My local quilt guild had a male speaker a couple of months ago. I really enjoyed his presentation, his honesty and his work. His name is Mathew Boudreaux, aka Mx Domestic. He and Tara J. Curtis have written a book called Fabric Weaving and Mathew has also created a new weaving tool, Mx Weaver, that works quite well with his weaving process. He has quite a few videos on YouTube as well. He also has an online fabric shop and I really love his fabric choices. I’ve even purchased a few of his traditional quilt kits because I loved the fabric choices. And on Saturdays he has been doing a Facebook live that I enjoy watching.
https://mxdomestic.com/collections/mx-domestic
The book has a large number of projects using a variety of different types of weaves. I thought I would try a tumbling block (aka triaxial) weave. His project suggests cutting it up and making it into coasters. I love the weaving on the cover!
First thing I had to do was draw a grid. This will be attached to a piece of 24” x 30” foam core board that is at least ½” thick as you will be pinning into it. This is a photo of my second grid drawing. The first I didn’t have the lines extended out to all the edges which made it difficult to line the fabric strips up with. As I progressed with the weave, I found out how important that detail was! One good thing is that I can reuse this grid later.
This project required 3 different fabrics, light, medium and dark. I decided I wanted to work with a turquoise pallet.
Once I picked my fabrics, I needed to cut them into 1” wide strips and then use my ½” bias tape maker to make 12 strips out of each color.
Photo of my 1/2″ bias tape tool doing it’s job!
Photo of all the medium color fabric strips ready to go!
Lots of prep to do prior to any actual weaving…
Finally I could start laying the strips down on the grid. First the medium color was placed vertically . The drawn grid lines are 1” apart, so 2 strips fit in each section.
This photo shows the first layer going down onto the grid.
Layer #2 requires using the Mx Weave tool and starting to work diagonally. Here is a photo with the Mx Weave tool.
Second layer progress…
2nd layer complete
Now for the 3rd and final weave. I switched to the smaller Mx Weave tool for the third layer and used my Purple Thang to help get the tip through in the proper places.
Purple Thang photo
1st couple of rows of fabric 3…
I’m getting excited to see the tumbling block pattern come to life! Hope I’m not boring you with all my progress photos. I found the whole process fascinating!
When I got to this point, I realized a few mistakes that I had made along the way.
One blatant one to my eye was that the strips were not laying in a straight line from edge to edge. You can see in the above photo how the blocks are bigger on the right side. It’s an interesting effect but not what I was looking for in this project. And since my drawn edge lines didn’t extend out far enough past the ends of fabric #2, I couldn’t see what I was doing. And all those pins to deal with! I tried to fix things and finally decided I would start the 3rd layer over again after I redrew the grid to make it bigger. This was a pretty scary move at this point because I had to remove all those pins. Worse case scenario was that I would have to start all over again and I was prepared to do that if necessary.
I was successful in transferring the 2 layers to the new grid. I think it was a good move to do this as I was much more pleased with the new block consistency.
And here it is with all 3 layers woven together.
Much more consistency after redoing layer #3. I can live with this version!
I had laid some woven fusible interfacing down before I started adding the strips. Once I removed all the pins, I taped the edges, gave it a good steaming to get the fusible interfacing to adhere a bit and then sewed all around the edges to keep it from coming apart.
Now…onto the coasters. How in the world could I cut this up to make coasters??? Oh my.
But I did. These are almost 6″ x 6″ which is a bit large for a coaster but here they are. All done!
I learned a lot from Mathew’s process. I wish I had taken a class from him first, as I’m sure he would have passed on a lot of his success secrets and do’s and don’ts. I will probably try another one or two of his woven projects from his book. That was fun!
Happy creating!
Tesi Vaara