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Alpaca Yarn – Checkerboard Patterning on a Pin Loom

How about using alpaca yarn on a pin loom? Just for fun I then tried some of my stash of alpaca yarn (sport weight) on another practice square. What a difference! The weaving needle moved easily in & out through the warp threads with no problem. I even worked with 2 different colors of alpaca yarn (of the same weight) to see if I could get a checkered pattern. Easy as pie, as it turns out: After winding on the warp threads with one color of yarn, simply switch to a second color for the step using the weaving needle. The second color shows up as the checks against the background first color. The pic below shows the square I made in this fashion, using fawn alpaca yarn as the background color (the warp), & black alpaca yarn as the checkered foreground color.

Check Alpaca WeavieSo how much yarn does it take to make a pin loom square? Not much, so you can feel free to experiment without fear of wasting a lot of expensive yarn. For the 4 inch checkered alpaca yarn square, I used about 5.5 yards of the first color (for the 3 wrap layers) and about 2.5 yards of the second color (for the weaving step).

O.K., once you’ve gotten the idea of how to create these square “weavies”, what next?  There are tons of options but basic to many of them is attaching multiple squares together.  Next time we’ll talk about some simple ways to accomplish that.