Stages Of Feline Development

Day 149: After seeing a cute design for cats woven on an eight-shaft loom, I set about hunting for one I could do on four shafts without having to weave it as false damask. I was unable to find a draft, but I was not ready to give up on the idea. Thinking in terms of both pickup and overshot, I figured I could effect much the same thing with only two sheds and a lot of patience, so I ran a short, narrow warp on my smaller rigid heddle loom, got out the graph paper and made a preliminary design. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, but as it turned out, the first few attempts came closer to my vision than I'd anticipated. I still have a few refinements to make: longer tail with more curve, one additional row on the body, reduction of the left shoulder by one X, but at least I have a recognizable cat.

One Thing At A Time

Day 95: You've heard it said that there are exceptions to every rule. Weaving is the exception to my self-imposed restriction which dictates that I can only work on one project at a time of any particular type of fiberart. Knit, crochet, tat, etc., I am only allowed one of each in progress. Why is weaving different? Because there are so many different ways it can be done. Certainly, all of them involve crossing vertical threads with horizontal ones if it comes right down to it, but each style of weaving requires a different skill-set to achieve the end result. Although three of the looms in the picture are small and portable and generally occupy the living room when in service, the floor loom (a corner of which is visible in the lower right) is what gives the "Loom Room" its name. It went into that room in pieces, and the only way it will ever come out is if it is dismantled. It occupies over a quarter of the available floor space. Looms not currently in use take up much of what remains. I nearly always have at least two looms in operation, and there has never been a time when all of them were empty at once.

Loom Types

Day 112: Gosh, here I am, rambling on about heddles and sheds, and I haven't shown you the most important part: the looms themselves! And forgive me, I had finished assembling the collage before realizing that I'd left out backstrap, so you'll just have to imagine a simple warp attached to a hook on one end and my waist on the other.

When I'm ready to engage in a serious weaving project which requires a long warp and a time commitment of several weeks or even months, I set it up on my four-foot floor loom (top left). This beast occupies the better part of my crafts room which, despite the name, is not a room where I do crafts, but rather the space in which all my supplies are kept. A floor loom needs a home of its own. It's not the type of thing you put in your living room for several reasons. One, it won't leave much room for guests and two, the act of weaving generates an uncommon amount of lint as the fibers rub against each other and against the parts of the loom. If you are thinking about getting a floor loom, you might want to ask yourself what it would be like to have a St. Bernard in the house. Right. Moving on, then.

A far more reasonable consideration for the casual hobbyist weaver would be a table loom. The distinction between it and a floor loom is somewhat loosely defined because many table looms can be mounted on floor stands, and kits are available for some to convert from jack operation (hand levers) to treadles, essentially turning the "table" model into a floor loom. Better to think of it as a matter of size. A table loom fits on a table. A floor loom does not. My table loom is shown center bottom, currently unwarped because I have a project on the floor loom. You can see the jack levers at the center top, two up and two down.

Rigid heddle looms (left and right bottom) are very portable and a good place for a novice weaver to begin. They are built to be used on a table-top, but can also be mounted in a floor stand. Table space being at something of a premium around here, both of mine are on stands. Although the one on the left is being used in the customary fashion while I weave a scarf, the one on the right holds a tablet-weaving project, its warps weighted with water-filled Gatorade bottles (the same warp-stretching method I use to warp my floor and table looms by myself). A major difference between standard weaving looms and rigid-heddle looms is in the heddles. Metal straps, wires or strings are used to hold the warp threads in sequence on a standard loom. These heddles slide along bars in the harness frame, permitting the weaver to use almost any size thread which will pass through the eye. On the other hand, a rigid heddle is exactly that: rigid, i.e., a piece of plastic with a set number of eyes and slots per inch. To change the number of threads per inch, the weaver has to swap out one rigid heddle for another of a different size. However, when using a floor/table loom, the number of threads per inch is determined by the reed, a slotted metal guide which is held in the beater bar. Weaver argot for this is "dents per inch," i.e., the number of slots in an inch of reed. It is important to note here that sometimes more than one warp thread is drawn through each dent. For example, I once wove a linen piece at 45 threads per inch, but since my finest reed was a 15-dent reed, each dent carried three warp threads.

Last in the collage is the inkle loom (upper right). Inkle looms are designed to make narrow bands for use as trims, straps or belts. The resulting product is similar to that produced by tablet-weaving, although generally not as thick. The warp threads are manipulated by hand on an inkle loom to form the shed through which the shuttle passes.

New Toys

Day 102: After banking almost all of my first economic stimulus check, I decided that the second one might be better applied to some stimulus toward keeping me sane. To that end, I bought myself two new toys, and each has a tale behind it. The first is a bit sad, and concerns the rigid-heddle loom I was given by a friend in our Morris dancing group. I was excited to have a larger rigid heddle at my disposal and warped it up with a project at nearly the full width. After creating six inches of cloth, it was time to advance the warp. To my ultimate dismay, I found that one of the gears would not engage, apparently worn out from use. I managed to transfer the weaving to my floor loom (a process I devoutly hope never to have to repeat!) and thus saved the piece, but the rigid heddle was beyond hope. I was back where I started, with a 10" SampleIt as my only rigid heddle. The new one is a 16" Ashford, mounted here on a floor stand. I purchased it from a dealer in Oregon, but it was shipped to me express mail at no charge all the way from New Zealand!

The second half of the story is funny in hindsight. One of the essential tools any weaver must have is a warping board or warping reel of some sort to aid in measuring out long warp threads. I have a large warping board, so when my mother passed away and I was sorting through her weaving supplies, I decided to yard-sale her smaller warping board which, as I realized several years later, wasn't a warping board at all, but her inkle loom! I'll chalk the mistake up to having been pretty stressed-out at the time, but believe me, I felt pretty silly about it when I discovered what I'd done. Such being the case, I wanted to add an inkle loom to my weaving studio partly to hold the tablet-weaving projects I am currently draping over the 10" rigid heddle (an unorthodox procedure), but also to be able to make inkle bands in the approved manner.

All three items (the rigid heddle, its stand and the inkle loom) required some assembly and the wood (New Zealand white birch) was unfinished. Presently, I'm waiting for the first coat of varnish to dry, anxious to come up to warp speed on both of my new toys.

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.

Rigid Heddle Weaving - Log Cabin

Day 326: Weaving on a rigid heddle loom is a new experience for me, and although the basic principle (creating sheds, passing a shuttle) is the same as weaving on a standard loom, the operation is different. Rather than using treadles or jacks to change sheds, the weave raises or pushes down on heddles set in a frame. Notches in the sides of the loom allow the frame to be locked in place, freeing up the hands for shuttle operations. The warp is wound onto a roller in the same manner as it is on a regular loom, and the finished cloth is advanced in the same way. Since there are only two possible sheds (the positions of the threads) with rigid-heddle weaving, more elaborate patterns require the use of pick-up sticks or a second heddle kit if one can be used with that particular loom (mine allows it). That said, some interesting patterns can be woven simply by changing colours in the warp or weft. Here, I am weaving a log-cabin pattern using a repeat of B-W-B-W-B-W-B-W, W-B-W-B-W-B-W-B. Note that at the ends of each half-sequence, the order reverses and the last thread of the first half is the same colour as the first thread of the second half. Using the same two-part sequence in both warp and weft results in a change of the dominant colour in each block.