Failures

I've been noodling around with a bit of tablet weaving.  I ordered cards from HipStrings, and warped my Ashford SampleIt loom.  I tested out a bit of plain weaving with the cards, which turned out fine and gave me a false sense of confidence.

I picked out a pattern, 

warped the loom, threaded the cards,

And turned out this:

Somewhere along the way, I got the cards turned wrong and never recovered.  I tried again:

And that's as good as it got, because I turned the cards wrong again and it looked similar to the effort above, although not quite as bad.  One of the things I discovered is that the crochet "cotton" I was using was actually 100% acrylic.  It looks really nice; it's just slippery to work with.

I went back to the store, bought actual cotton, re-warped the loom and re-threaded the cards (two or three times), and then pulled out what I wove 13 rows in because it's still not right.  I'm currently re-threading the cards and will give it another try because I'm kind of stubborn like that.  

In the meantime, I bought a book and have been watching YouTube videos.  This one helped:

There are a couple of things about this that struck me.  First, the fact that she moves the groups of cards away from each other when she turns them.  I've been holding the cards between my two hands, and I'm pretty sure I've bumped cards forwards or backwards after turning them.  Second, when she pulls her hands back to open the shed, it's plain to see whether or not she's got all the cards turned properly.  You can see the pattern and see whether or not the warp is lined up correctly.  I cannot read what I am doing, yet.  It's just going to take time, patience, and practice.