Stash Busting Scarf
FREE Weave-Along 2021
Learn to design and weave a beautiful 4 or 8-shaft scarf from your stash leftovers.
Want some FUN and FREE creative camaraderie?
Join us for Stash-Busting Scarf Weave-Along 2021!
Coping with pandemic boredom through weaving, but stuck with a stash that doesn't inspire you?
Here’s the perfect solution for you.
Join color-in-weaving expert Tien Chiu and well-known weaving teacher Janet Dawson in a fun weave-along community as we help you solve the problems of dealing with stash projects. We’ll offer online lessons, free Q&A sessions, and the chance to join a supportive community of your fellow weavers, sharing your trials and triumphs. We’ll lead you through a 4 or 8-shaft scarf project that will teach you the basics of:
Working with mystery yarns
Mixing yarn textures, fibers, and thicknesses
Designing with a jumble of colors
Share the fun with an online gathering of fellow weavers - all working on scarves as individual as each weaver’s stash and creativity can make it.
You May Have Seen Us In
Clear Up Your Stash Confusion
Work with Mystery Yarns
Learn how to use those mystery yarns, even if you're not sure what they are!
Choose and Use Colors
Uncover the secrets of choosing colors that won't mix into mud, and that look good together. Discover how to make your pattern show when using lots of colors.
Combine Different Yarns
Nervous about combining different kinds of yarn in a project? Find out how to make sure a variety of yarns will play well together on and off the loom.
Mix Yarn Sizes
Learn what happens when you combine thick and thin yarns in your warp and weft, and one way to handle the combination.
Meet Your Teachers
Hi! I’m Tien Chiu,
and I'm obsessed with color in weaving. I've dyed over 2,500 yarn samples, woven hundreds of handwoven swatches, and spent countless hours poring over color theory and weaving structure books in my quest to understand color in weaving.
And I've succeeded at it. I've won countless awards for my work, my handwoven wedding dress is in the permanent collection of The Henry Ford Museum, and my Kodachrome Jacket was featured on the cover of Handwoven as one of the winners of the Garment Challenge. I've written almost thirty articles for Handwoven, Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot, Complex Weavers Journal, and WeaveZine.
I've taught over 14,000 weavers in my online classes, and I'm looking forward to teaching YOU how to create beautiful things out of the colorful yarn leftovers in your stash!
Hi! I’m Janet Dawson.
I’m a weaver AND a teacher. I’m a writer AND an editor. I’m good at math and patterns but also really good with words. The combination of all of these is my superpower: I not only get this stuff, I can explain it well, and write about it clearly.
Using my facility with words and my experience teaching thousands of students online (with rave reviews!) and in-person, I can help you feel confident that YOU CAN make educated, informed design choices that will produce good cloth because you understand what’s going on on your loom.
Why do I do this? Because I love making happy, confident weavers even more than I love weaving itself. Helping other people understand and enjoy all the parts of weaving – project planning and loom prep as well throwing the shuttle – is my favourite part of the whole business.
Free Lessons - Starting April 16th
Week 1 - Choosing Yarns and Planning Your Warp
Lessons released April 16th
- Choosing Yarns - Physical Guidelines
- Evaluating Your Yarns for Suitability and Compatibility (Even Mystery Yarns!)
- Choosing Colors that Work Well Together
- Crunching the Numbers - Determining Sett, Project Size, and Warp and Weft Amounts
Week 2 - Designing, Winding, and Putting Your Warp Onto the Loom - April 23
- Designing Your Warp Colors
- Winding Your Stash Warp
- Dressing Your Loom (Front to Back)
- Dressing Your Loom (Back to Front)
Week 3 - Weaving Your Scarf - April 30
- Sampling for Color
- Sampling for Sett, Beat, and Selvages
- Tips for Success and Troubleshooting
- Finishing Up
Live demos and live Q&A sessions with Tien and Janet
Every Sunday at 12:00 pm Pacific Time we'll do a live demo of that week's lessons!
And every Wednesday at 4pm Pacific Time we'll do a webinar to answer your questions LIVE!
A free online community for sharing your work with other weavers!
(This is HUGE - many people last year felt the inspiration of hundreds of other weavers' work, access to so many other weavers' wisdom, and the joy, creativity, and camaraderie of our online community were every bit as valuable as the class itself!)
Frequently Asked Questions
There are three weeks of lessons in the weave-along, but we want to give you plenty of time to finish! So you will be able to access everything for free until May 21, 2021 - five weeks after the Weave-Along begins.
You'll also have the option of purchasing lifetime access to course materials for $19.99.
Nope. You get everything in the Weave-Along entirely FREE for the five-week period that it runs. This is our gift to the weaving community.
We hope everyone has fun and learns a lot!
(After the Weave-Along ends, you will have the option of purchasing lifetime access to course materials if you want, but this is absolutely NOT required to participate.)
The class and the projects are designed for weavers using 4 and 8 shaft floor and table looms. If you are using other types of looms (rigid heddle, backstrap, etc.) you are welcome to join! but we won't be talking about your kind of loom in the lessons or webinars.
Nope! All you need to access the online classroom and design your scarf is a web browser. That's it. No weaving software is needed.
If you want to attend the webinars, you'll need to install and run the free Zoom app, but you can do that on practically any mobile device or computer.
You should know to do these things on your own:
- Read a weaving draft, including threading, tie-up, and treadling or lift plan. - Wind a warp and dress your loom, including threading and tying up the treadles
- Wind bobbins and start, join, and end weft yarns.
Nope! You can weave anything you like (or nothing at all). The lessons are geared towards weaving the scarf, but you'll learn a lot even if you don't.
So feel free to join us just for the lessons, or to cheer everyone else on! We'll be delighted to have you, however you choose to participate.
Yes! We'll be encouraging people to share their work in our Facebook group, because sharing your trials and triumphs with other weavers is half the fun, but the course materials and Q&A sessions are hosted on a different platform, so you can absolutely participate without a Facebook account. No problem!
Lessons are released on Friday mornings, and can be accessed any time through the online classroom (you don't have to be there at a specific time).
The live lectures are Sundays, noon to 1:30pm Pacific Time. If you can't make them live, no problem! They're recorded and put into the online classroom so you can watch them later.
The live Q&A sessions are Wednesdays 4-5:30pm Pacific Time. They are also recorded and put into the online classroom for those who can't attend live, and you can email us questions ahead of time if you can't make it to the live session.
All videos are transcribed with searchable closed captioning so if you can't attend, it's very easy to skim through the transcript, find whatever topics interest you, and just jump to that spot in the video later.