More Fun with Wire

I have to admit that the inkle loom, with it's wire warp, has been neglected since the last time I posted about it. Oh, I have excuses: the shawl needed to be finished quickly, then I wanted to knit a quick baby sweater (more on that in a future post).

But let's be honest. When have I ever let a deadline (especially a self-imposed deadline) get in the way? Once the excitement of warping and figuring out how to weave with the wire had faded, so did my interest. Meh. Wire. Yawn.

So. I've been thinking about beads and I've thinking about ways to make the weaving more interesting. I started trying to figure out how to put the two together, which isn't altogether obvious. The main problem is the weaving on the Inkle loom is warp faced and the beads would need to be added with the weft (on this warp anyway, since it already exists). In a perfect world, you don't see the weft, but this isn't a perfect world, and the weft is quite visible on the wire weaving. It occurred to me that could work to my advantage, so I went to the bead store (otherwise known as, to me anyway, House of Sin) and found some flat beads which seemed likely to work. I threaded them onto the weft and, after some fiddling to get the spacing to work, this is what I came up with:

It still isn't hugely exciting, but I think there is a lot of potential here. This is only 8 inches long, which isn't quite long enough to make a cuff, so now I'm trying to figure out how to lengthen it in the finishing (I have plenty of unwoven warp on both sides).