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Guest - Katrin Sprang Discussion
18 September 2026
Hi Rachel, I have looked for more photos of you, but that was not very successful. I found a link on...
Guest - Beatrix Sprang Discussion
15 September 2026
That lozenge pattern element is not a photograph, but a scan. So it should be to scale. But I pinned...
Guest - Katrin Sprang Discussion
15 September 2026
I was not referring to Rachel's reconstruction (is the reconstruction you refer to the one photograp...
Guest - Beatrix Sprang Discussion
14 September 2026
There is something Rachel did not mention. She told me: "Well, I worked with the measurements we too...
Guest - Katrin Sprang Discussion
14 September 2026
Well, this is certainly developing into an interesting discussion. Firstly, going from that lovely l...

Butterfly Bobbin.

As I'm preparing the weaving workshop for bow loom weaving that I'll be doing on the weekend, one of the points is "preparing your weft yarn". Now, for a small piece like a band, there's several ways to do this, depending on what you want and how much you mind adding in a new bit of weft. You can just take a length of yarn and use that, no winding, no nothing. 

If you want a lot of yarn for use in one go, you can wind a shuttle. The simplest of these is the humble, but glorious, stick shuttle. Any stick in a length and thickness that suits you and your weaving will do, and you wind the yarn around it, and that's it.

Third option, somewhere inbetween: The yarn butterfly. There are several ways to wind yarn into a butterfly, and the simplest one is wrapping some yarn around your fingers and then wrapping the end around the middle of that mini-skein. That, however, tends to come undone. With a tiny little different way of winding, however, you can have a butterfly bobbin that you can pull more yarn from, which does not come undone, and which will serve beautifully in a lot of instances (not only when weaving). 

Nancy explains this very nicely on YouTube:

0
Off To Shenanigans!
Looking At You.
 

Comments 1

Harma on Wednesday, 28 September 2022 17:59

Please tell us how the workshop went.

In two weeks I'll be teaching a beginners workshop in tablet weaving in which most participants want to use the bow - because it looks "cool". I personally prefer more tension than a bow provides. If you don't support the tablets they can flop around, which I find irritating. In my test run everyone liked it though.

I did add washing pins to keep the wap ends from sliding around.

Please tell us how the workshop went. In two weeks I'll be teaching a beginners workshop in tablet weaving in which most participants want to use the bow - because it looks "cool". I personally prefer more tension than a bow provides. If you don't support the tablets they can flop around, which I find irritating. In my test run everyone liked it though. I did add washing pins to keep the wap ends from sliding around.
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Monday, 21 September 2026

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