Weaving The Years

Day 68: The years have flown by at warp speed from the time I bought my first loom. It was a table loom, operated by jacks (hand levers), and as a deteriorating shoulder became more and more painful, I did less weaving than I would have liked. During the same period of time, my two favourite fiber suppliers closed up shop and it became difficult to find the threads and yarns common to the craft. Eventually, I put the table loom aside, sad that something I had so greatly enjoyed was possibly lost to me forever. Some years later, a knock sounded at my front door. The woman standing at the bottom of my steps was unfamiliar to me, but she explained that she'd talked to me at length about weaving and spinning during a yard sale I'd hosted a decade earlier. Then she asked, "Would you be interested in my four-foot floor loom? I don't use it any more." Exciting as that sounded, I had reason to suspect it was out of my reach. I asked her, "How much do you want for it?" Her response left me flabbergasted: "I want to give it to you."

One thing led to another, and a week or so later, I met her at her storage unit and we dismantled the loom in order to get it in my car. I brought it home with only a vague idea of how to put it back together, so launched into the project while the memory was still fresh. There were a few mishaps, fortunately easily rectified, and a few missing bolts, but by the end of the following day, I had a fully functioning loom occupying roughly 40 percent of the floor space in my back bedroom. It has not set idle more than a week or two at a time since that day.

These are just a few of the fabrics I've woven over the decades. I didn't keep samples at first, and many others required every inch of thread I had available. Most of the finished pieces are long gone, given as gifts. The only large piece I've retained for myself is the double-bed sized overshot coverlet which provides the background for the sample cards.