There’s a lot of talk and publicizing of card weaving and tablet weaving right now. This is something I’ve been doing for the past 4 or 5 years and I knew it wouldn’t be long before it would be swinging its circle back to being popular again. I’m always amazed at how cyclic the trends are and how everything old and suddenly becomes ‘new’ again.

All that said, I figured I’d just do up another blog post, with all the pictures of nearly all of my card weaving endeavors, including my hand-made cards. I’ve also shared a couple of tutorials I’ve published in the past.

This is the first guitar strap I made for a friend in Milwaukee. It measured 6 feet long by 3 inches wide when it was finished. He requested acrylic yarns only because he didn’t know much about wool yet. I originally started out with playing cards cut into weaving tablets.

This was a 2-sided (exactly the same on both sides) Anglo-Saxon braid card weaving that I did next. It became an adjustable belt. It’s 100% from my hand spun, hand dyed wool yarns! All of it is Suffolk from the Ahrens’ Suffolk sheep!

At this point, I considered buying some weaving tablets/cards because the playing cards pretty much wore out after about 5 weavings. I made another set of playing card tablets and then I started playing around with all of the plastic containers we had around the house. A year after I perfected something I liked, I created this Instructable for them (http://www.instructables.com/id/Card-weaving-how-to-make-your-own-cards-from-rec/). Cat litter jugs and milk jugs work the best!

As you can see, I use a rug loom to do my card weaving. I prefer standing and I prefer weaving top down. The skinny ones became dog leashes and the wide ones became belts or guitar straps. The last one, on the triangle weaving cards was acrylic (another special request).

I also discovered that I love triangle weaving. That patterns that can be created are unfathomable, but that will have to be for another post while I learn more with the triangle cards. Both of these became dog leashes also. The first one is acrylic. The 2nd and 3rd ones are my hand dyed, hand spun wool yarns.

During all the madness, I decided I needed a more portable way to card weave, so I made a back strap loom and designed and built a wooden, portable card weaving loom.

This first one didn’t work out so well because I realized I needed to be able to pass the shuttle back and forth, unimpeded.

This ‘minor’ modification, using a jigsaw, turned out just right (and yes, I still use playing cards to weave with because it seems I end up selling off my recycled plastic ones.

Here is the video of me demonstrating triangle card weaving. I did all of the editing with help from my friend, Azharuddin Khan!

Also, a special thanks goes out to Guntram for creating awesome, free software to design all of those designs you want to create. His software comes with a bazillion preprogrammed patterns, but also allows you to design your own and save them all. The software is called, Guntram’s Card Weaving Thingy!

As always, if this prompts you to want to start card weaving and you’d like some nice, slippery cards that don’t tip over while you’re weaving (unless you want them to), see my etsy listing for them.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/128994950/1-dozen-unmarked-card-weaving-cards-made

Get busy and make something!!