The Best Weaving Advice (Nobody Listens To)

Author(s): Jamie Hurlburt & Kim McCollum

This book will not teach you how to weave.

What it will do is help make your weaving more enjoyable, more productive, and so much easier. We’ve written down the key bits of weaving wisdom we’ve picked up over the years: mindset tweaks, best practices, keys to happy weaving. It has the kind of advice we share at workshops and with each other–the things you usually need a good weaving friend to hear about. 

It won’t teach you how to wind a bobbin, but it will tell you why curiosity is more important than creativity, how to weave through troublesome projects, and that you should just go ahead and buy good tools (and maybe that big loom you’ve been thinking about). 

Written with honour and passion, The Best Weaving Advice Nobody Listens To gives you a window into the weaving practice of two friends who love weaving and love talking about it… to anyone who is willing to listen.

Pages: 122 pages
Sneak Peak Inside

Be Curious.
The number of people who tell us they “aren’t creative” within the first few sentences of the introductions in a beginner weaver class makes us want to scream. Creativity is a skill. It’s not something you’re born with; it’s something you learn. And you frankly don’t need a well-developed sense of creativity to be a very solid weaver. What will make you a solid weaver (and incidentally, what will start slowly but surely building those creativity muscles) is curiosity.

Curiosity is a mindset that stays open to questions and experimentation. Being curious means getting out of the production space (e.x. I am making a scarf) into the learning space (e.x. Would this weave structure and/or fibre and/or sett make a good scarf?). Let yourself wonder “What would happen if…” and then run as many of those experiments as possible. When you try something new, stay curious about the results: how it feels, how it looks (up close and far away), how it shrinks, how it drapes.