Improvisational Weaving Part 3: Deeper Dive

Loom made from chopsticks, warp and weft made from “plarn” (plastic bags turned to plastic yarn)

For the deeper dive section of the Improvisational Weaving project, I decided that I wanted to continue experimenting with different materials and play with the effects of my weaving. I created a loom by taping six chopsticks together in the shape of a triangular prism. I had a lot of difficulty doing this and it didn’t turn out exactly how I pictured it but multiple factors played into that. For one, one pair of chopsticks was longer than the other two pairs, so the triangles couldn’t have equal angles. I also found it very difficult to tape the chopsticks together and some continued to slide up and down while I was weaving. I knew that I didn’t really have enough of any material in my room to weave with so I decided to use left over plastic bags to make plastic yarn, aka “plarn”. To do this, I cut the bag into strips to get thin rings, then I tied them together to have one very long ball of “plarn”. There were a few challenges I ran into using “plarn” for weaving. First, because the plastic is such a thin material, I found that the more I pulled it to increase the tension, the more it stretched and the thinner it became. This made the warp very loose and hard to keep in place. Second, I tried to warp in each plane separately and then move to the next plane, but towards the end, it was difficult to warp the material around the other sections. This made the warp very inconsistent in number of rows and distance between other rows. Finally, since the “plarn” is made from loops, it got a bit confusing trying to figure out which strands of warp to weave the weft through. I decided that I would experiment with this and did some areas where I went between the entire loop and some between the individual strands of the loop. Overall, I experimented most with the tightness of the weave, some sections were very tight and others were pretty loose. This made unique textures in the weave and left some areas more open and some more closed. The final result looked like a tent of sorts and the trash theme made me think of WALL-E 🙂