A New Old Loom

Day 9: Earlier this year, one of the members of our Morris-dance side offered me an old loom she thought she'd never use. Never one to pass up a fiber-arts tool, I masked up and went to collect it. She'd stacked the pieces on her porch so that we could maintain social distance while I loaded it into my car, but to my way of thinking, there was a lot more wood in the pile than could be accounted for in the structure of a single loom. Once I got home, I began sorting parts and in the end, found that they went together to make a simple frame loom, one large and two smaller rigid heddle looms. The mid-size rigid heddle is shown here with its first project half-loaded. It came with one heddle, the dents much too large for any of my preferred weaving fibers, so I started looking for smaller gauge reeds with very little success. The manufacturer was unknown and the dimensions didn't seem to correspond with any name brand, so I got on the horn to the nice people at Halcyon Yarns to see what they could recommend. In the end, I bought two Schacht reeds and cut them down to fit the blocks. As engineering projects go, it wasn't a difficult task, and the end result was that I now have a fully functional 21-inch rigid heddle loom, perfect for those larger short-term projects like this shawl.