I’m famous – sort of!

Dawn of Crafty or Crazy alerted for to the fact that Craftzine had mentioned my pouchy baggy thing that I blogged about on June 7th. You can see the link to my work on Craftzine here. It seems as though people are keen to have more information about how items are made so I will add a few lines about how I achieved my woven pouchy baggy walletty thing.

I can’t remember where I saw the object that set me thinking. I think it was actually made of woven comics which meant that the weft provided by the newspaper was brightly coloured. These days some of the free newspapers, especially those available on the trains into London, are full of photos. This means that newspapers are now longer plain old black and white. I was watching some mindless programme on the television when my eye was caught by the red, blue and yellow that filled the pages of “The London Paper” and I remembered the woven pouch I had seen somewhere.

I used a cheap old picture frame, one of those that’s costs about 99p and then you break the thin glass as you are carrying home and instead of being cheap you have just wasted almost a whole pound. Of course you can’t throw it away, that would be far too tidy, so you just prop it up somewhere where it gets on the nerves of any tidy freaks who dare to cross your threshold. Ten and a half months later when it has gathered its share of dust and dead spiders you have a brainwave that you can use it as a sort of weaving frame and you leap up, thereby missing the arrival of a long-lost step-half brother’s ex-wife’s , presumed dead’s son.

So:

colourful newspaper

improvised “loom”

fine, strong yarn (not actual parcel string as someone thought I had used – though why not)

glue stick (to stick edges of newspaper pages together)

something to BEAT with (what DID I use? – I think it might have been a wooden kebab stick)

I started out using one of those stiff plastic things that allows you to “bind” several sheets of paper together as a loomstick but it didn’t work out so I just stuck to simple over, under, over weaving of the paper.

WHAT I MIGHT DO DIFFERENTLY

I might take up Dawn’s suggestion of folding wider strips of paper so that they are several thicknesses, then I wouldn’t need the glue stick and I wouldn’t have so much paper flying around the room. This would probably also make the edges of the strips straighter and allow me to “beat” the strips/weft closer together.

Now I seem to remember that the original had several “rows” of woven thread/yarn after several “rows” of paper. I think this would also pull it together much tighter.

When I had finished I held all four sides together with masking tape on each side and then cut the weaving off the loom.

Then I machine stitched just inside that masking tape so that all the newspaper couldn’t escape. Then I decided how I was going to fold the pouchy thing and cut up some fabric to make some binding. If I had tough close-woven tape I think it would have worked better and been much tidier but I’m a freeform gal and messy to the core.