Tutorial: Handwoven Greeting Card

post from CraftyPod on 15 March 2008 11:54:00 AM. © CraftyPod

Hot on the heels of my weaving podcast, here’s a little how-to for weaving on a greeting card. If you’re a DIY Alert user, well, you may have seen this one before. But, what a great opportunity to share it!

So, you begin with a blank card - and for this project, it’s best to use one that’s made of quite-heavy stock. Strathmore makes wonderful heavyweight blanks.

With a pencil, mark two parallel lines on the front of the card. And then, mark a row of evenly-spaced dots along these two lines. (I’ve used heavy, dark pencil marks here, so they’re easy to see. Yours will be much fainter.) These dots should also line up with each other, as you’ll see in a minute.

And, this is very important - you’ll need an odd number of dots in each row.

Next, open your card and place it on a padded surface. A folded sock works nicely. Use a pin to poke through all those dots.

. . . After which, you can erase all those pencil lines.

Thread up a needle with a double strand of thread, or a single strand of embroidery floss. Follow the holes you just punched to make a series of long, parallel stitches on the front of your card.

I started and ended my stitches with knots here. You could also just tape the ends of the thread down with some little pieces of masking tape.

Now, get a collection of bits of interesting leftover yarn. Thread a strand onto a big tapestry needle, and weave it in and out of these thread stitches.

At the end of each row, trim the ends of the yarn to about 1/4″. These ends will make a kind of fringe, as you’ll see soon.

The second strand weaves opposite to the first one. See where the first strand passes over the thread? The second strand passes under that thread.

Keep adding strands, building up a cool block of texture as you go. See that fringe emerging? That’s all there is to it. Glue some nice paper over the back of your work, on the inside of the card, and you’re done.

You can also play with weaving one long strand of yarn back and forth, to get a smoother block of weaving.

And you can change colors! Leave a long tail at the beginning and end of each color. . .

. . . And when you’re done weaving, you can thread this tail onto a needle and pass it under the block of weaving. Then cut the end close to the block.