Harlequin Vest

Woven on a Hand Held Pin Loom

I saw the cutest vest kit on Etsy and had to give it a try. It's called the Harlequin Vest for Zoom Loom, designed by Lois Weaver, a really lovely person to do business with.  You can buy the complete kit with the 4 inch Zoom Loom, but since I already had a hand loom, I bought the kit without the loom.

A Zoom Loom is a lot like those potholder kit looms that we used for Mother's Day gifts back in the day. I still have the one my kid made for me when in kindergarten. It's lovely. Seems as though she got tired of working on it so she just pulled it off the loom and wrapped it up. It's still my favorite (nonworking) potholder:

Anyway, back to the Zoom Loom. Here's what it looks like

The one I have is a 40 year old vintage loom, made from wood and finishing nails. Back then it was called a Weavette Loom. It worked just fine. I think they sell them on eBay. The Zoom Loom is a lot snazzier, made from polypropylene (I'm guessing) instead of wood and has a much wider base to hang on to compared to the Weavette Loom.

The vest comes in long or short versions in two sizes, S/M or M/L. I chose to make the long vest in the M/L size, necessitating 70 squares. Each square takes about 45 minutes to make.

So here's my completed vest, front and back with closeups:

 It is made with 5 skeins of  Tempo yarn  by Filatura di Crosa in the Sunset Color option. 

Since this is a variegated tweed yarn, the squares end up a range of sunset hues from maroon to orange with greens as a background. The real fun is to arrange the final squares into a pleasing arrangement.

It was great fun to fiddle with the colors. I love the way the front turned out. The back, well, since I used up every bit of the yarn making squares, it sort of fell into whatever arrangement was left. I had 2 squares left over, since I wanted to use up all the yarn and have at least a bit of leeway in selecting the squares to be used.

The directions were to hand sew each square to the next using the long tails left from weaving. That would be mind-numbingly boring for me, so I wove in all of the tails and sewed the squares together on my machine.

All in all, this was a fun project. I worked on it at night as I binge-watched Grantchester (1 season--slower going because I had to keep a sharp eye on that cute vicar), Broadchurch (2 seasons), Game of Thrones (1.5 seasons), Ray Donovan (1 season), and a boatload of old Barbecue Pitmaster episodes. My eyeballs have turned to rectangles from all that TV watching but in the meanwhile my squares turned into a lovely vest. (smile)