This has been a good week for crafts. Two day-long “faculty retreats” meant that I got to spend some time at work knitting. Usually I don’t knit in meetings at work, but when it’s two 8 hour days back to back with much talk and few results, knitting just makes me a better person to be around. I finished a sock that’s been languishing in my UFO pile for 2 years now:

This is the second sock, so I now have a new pair ready for next fall. It’s just a very simple foot with a twist stitch rib at the cuff, which is thick and cushy and very elastic.

I also knit away on a sweater sleeve for Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater. I’m about 10 inches into the first sleeve now…only 15 left to go!

In the evenings, I’ve been playing with band weaving, using my new tablet loom. I started out with a very simple, narrow band, just to get a feel for the technique.

It’s about the width of a shoelace, and was mostly just me fidgeting around with making different patterns and figuring out how to use the tablets.

Once that was off the loom, it was on to more challenging things.

This is the band that I’ll actually use for my phone purse. It was much more difficult to warp because of the way the colors were arranged, but it’s still pretty easy to weave, and it’s something that I simply could not do with my 4-shaft loom. The band has 88 threads in it, and is about an inch wide and very thick, perfect for use as a strap. The tablet weaving makes a completely different structure than a regular shaft loom, which I will need to remember to write about sometime when I have closeup pictures to show.

These are a couple of the other patterns possible with this warp threading; there is always so much variation to play with in weaving.

The weaving goes pretty fast once I get into the rhythm of it, so my phone should have a much fancier home to live in soon.