Mixed Media

Day 93: There is very little instructional material available for either Scandinavian-style band looms or for krokbragd weaving and, as far as I know, nothing which combines the two. Since krokbragd can be worked on an inkle loom, I was sure there was some way to adapt it to the bonker. I have long known that I do my best thinking when I'm horizontal, and thus it was that I passed a mostly sleepless night visualizing the various ways the loom could be set up to give three sheds. When I finally came up with what I thought was a workable solution, I wasn't sure if I'd have to remove one pair of heddle pegs in order to have enough space to lower...not raise as you would on an inkle loom, mind you...to pull down the threads not required in the active layer. As it turned out, I was able to leave the unused pegs and heddles in place, rigging secondary heddles on two carabiner "handles" so that I could pull them out of the way as groups. There were a few foibles to work out along the way. I'd crossed two threads while I was warping my sample and the sheds wouldn't open properly, and when I tried to shortcut fixing the issue, I compounded it instead. Then in the process of re-warping, I fouled it up even further and wound up cutting the first few inches of the sample off so that I could start over from scratch. Once I got that sorted out, things went smoothly, and I successfully finished up two yards of sample in very short order. That said, it was Friday the 13th, and Murphy had plans. That will be the subject of a future post.