A couple weeks ago, I was a vendor in the Flagstaff Wool Festival. I brought a variety of samples including the vests I had woven for my daughter and for me. Several people asked if I could explain how I made them, and I promised to blog about it in short order. Here goes.

I feel like I should start with a warning or disclaimer. I am not good at sewing, so there may well be a better way to make and assemble this for a more “couture” look. Because of my own limitations, my goal was to do it with a minimum of sewing needed and most of the shaping (and there isn’t much) done on the loom.

When I first decided to weave a vest, I actually purchased a couple books with weaving designs. The first one was called Woven to Wear: 17 Thoughtful Designs by Marilyn Murphy and the second one was called Simple Woven Garments by Sara Goldenberg and Jane Patrick. Both books were excellent resources, and I highly recommend them. However, neither book had the type of vest design that I had in mind, so I ended up having to figure it up myself.

I made the first one for myself. The trouble is that I made it too small. By the time I had to account for the seams and a bit of pulling in on the edges, it was too narrow to be able to be seamed all the way down. Read: the hips wouldn’t work. Fortunately, I have a friend who is a brilliant seamstress, and she came up with an alternative method for putting it together that made it work. Here it is:

By the time I made the vest for my daughter, I had learned a few things, and it went more smoothly. Here’s a photo of her wearing the vest:

My daughter wanted me to use my Black Butterfly Sparkly Merino Sock yarn for the warp, and I used plain black worsted-weight merino that I spun to use for the weft. I spun 162 yards of it and used almost every inch for the weft. Since the warp was a fingering-weight yarn at about 20 wraps per inch, I wanted a sett of about 10, so I used my 10 dpi dent. I have a 32-inch rigid heddle loom.

What I wanted to do was weave the back as one piece and then split it in two for the neck/shoulders and then widen it back out for the front but leave it as two pieces all the way to the end and then seam up the sides. This would require switching to using two shuttles once I got to the shoulders. Also, my daughter really liked the modified Brook’s Bouquet I used in the first vest and wanted me to do it again. There’s a great video on how to do that on Liz Gipson’s youtube channel. She has so many fabulous videos, and this one is no exception:

I wanted to make sure not to make the same mistake again of leaving too little space for the hips, so I took her measurements and added a full 9 inches to the overall circumference (front and back together). In the end, about 5 inches beyond her hip measurement would have been perfect. Next time. That is what I would suggest though. Take your hip measurement all the way around, divide that in two, and then add 2 to 3 inches for total width of the weaving.

In other words, if your hips are 36 inches, then divide that in half (18 inches) and add 2 to 3 inches to that (20 to 21 inches) to determine the total width of the rectangle on the loom. Make sense?

For the warp length, you have to decide how long you want the vest. My daughter wanted it to be fairly long, ending right at the top of her thighs and then adding the fringe to that. I measured from front to back, going over her shoulder, and I got 52 inches. I added about 10% for warp takeup, 4 inches for fringe on the front and 4 for fringe on the back, and 24 inches for tying-on wastage. That made the total warp length 90 inches when I rounded up.

Since I was weaving at 10 dents per inch and I wanted the width to be 23.2 inches (which as I said turned out to be too wide), then I needed 232 warp ends. That meant I would need a total of 579 yards of warp (90 inches in length x 232 warp ends divided by 36 to get yards). That meant one entire skein plus a little less than another half a skein.

I actually have a warping board, but I much prefer using warping pegs on my front porch. I wound the warp 90 inches long with 232 warp ends and put it on the loom.

I decided I would do a Brooks Bouquet row every 3 inches. Alternatively, you could count rows, but I find that to be more of a bother than just measuring as I go.

Figuring out where to split the warp for the shoulders was a bit challenging because I wanted the vest to be properly balanced with ample space for the shoulders and neck but not too much. Since I was aiming for a 52 inch total length and I started with the back, I decided to start the shoulders once I had woven 25 inches. At that point, I started using 2 shuttles instead of one and wove from each edge to 3 inches from the center, leaving a 6″ space for the neck. I left the 6-inch gap for 6 inches and then started to bring the two sides back together again by including one more warp thread for each row of weaving until there were no threads that weren’t being woven. I hope this is making sense.

Here’s a sketch of the shape of the vest on the loom:

Throughout, I continued doing 1 row of Brooks Bouquet every 3 inches regardless of where it fell.

When I finished weaving, I cut off the front, leaving 4 inches for fringe while it was still on the loom and made knots for every 4 warp threads. You could certainly hem stitch it instead. I unwound it to the neck hole and carefully cut the unwoven warp threads in half and knot those in sets of 4 as well. That was a bit challenging because the threads were just barely long enough to tie. You might consider making the neck rectangle a bit longer to account for that or using a crochet hook to make the knots.

Then I took off the remainder of the piece and knotted the other end.

Now, if the width had been just right, I would have just seamed up the sides. However, since it was too wide for my daughter, we ended up overlapping the front and back panels and creating a bit of a waist when we seamed up the sides.

As I mentioned, I have a 32-inch rigid heddle loom. What if you have a narrower loom? Well, you could potentially weave it in two panels and still make the shoulders narrower by leaving a 3-inch section unwoven for the shoulder and then seam up the back.

What if you have a floor loom? I suspect pretty much everything would be the same except you would need to allow more for warp wastage.

If you have questions or ideas for improvement, please let me know.