Review - Woven Scarves

 Today's Review - Woven Scarves

Interweave/F+W

 Find it for sale at the Interweave site, or wherever you purchase craft books.

I really enjoyed reading through this book and admiring all the pretty scarves.  The book introduces weavers to a broad sampling of weaving techniques and exploring various ways of creating cloth on a rigid heddle loom. Scarves are a great way for new and seasoned weavers alike to practice and explore weaving techniques.   Now, I'm not a weaver, so I really couldn't assess the book beyond admiring the pictures, so I gave it to my friend Beth, who IS a weaver.  Here are her comments. * * *

Thank you again for the book, I recently sat down and went through it.

This book is actually for the rigid heddle loom.  I started out on a Schacht 20” Flip rigid heddle loom and within a year moved on to a Schacht Baby Wolf four shaft floor loom.  I now have a Loüet David eight shaft floor loom.

One of my frustrations when I was weaving on the rigid heddle loom was a lack of really interesting projects.  There was one rigid heddle book by Jane Patrick (who co-wrote this book and who is married to Barry Schacht) called ‘The Weaver’s Idea Book’ that I used when I was learning to weave.  The book was very good in terms of being instructional, and had lots of wonderful color photos of different types of weaves;  however, the book lacked actual projects.  Being a beginner, I really needed start-to-finish guidance.  Consequently, I wove samples of all kinds of weaves and did not do anything with them.

Had this book ‘Woven Scarves’ been around when I was weaving on the rigid heddle loom, I may have stuck with it longer.  The projects are much more sophisticated than any I’ve seen for this type of loom and the use of color and texture is fabulous.   This book can teach a beginner how to make a scarf, but more importantly, the wonderful fabric creations inspire one to go beyond scarf-making.   The authors also teach techniques such as felting, fringe twisting, pom-pom making, fulling, dying, - even a step-by-step instruction how to deconstruct a sweater to re-purpose the yarn.

I still have my rigid heddle loom and will most likely put it back to use now that I have this book.

 * * * 

Thanks for the review, Beth!

Above are a couple of the 26 scarf designs in the book. Check it out!

P.S. I was given a copy of the book to review.