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Showing posts from March, 2009

loom in danger

there is a loom in the lake district that is in danger of being chopped into firewood. for reasons that are too long-winded to go into on a wee 15-minute net sesh, i find myself in the central belt of scotland about to take a trip to greater manchester and back. there was a dobby loom in the same location, and i was considering running over to rescue the box and reeds, but somebody has bought the loom as a One. there's still another loom though, a 4 shaft counterbalance by the look of things, tho was unsure from my phone conversation. but it has a beater bar, with fly shuttle. and i'm starting to think that it might be worth my time doing it on foot, just to rescue the beater bar, shafts, back and cloth beams, pullets, ratchets and all that. i would feel awful taking a saw to a loom to cut off the useful parts, but i guess it's no different from taking the good components form a messed up old car that's gonna be scrapped i don't want to break it into bits, but if it

lovely pink yarn

i'm going to weave it in a 2/2 basket weave twill on the table loom. i can't figure out how to turn the picture round on this computer. i really hsould prepare these posts at home before i go out.

Teaching weaving

hooray! I taught my first person to weave on a loom today! It's the lady who taught me to spin, Anne, and she's got this wee Kromski Rigid Heddle loom, with a stand and all that she got at woolfest. it's quite a pretty wee loom, very nicely made, and it's got a warping frame built into it with the removable pegs and all that. the ratchet mechanism is not very good though. never mind. anyway, i managed to make a right hipse of the warping demonstration, doing everything back to front and that. but we eventually got a wee warp onto it with some disposable machine-knitting cotton and started getting some checks woven up. it doesn't seem to work too well with the stand as it goes, i don't think it's that stable. but it's cool, cos you can just lean it against the edge of a table. used to do that with my table loom actually, but it's uncomfortable cos it's heavy. anyhow, yeah, wow. i am so incredibly bad at explaining things, it's completely unrea

The 100 scarf project

Hi there. I know i haven't had much of substance to say recently, but i haven't been idle. Oh no. You've seen the green and white scarves from a previous post maybe, and perhaps you've also seen in my last post a tri-colour scarf shot on the loom from a curious angle. I was originally going to call that series of scarves "Accidentally Irish" because i didn't realise till the warp was on the raddle that it was basically an irish tri-colour, and thus something you can't wear or sell in certain parts of Northern Ireland or the Central Belt if you're an excessively careful sort like me. Now, I am developing with this a scarf that can be woven inexpensively. In the first warp i left 5 inches between scarves for twisted fringes. And that's all well and good, and terribly nice, but it took me ages to twist the fringes up for finishing. So i scrapped twisted fringes in the name of efficiency. In the second, Accidentally Irish, warp I decided to leave h