I'm so excited about my first weaving project!  I love the way it came out!
Diane of CraftyPod recently released her newest eBook, Weaving Un-Loomed and sent me a review copy.  There are six great weave-y projects in the eBook that each explore a different facet of loom-less weaving.

The eBook starts with four pages of  "The Secrets of Weaving" which is full of all sorts of great information about warp, weft, and creating designs with color or weaving techniques.  Diane gives you enough weaving knowledge not only to do the projects, but also to strike out on your own and get creative with weaving.

After reading the "Secrets" section and looking over the projects, I decided to try my hand at the woven applique because it's simple to execute, can be made small-scale, and has a high potential for cuteness.  

My idea was to do a little peacock feather weaving on my purple corduroy bag that I use to take my lunch to work.  Ignore the circular weaving plan on the right because, duh, you can't weave circular on parallel warps.  

Here is the initial green warp threads with the purple and bright blue weaving.  If I'd realized earlier I couldn't do the round weaving , those colors wouldn't be in squares, but, oh well.  I did better on the later colors. :)

The corduroy was nice for a first weaving project because when I made my warp threads, I could easily line them up on the wales of the fabric.  I pulled the threads a little too tightly on the right, and you can see that I pulled the warp thread over a little too much.  That mistake carries over to the finished piece, too, as you'll see.

Here's the finished weaving.  I love how well the weaving covers the fabric (except where I made the pulling mistake).  When embroidering it's super-hard to cover an area completely, so now I can use weaving as a tool in my embroidery arsenal.  Yay!

I picked the green as the warp thread color because peacock feathers are iridescent and I thought it would make the other colors sparkly.  It sorta works the way I thought it would.  I think the effect would be even better on a larger scale.

Here you can see my embroidery with all the other stuff I've sewn onto the bag.  The two patches are from swaps with Crafty McGee.  The vintage owl ribbon was a gift from Laquita of Sideshow Kitties about which Maitreya of Craftlog commented, "Wow, that owl trim is great! What are you going to use it for?" and I thought, "Probably I'm just going to hide it away in my stash."  That was too sad for such cute trim, so I cut off a bit and sewed it to the bag.

I finished this whole project in a couple hours yesterday afternoon, which I think is super quick for a first weaving project!  I whole-heartedly recommend Weaving Un-Loomed.  One of the cool things Diane did is split the eBook up into parts so that you can choose to buy the whole thing or just pay for the project instructions that you want, a la carte.  Man, I wish other craft books did that!

And to whet your weaving appetite, she made one of the projects available to you FOR FREE!  Visit the Weaving Un-Loomed page to download the Woven Wall Art pdf for free (scroll to the bottom of the page).