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.