Skip to main content

Re-organising Heddles

Getting ready to put as large a warp as possible on my 4-shaft bigloom, it occured to me that since buying the thing, i've never counted the heddles. So i did, and it turned out they were unevenly distributed across the shafts, which isn't much good is it?

So, i took the frames apart, recounted all the heddles along with the spares and find i have about 1000 metal heddles. Which is nice. Making a warp of 30epi, as i tend to do (based on 2 ends per dent on a 14 dent reed on my table loom), that should give me a warp of a width of, ooh, let's see

1000 % 30 = 33.33'

So, about 2 and 1/3rd feet or so. which i suppose ain't bad. but if i want to ever consider weaving silk i'm gonna need a lot more heddles like.

Now, as i'm in the mood, i might as well calculate the metreage of a 4m warp of 1000ends

which isn't difficult, that's 4 KM of yarn. not bad.

Am i wittering?

Maybe

Anyhow, I'm making a warp with blue and grey yarn running concurrently, to make a warp of blue, blue, grey, grey. Doing the same with the weft, i will create a fabric of tiny little squares. Which will, presumably, be nice.

I can't decide whether to do it in plain weave, straight 2/2 twill or back n forth diamond twill. So i think i will maybe just warp it as a normal 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 so i can do plain weave or a straight 2/2 twill at my leisure. see what works. I have high hopes. Maybe i'll at least get the shafts tied up tonight, and hopefully be able to work up the motivation to warp the thing up tomorrow.

Once that's done it's done, and i can batter away at it in my time off and maybe get it done by the end of the week with any luck. In the meantime i still have maybe 3 metres of a minor disaster to weave up on the table loom. I mixed up far too many colours and bolloxed up the threading of a varied diamond twill and have thus created a fabric that i find singularly unappealling. Oh well, lesson learned i suppose. It's difficult to use more than 3 or 4 colours together without ballsing it up completely, as i have done. But, i can't waste it, so i must finish it, cos it represents about £10 worth of wool and it'd be a shame to waste it. Maybe i could try a plain weave with a thin weft to maybe create a warp faced fabric, that might work i suppose. I guess i have nothing to lose and might as well just try whatever i can think of. I mean, it couldn't really get any worse.

Actually, it occurs to me that i should maybe be using a thicker weft for warp face. is that right? i'm not sure. See, this is what happens when you batter away at weaving experimentally with no tuition. Sometimes, you achieve excellent results, sometimes you create something ok, and occasionally you balls it up completely. Whilst, in the meantime, you just get confused and fail to take proper notes and forget what your lessons learnt were.

So, like i say, once I've got that mess out of the way, i'm going to attempt to recreate this which is a really lovely spiral twill doo-da thing. it looks to me like both warp and weft are running orange,black,orange,black alternately in a 12 and 12 pointed twill, maybe. It's bloody hard on the brain trying to analyse fabric from a Jpeg on a wee laptop screen. i think i might print it out and take it home and pore over it with a magnifying glass. Anyhow, that's just a tiny sample of that lady's nice work. She is well talented, really nice stuff and worth checking out

Cheers for now

-a

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Screw print 1.1

First in a series of screw tests. I'm designing a 3D printed loom and am documenting the design process. I have already come up with the preliminary shape of the thing, but shall keep that under wraps until I'm ready to launch. I am currently attempting to make a 3D printed screw for operating the hinge. Currently the loom is designed with a 20mm wide screw and screw hole so I am working from this for the time being. The parameters I shall initially be varying are the thread size and the clearance (push). I have had good results printing a slot-together joint with a push of 0.125 so shall start from there. Standard dimensions will remain the same throughout all variations of 1.x, specific dimensions will be changed according to the results. Print setting will most likely stay the same, at least until I start narrowing down on Specific Parameters and feel perhaps the printing quality needs to be improved. Standard dimensions thread size 20 x 20mm Spec...

Tablet Weaving Lesson #1: Backstrap weaving a simple diamond motif

This is the first in a series of video and photo tutorials showing basic to advanced tablet-weaving concepts. These lessons shall each build on the last and hopefully take the viewer from simple diamond patterns up to more complicated double face pattern weaving with finer yarns and eventually onto the heady heights of brocading and other fancy techniques (just as soon as I learn how to do them myself). In this first lesson we'll learn the basic weaving steps involved in weaving a diamond pattern in the backstrap style. This lesson is meant for someone who has purchased a ready-made warp from me. The next lesson shall detail how to design and make this warp oneself. And we begin This is the basic pattern we are making. The woven band is tied to my waist with another strap. I am holding a small stick shuttle in my right hand which contains the weft. In front of me are the cards, each card has 4 warp threads going through it. The gap that you can see is called the ...

3D printed folding loom Version 1

Hey there! Been wanting to talk about this for aaaaaaaages. But by god does designing medium scale 3D printed objects take a long time. Anyhow, I've been designing this thing since maybe August and been printing since late October. Here's a couple of pictures of it open. I'm just freehanding that pattern. I kind of fluffed up the last two switchovers. And it was meant to be a knotwork but it clearly isn't. I really need to learn to draft things out before weaving them, I'm not good enough at sketching. Same thing on paper actually, I can draw stuff in front of me (to an extent) but I can't sketch from my head. Anyhow, here's a couple of pictures of the thing closed up. Boom! So, that's nice. I'm quite happy with the progress so far. Now, onto the issues. The big circles that form the hinge get in the way of my hands when i'm weaving and I'm always bumping my knuckles off them. Would probably work better for rigi...