What's Making Us Happy: Little Looms 2020

The 2020 issue of Easy Weaving with Little Looms is out now, and I am so excited to finally share it with you! The theme this year was Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, and I have to say our designers knocked it out of the park. Of course, as much as I’d like to show you all 23 projects and give you brief descriptions of each article, I’d be here all day doing so (and I’m not sure how interesting that would be). Instead, I asked other members of the Handwoven and Long Thread Media crew what they found most exciting about the issue.

Greta Holmstrom wove her Mount Wilson Shawl using hexagons woven on a pin loom. Photo Credit: George Boe.

Handwoven editor and long-time rigid-heddle loom weaver Susan E. Horton ended up falling in love with a pin-loom project—specifically Greta Holmstrom’s fabulous Mount Wilson Shawl. Susan loved the simple and elegant design so much that she went out and bought the loom to weave it. I have to agree with her—it’s a beautiful example not just of how beautiful pin-loom weaving can be, but also of the interpretation of theme. The actual Mount Wilson (in southern Nevada) is known for its beautiful layers of colorful rocks, and Greta’s shawl captures that perfectly—including the row of multicolored hexagons representing the rubble at the base.

Peg MacMorris used variegated yarn and crammed dents to give her beautiful Sea Slug Silken Scarf visual interest. Photo Credit: George Boe.

Anne Merrow, cofounder of Long Thread Media and the first editor of Easy Weaving with Little Looms, specifically pointed out Peg MacMorris’s Sea Slug Silken Splendor Scarf as one of her favorite projects of the issue. Inspired by the colorful chromodoris annae sea slug, Peg uses a variety of clever techniques to create a plain weave scarf that looks far more complex. For example, she crammed some of her dents to create areas of contrasting texture. It’s such an easy thing, but it makes a huge difference in the final product. Peg also used a variegated yarn for part of the scarf, giving the illusion of a more complex weave. It’s truly a project you can warp and weave in a weekend (or less!), but it will look like it took you ages.

Our fabulous Customer Success Manager Rachel Szado takes care of all our project shipping. While sending back projects for this issue of Little Looms, she had to let me know how much she loved Margaret Stump’s pin-loom Shark Mittens (pictured at top). Margaret, whom you might know from her many books on pin-loom weaving or her truly epic wolf hat she wove for us last year, outdid herself with these mittens. Not only are they just beyond cute, they are also perfect for “delighting” friends, family, and strangers alike with renditions of “Baby Shark.” If I wove these for my Baby Shark–loving son, I’m pretty sure he’d either never take them off or never let me sing anything else to him again.

Both the Green Pastures Scarf by Robin Lynde, shown at left, and Mariellen Boss’s Tunas in the Night Runner, at right, use the clasped-warp method. Photo Credits: George Boe (scarf) and Matt Graves (runner).

As for me, it’s so hard to pick just one thing in this amazing issue, but I think what has me most excited about the 2020 Easy Weaving with Little Looms is the clasped-warp technique. I’d not heard of clasped warps before last year, but now it seems as if they are all over, and I couldn’t be happier. Little Looms not only features 2 fabulous projects that use this clever technique (Robin Lynde’s Green Pastures Scarf and Mariellen Boss’s Tunas in the Night Runner), but also includes an article by Robin Lynde about designing with this technique. While there’s so much to love about clasped-warp weaving, I’m most excited by the idea that you can create a warp that looks as if it were painted. How cool is that? I will hopefully be pulling out my rigid-heddle loom soon to give this technique a whirl.

This is just a small snippet of the clever techniques and fabulous projects in this issue. I hope you all love it as much as I do! You can order it here.)

Happy Weaving!

Christina