Wire Weaving

An update, for Barb! Well, to be honest, I've been planning to do a post about the wire weaving and my (abject lack of) progress. I've been focusing on getting a shawl done -- it is now off the needles and waiting to be blocked -- so I haven't been as attentive to the weaving as I should be.

To recap, the warp is 28 gauge silver and brass. There are 24 silver ends and 22 brass ends. I didn't have any kind of plan when I started, because I didn't really know how to plan, so I just warped until it looked wide enough for a bracelet. Even that is hard to see, since the wire doesn't lay as neatly as cotton. It turns out be about 1/2 inch wide.

This is my first attempt at weaving, using some of the brass wire left over from the warp. It got a little easier, and better looking, as I figured out how to make the wire behave. I didn't want to stick with the brass for the weft, since I have silver warp on either side.

I happened to have some 24 gauge wire hanging around and tried using that for weft. It doesn't work, at least not with something this narrow and warp-faced, it is too thick to bend into the necessary sharp turns.

Silver, 28 gauge warp. This is still plain weave, I'm planning to try some pick up in the next bit that I do, but I wanted to get a feel for the wire before trying anything else.

And this is how the wire looks when the tension is loosened. Yeesh.

What does not show up in the pictures is that the weft is clearly visible through the warp. It is still warp dominant (rather than balanced the way a mesh would be), but the weft does show up. I don't know how to fix it (maybe a finer gauge weft?) or if I care very much, at least for this project.