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.

The Tail Project

Day 246: One drawback to weaving is that there is always a certain amount...sometimes quite a bit...of "loom waste," the section of warp between the heddles and the back beam. When calculating yardage requirements for a project, the weaver factors in an amount appropriate to that distance and the loom being employed. Different types of loom will have more or less waste depending on their design, so sometimes it's possible to take the waste from one loom and use it on another, or to use it as weft for narrow stripes. Oh, hang on! I've gotten ahead of myself with this story. You're probably wondering where this loom came from, aren't you? Yes, it's "new" (to me, anyway), given to me by a member of our Morris-dance side, and looking very much like a pile of kindling at the time I picked it up. The brochure she gave me to go with it was rather unhelpful. It wasn't that it was written in German; I could stagger through that. It was that it didn't show any model which went together with the parts I had laid out all over my living room floor. Several visits to Mr. Google later, I had a handful of blurry photographs which showed at least some of the parts (not always in the same places) and a model number, Kircher-Rahmen WU80. Don't even ask. YouTube was no help at all.

As the afternoon wore on, I discovered that the "pile of kindling" actually contained two looms, the Kircher and a tapestry frame, the parts of which could not be made to relate to the tapestry adaptation for the WU80. So...I got two looms for the price of one (free!), and two smaller rigid heddle looms (one missing a handle) thrown into the bargain. I'm still not sure I have all the parts in the right places, but what the heck, it's a loom. The heddles go up, the heddles go down, threads can be secured to the beams. That's really all any loom needs to do.

And that brings us now to the Tail Project, i.e., what to do with all those five-foot long bits of warp from my floor loom. I had to pull in some other yarns from my stash, but was eventually able to formulate a plan for a striped lap throw which will be fringed on all four sides, substantially reducing the number of bags of loom waste occupying my crafts room. As my grandma used to say, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." Weavers, take note. Those tails are good for something. Save them until you have enough.