Our projects co-op got together at a park this week to work on our strip weaving on the ground looms we created two weeks ago. The weather was cold and blustery (although less so than we should really expect on the last day of November, so it feels silly to complain), and it made for kind of a surreal experience. It makes no logical sense to sit on the cold ground, bundled up in our winter woolies, weaving on a ground loom! A hot sunny day would have made MUCH more sense. Lessons learned about choosing appropriate weather for some of these sorts of projects! (Of course, the entire point of these projects is learning about ecosystems -- specifically the ecosystem of survival in the desert, and the point has certainly been driving home about how different OUR climate is from that of the ancient Hebrews!)
Anyway! We set up our looms, staked them to hold them in place, then began weaving. Here Zoo Boy uses his batten to separate the warp threads.
J gets the yarn on the shuttle ready to pass through the space created by Zoo Boy and the batten.
Passing the shuttle through the threads.
Celebrating weaving victory.We need to do a bunch of weaving at home this coming week to complete our strips, because we're all getting together to sew them together to create the tent next week. Will be nice to have an INDOOR project time! The following week we will erect our tent (fingers crossed that major winter storms will hold off for another couple of weeks), and then hunker in for the winter.
Our next major cultural project will be Maple Sugaring in late Feb/early March. At least our weather and climate will be appropriate for that one!
3 comments:
I've seen instructions for doing this kind of weaving in doorways instead of staked to the ground. Next year (ha... or when you write your book about homeschooling to help everyone else...) you could start with the ground weaving to show how the ancient Hebrews did it, then mount your looms in doorways or from rafters to make the process more sheltered and a little easier.
What an awesome project! I look forward to seeing how it continues :)
This looks like such fun! Too cold for my thin blood, but still, fun!
Alyss, I expect quite a bit of the weaving will be done indoors, although it's supposed to warm up a bit on Sun/Mon, so hopefully we cn use the loom a bit more the way it was intended. But at least the kids got the experience of weaving the tent strips the way it was actually done in the desert!
LOL, when I "write my book" about how to do this, I'm going to say to do it during the summer at the beach! ;)
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