March 2025
A new/old pattern, and many workshops!
In this newsletter you’ll find:
Seed Pod Towels re-weave
Darn It! + Landmade 2025
Upcoming workshops
Studio Views
Seed Pod Towels
Every so often I receive an email from a weaver with questions about a past project or something I’ve shown on Instagram. Sometimes it’s about personal projects that don’t plan to make into patterns, but others are projects I want to revisit, tinker with, or update, such as the Seed Pod Towels.
I designed the Seed Pod Towels as part of Halftones, my Gist Yarn Weave Quarterly subscription box, which came out in 2023. The original patterns are still available as a bundle on the Gist website, but I wanted to revisit the Seed Pod Towels and adapt them for a slightly closer sett, different yarn, and a slightly rounder seed shape.
If you’ve woven from one of my patterns before, you know I like a good hack — I can’t seem to help myself, I always want to break down my original idea and try out new ways to treadle the same draft. In this new pattern, you’ll find two variations: Towel A resembles the original all-over pattern and is woven in a smooth linen. Towel B places one of the seed motifs in between sections of plain weave, resulting in an undulating chain that travels in horizontal bands. I quite like this new variation — it reminds me of the cell chains that make up plant structures as seen under a microscope.
Since I was already tinkering, I used up the last bit of warp to show you how several different wefts look — this type of floatwork pattern is very amenable to substitutions and swaps, and I’ve included this information in the project in case you’d like to use alternate wefts, too.
The Seed Pod Towels are available on my website as a single pattern download here. Thank you!
Darn It! and Landmade 2025
As mentioned last month, Landmade 2025 is quickly approaching. The website and full list of speakers and workshops is now live, so I’d like to share it here so that you can plan your visit.
I’ll be there as a guest but also as an instructor — I’m running a short workshop called Darn It! where participants will weave a small patch out of local wool, provided by my friends Melinda at Lickety Spit Fibre Farm and Laura at Twin Oaks Fibre Farm.
Darn It! is happening on Saturday March 15, 2025 from 10:30 - 11:30am, at The Image Centre, 33 Gould St, Toronto. Registration is now open: please sign up here!
Upcoming Workshops
I’ll be teaching two more beginner Weave a Scarf workshops at the Art Gallery of Burlington this spring. These classes are geared towards folks who have never woven before but want to see what it’s all about (spoiler: it’s fun!).
Each session is three classes long: you get to borrow a loom from the AGB and I’ll walk you through the process of warping, threading, tying on, and weaving.
There are two sessions available:
Saturday March 29, April 5, and April 12, 2025: Registration here.
Saturday April 26, May 3, and May 10, 2025: Registration here.
Studio Views
Since this newsletter is a coming a little quicker than usual to get those registrations out, there hasn’t been much new in the studio, where I’ve been buried in by the most snow my city has had in 45 years!
However, there has been some nice hand spun yarn — on the left, a naturally dyed stash at my mum’s, on the right, my own.
Using the Design and Technology Lab at the university, I’ve laser cut these small looms for the Darn It! workshop. So far so good!
Amanda