The Mannings

I’ll start with the bottom line. What a fantastic week. I would absolutely, positively, 100% recommend Beginning Weaving Week at The Mannings to anyone with an interest in learning how to weave. Tom is a fantastic teacher with the patience of a saint. I arrived at class a little worried about whether or not buying the loom had been a good idea. I left confident in my ability to warp that very same loom and get weaving.

Last Sunday, I met my mother in Cranberry to start our drive to The Mannings. As we went along, we realized we’d be driving right through Gettysburg. I’d never been, so we stopped briefly. One day, I’ll brush up on my Civil War reading and go back for a real visit.

But there was one place I absolutely had to stop while we were at Gettysburg.

RT, meet George Sears Greene!

That’s Gen. George Sears Greene, atop Culp’s Hill. Why did I make a point of visiting that particular statue in a gigantic battlefield with thousands of memorial statues? General Greene’s great great grandson was best man at my wedding!

Meanwhile, back to weaving, the theme of last week.


Class started on Monday and after just a bit of theory, we were all weaving away, on the far set of looms in the above picture. Oh, and yes, that’s corn straight out the window. Ground level is just a few inches below those windows in the back of the Loom House.

Within a few hours, RT was admiring two of the four dishtowels I completed over the course of the week.


By Tuesday, we had started on our twill samplers. I knew exactly where I wanted the finished project to land in my house, which meant I was the only person in our class doing a wall hanging instead of a table runner.


We picked yarns for our scarf projects on Wednesday (I picked two sock yarns. Go figure.) and warped our looms. Tom and his daughter Sara did their best to make sure all of us were working on a loom as close as possible to either what we already owned or what that person was considering purchasing. I was on an eight-harness Schacht loom that (hopefully) prepared me to warp my own loom.

We started weaving our scarf projects on Thursday. That wound up being my latest night, since both the dishtowels and scarves had to be ready to cut off the looms first thing Friday morning. Here’s my scarf:


I’ll show you my finished projects over the next few days. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll be going back and taking classes at The Mannings again.