Weaving with "Real Yarn"!

This fall was the first time I had taught weaving* to students with anything other than construction paper. I had always waited because I didn't have enough looms. Since I've been trying out choice based art this year, I decided to give it a go, not expecting the project to be so popular! I offered weaving to 4th graders and it quickly became apparent that I would need to make more looms. I think out of 110ish 4th graders, there were only about 5 who chose another project. At least 2 of those students tried it out later. I had about 30 chipboard looms that I had ordered. Thankfully, I have a big supply of mat board scraps and cardboard. It was super easy and pretty quick to make looms.

*Since we were studying American Indian cultures, I told them the story of Spider Woman and how she brought weaving to the Navajo people. Read the story HERE.

I used a ruler and a box knife to cut rectangles. I didn't worry about measuring, just getting my edges straight. Next, I took a big pile and marked little dashes in half inch increments on two opposite sides. I did this while trapped at my desk pumping. Oh, the things working moms do. :) After marking the sides, I used a pair of scissors to cut little slits. Some students helped with this step, and I had to cut the slits a bit deeper later since I didn't explain that the tiny marks were just to show where to cut, not the exact size the cuts should be. Lesson learned.

Here is one of the mat board looms.

Someone pointed out that I could have just skipped the measuring step and eyeballed the cuts, putting the same number of slits in each side. That would have made it a bit faster, but having grown up with a perfectionist carpenter father, it's not in my nature! I have more mat board scraps that I will turn into looms at my other school, and I'm also going to try using foam meat trays to see how that goes. Cardboard worked ok, but the mat board looms are holding up better.

 One of the hardest parts was just getting the looms warped. It was a hard concept to loop around the notches at the top and come back down the front instead of wrapping all the way around front and back. I had a pretty big stash of yarn from my predecessor that was stored in a big cardboard box. I got most of it untangled and displayed in an over the door shoe holder. I added some leftover yarn from projects I'd done at home and my mom scored some yeins of neon colored yarn at a garage sale. The brightly colored yarns, textured yarns, and variegated yarns were the most popular. I let students totally be in charge of which and how many colors they would use. Some worked in patterns or color families, some just experimented or went with their gut, choosing yarns they were drawn to.

I had just planned to show how to weave in stripes, but some students really picked that up quickly and wanted more. Two other options I demonstrated were splitting the weaving and rejoining it, and making zigzag patterns.

 I usually just said anyone who was interested could come around a table to see how to make the different patterns. I had SO MANY kids in my room during recess to work on their weavings. They were so excited to work with "REAL YARN"! They were even telling younger siblings about it and talking about plans to make their own looms at home. They were discussing how big of a loom they would need to make a blanket, how much they would sell said blankets for ($10, what a steal!), and talking about what they would do with their projects.

The other hardest part was tying all the knots to take weavings off looms. With the risk of sounding much older than my 27 years, "kids these days" don't know how to tie simple knots! This took a lot of time and help.

I needed a way to display the weavings in the hall, and what worked best for us, was to connect the projects to a piece of black construction paper with one staple and have the students write their names in colored pencil. We used the RoseArt Metallic Colored Pencils I was given and they worked great on black paper. I'm usually a Crayola girl but really like these RoseArt pencils. I couldn't find them when ordering supplies, but I just located them on Amazon.

When the projects came down, it was easy to remove the one staple without damaging the weaving.

 Most students finished in 3-4 classes but some are not yet finished. I didn't set a size requirement or anything like that, so as the semester went on, weaving projects started shrinking! We ended up with some funny little weavings, like one below that's around 15 rows. These were sometimes made by students who just weren't that in to weaving, but more often by those that tried and tried, but struggled.

 6th graders will have the option to weave next, and since most of them wove with yarn last year (CYOA: Weaving), I'm excited to see what they do this year!

CYOA- Weaving

I wanted my 5th graders to learn about Fibers during their last lesson of the year, but I wanted to give them choices, so I designed sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure lesson! I thought about all the supplies we had available and the time that was left and came up with 3 "explorations" the students could choose from: Weaving, Quilting, and Textile/Clothing Design. Within each, there were more options. I used my big classroom bulletin board to post information about each category and the options within each. I took a cue from TAB and created "menus" to display for each option that would allow students to work fairly independently. Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph my menus so you'll have to use your imagination.

 I only had a couple takers on the quilting exploration and neither finished. I'll write about the weaving exploration now and later post about the textile exploration. Weaving was pretty much broken down into paper, cardboard loom, and radial.

 Within paper weaving, students could use regular construction paper, magazine images, paint their own paper, or come up with another option on their own. All my paper weavers chose to use solid construction paper. Some layered strips to create interest, some made patterns with their colors, and one drew a picture over the top when she had finished.

This student showed an interest in color theory. He told me about choosing complementary colors and trying to make the illusion of blue fading to white.

 Loom weaving was a pretty popular choice. I had honestly never woven with students using anything other than paper before so it was a learning experience for me. I had a bunch of cereal boxes and other thin cardboard pieces that we cut apart to be used  for making looms. This worked ok, but a thicker cardboard would be much sturdier. I didn't expect the cardboard to curl so much. It wasn't really a problem other than not being able to store them flat. I'm hoping to order some more of the sturdy chipboard looms I know a lot of teachers have success with for next school year. Some students didn't have any trouble making their looms and threading the warp before the end of the first class but others took almost two whole classes because no matter how many times they've been shown, they struggle with rulers. 

Making our own looms

Pros= free, students get to keep the looms, measuring practice. 

Cons= time consuming, curled up, not super sturdy, ends of finished weavings tend to flare out instead of staying straight.

 Most of the students eventually got their looms constructed and loaded correctly before beginning to weave with yarn. There was a lot of peer tutoring happening naturally as the students were allowed to sit in groups with those working on similar projects. Some students, however, sort of slipped through the cracks and ended up with less than successful products. This is in part due to me learning how to manage a "studio", partly due to students missing classes and not having time to make it up, and partly due to minds focused on other things than technique at the end of the school year.

Whoops!

Common issues with loom weaving for students not paying attention confused students: 

• Thinking that over-under-over-under is just an option/skipping all over the place
• Looping the yarn around the back of the loom at the end of a row instead of flipping back the other direction
• Not pushing the weft close enough together
• Cutting the warp threads too short

 The student whose loom weaving is posted at the top of this section was a rock star. She really took to the process and enjoyed herself. She constructed her loom and picked everything up really quickly. She came in to work during extra time (and would have spent even more time in the art room if allowed) and finished early. When she was done with a class period to spare, she decided to work on some finger knitting. She also helped others who were struggling with weaving and started teaching some friends to finger knit.

The last weaving option, and by far the most popular fibers exploration in 5th grade, was making radial weavings on old CDs. Our music teacher just retired and gave me a shoebox full of old CDs as she was sorting through her classroom. It was another new process for me and the students but we got the hang of it. Since there were so many students interested in weaving on CDs and because there was a general level of confusion, I ended up having all the students working on that project in each class come around a table so I could demo and make sure they at least got started ok.

Here are the basics steps we took on our CD radial weavings

1. Loop and knot a long piece of yarn through the center of the CD (from the outside edge through the hole in the middle). Tie a knot on whichever side will be the back. 
2. Continue looping the yarn from the outside through the hole, working in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Several students (all boys, conincidentally) forgot that their "spokes" needed to go in one direction and kind of wrapped all over the place, skipping around to different sides and back again. This made it really messy and confusing when they started to weave.
3. Stop looping when there is an odd number of "spokes" on the front. If your students are anything like mine, you'll have to repeat the words in bold a LOT. When there is an odd number on the front, tie a knot and put a piece of masking tape over both knots. This adds security and gives the students a place to write their name with sharpie. It is very important to have an odd number of your warp threads when working on radial weaving. If there is an even number of spokes, the yarn just sort of stacks up. To fix this, I had students just scoot two spokes close together and act as if they were one thread every time around. For some reason I also had students trying to weave on the back of their CDs, which causes trouble when you run into the knots.
4. Get a "wingspan" of yarn and start weaving on the front moving in one direction the whole time in an over-under manner. The students struggled with tucking one end of the yarn under the spokes and then starting to weave with the other end so I eventually started having them use a small piece of masking tape to secure the end. Before taping, I had students trying to weave with both ends going in different directions. It works best to go over-under a few spokes then pull tight and repeat. If students try to go all the way around the CD before they pull the yarn tight, they tend to get weird loops that tangle.
5. When you run out of one piece of yarn or want to switch colors, tie the ends together and keep weaving. There are probably other methods than tying the ends of the yarn together but this was the easiest for my students.
6. Continue weaving until the front of the CD is full or the design is complete! Tie a knot to secure the end.

This student started off with an even number of spokes- note how the rings of green in the center are stacked. After the green, I showed him how to combine two threads into one to correct the problem.