Weave with Words: Using Inlay to Create Text in Woven Cloth

Add words to your weavings! Learn to plan, design, and weave letters, words, and phrases to enhance and personalize any work.

Engaging instructions and how-to illustrations teach intermediate and advanced weavers to add text to cloth by using the familiar inlay technique in new ways. It’s the first book to detail this skill set, enabling weavers to accurately create beautiful lettering to personalize any project and add new layers of meaning.

Expert weaver Scott Norris teaches the building blocks in an encouraging and effective way, drawing from his years of practice in pioneering the combination of weaving and typography. Using a traditional four- or eight-harness hand loom and plain weave, readers learn to plan, design, draft, and weave letterforms by choosing and combining vertical, horizontal, angled, and curving lines. 

So that readers can practice their new skills, the book includes six colorful, ready-to-use designs featuring words. As a bonus, there are directions for turning those weavings into nine practical, heirloom-quality projects such as pillows, placemats, and towels.

Features: 

• Detailed, step-by-step instruction in the inlay technique and applying it to the alphabet.

• How to design and draft patterns to create any sizes, shapes, and combinations of clear, beautiful text.

• Six ready-to-weave text designs with nine “try-it” weaving projects provide guided practice and learning.

• Projects are heirloom-quality, practical household items such as placemats, napkins, dish towels, and pillows.

• Projects are weaver-friendly: sized to be economical in materials expense.

• Includes drafts for two complete alphabets (one roman and one script), jump-starting weavers’ “writing” possibilities.

Scott Norris has spent more than three decades dyeing and weaving linen and teaching beginner, intermediate, and advanced weavers. He has received best-in-show honors from the New England Weavers Seminar, and his writing has appeared in American Craft, Ceramics Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly, and others. www.elamswidow.com