Rigid Heddle weaving is great! It's affordable, portable, and all around a great place to start getting into weaving. After you've made several plain weave scarves and towels though, it can get a little monotonous for some of us. We have a suggestion for you if you'd like to keep rocking the plain weave but add a little pizazz to your projects: Texture! 

Materials Used:

• Kromski Harp Forte
• Kromski 8 Dent Heddle
• Kromski Stick Shuttle
• Omega Sinfonia Cotton Yarn (Coral, Morado, Mandarina)
• Feza Alp Premier Yarn (422)

Pattern: Plain Weave

We wrote this pattern up for a Rigid Heddle Loom but you can also use a Floor Loom or a Table Loom! Check out our blog post, How to Create Plain Weave on a Multi Harness Loom if you need help setting up your treadles!

We chose our skein of Feza Alp Premier Yarn first because the whole goal of this project is to feature texture. We love the orange/purple mix in this skein. Then we visited our selection of Omega Sinfonia Cotton Yarn and picked out three colors that coordinate with our texture skein. This will help to make the overall project look more unified, but if you want to have crazy pops of texture and crazy pops of color, go for it! 

We are making a 7" wide scarf, so with our 8 dent heddle we have 56 ends. We tried to make our warp a random mix of the yarn and colors. We switched yarns every 2-4 ends and made a conscious effort not to place the colors evenly throughout the warp. The length of the warp is 80". We did this so we could play around more and eyeball it while we work on our weft while not worrying too much about symmetry. 

We've been mostly doing about .5 to 1 inch of Sinfonia in the weft and then putting a pick of the textured Feza in. This is a great way to use the more expensive Feza yarn throughout the whole project without having to purchase multiple skeins. This project isn't off the loom yet but we're already loving how it's turning out. 

Aren't the little bits of sparkle and texture from the Feza yarn super fun? We'll keep you updated and show you want this looks like when it's off the loom and finished. We think the Feza ends are going to make for super fun fringe. 

You don't have to buy a highly textured commercial yarn to make a project like this, it would also be very fun to use a skein of highly textured handspun mixed in sparingly throughout a weaving project. We'd love to see examples of your rigid heddle texture infusions, share them with us on Facebook or Instagram!

Update: We heard from some of you that it can be hard to pick out colors online so we put together some kits for your in a new blog post - Rigid Heddle Texture Infusion Kit Ideas.