tight as this will be the base of your weave.

2 To create tassels for your weave, cut your wool to a length of roughly 20cm. You will need to cut quite a few of these. Taking 3–6 strands of wool (depending on the thickness of your wool), lay the strands over the top of two warp threads. Twist the threads under the warp and pull down. Carry along the length of the loom.

3 To start weaving, take the wool and wrap around the weaving shuttle or an embroidery needle. To weave, take the wool up and over alternative warp threads all the way across the width of the frame. Do the same for the next row, but weave the opposite way – taking the wool under the warp threads it went over in the previous row.

4 To create knotted tassels, follow step two again but, before you thread the wool under the warp, knot all the pieces of wool together.

5 Carry on weaving using different thicknesses of wool to create texture. 6 Once you are happy with your weave it’s time to take it off the loom. To do this, cut the top warp threads but leave the bottom warp threads (under the tassels) as they are. This will just lift off the loom. Tie the top warp threads, and then tie around a piece of doweling all ready to hang. Don’t forget to tie a piece of string so you can hang your weave up on the wall.

Turn to page 110 of November's The Simple Things for another weaving make.

Project by Lucy Davidson. Lucy Davidson runs regular weaving workshops around southern England. Check her blog peasandneedles.co.uk for details and more woven inspiration.