What’s included?
The Sigga 8 kit comes with a Sigga 8 heddle prethreaded with a wool warp, a red & white braided tie for attaching the warp to a fixed spot, a long cotton band for tying around your waist to create the second attachment point for your warp, a plastic clip used to fasten the near end of the warp and eventually the woven belt in progress to your belt, a preloaded shuttle of weft yarn, a booklet with instructions showing how the heddle is threaded and the pattern, a monofilament threader.
How is it going?
Better than expected! The first few inches are a bit freeform because backstrap weaving is remarkably like andean plying. The minute you get all tied up, the phone rings or some one needs me for something. The first thing I learned is don’t try weaving with fuzzy wool on a hot, rainy day! All’s good until I try and back a row or two to fix a tension gloop. This yarn is wonderful, but it is very grabby! It would be fabulous for steeked colorwork sweaters!
For the Checkerboard pattern, I decided to put the red dot in the center and the blue dots on the four corners. To do this, I started by opening the shed that had the upper threads with 3 whites in the center. The next shed swaps the layers so the threads with two reds in the center are on top. Then the third swaps back to the three whites in the center. The shuttle passes over the floats for these rows which puts three rows of green floats on the backside of the band. After three rows of checkerboard on the side facing me, the pattern calls for 3 rows with the shuttle passing under the green threads so I can have three rows of green on top. This puts the three rows of checkerboard on the back face of the band.
I’m having a bit of a challenge getting the floats to balance. The front of the band has green floats for three rows. There is a little bit of the checkerboard warp showing through, but it goes away if I run my fingernail over the transition.
On the back of the band, there isn’t enough of the green float to cover the transition. I’m trying different ways to pack the warp and messing around with the tension on the warp, but I have a bad feeling this is just my new to inkle weaving hands getting wonky tension. In the good news, this means many hours of weaving ahead. There’s no downside there!
More on fixing the gloops as I go. I’m only about 16″ into the band, so hopefully things will improve along the way!
Spindles In the Wild 