weave4fun

Starting note. If you're a Greek weaver or a Greek speaking weaver and get bored with this rambling, please scroll to the bottom, I need your help with language. So, things didn't quite work out as planned in Dundee, for very personal reasons. As these things tend to do. I'm sure many of you have been in a similar position before. Something very central to your life changes and the life you have just doesn't make sense anymore. So, the upshot is, I couldn't afford to keep the flat anymore. The rent is more than I can afford, even when working at full capacity. I've been working as a delivery driver for Domino's Pizza and while it's a great deal of fun, very satisfying and my workmates were really good fun to get on with and the management was the best I've ever worked under, no matter how many hours I worked there'd be no way to make anything more than a subsistence level income with the rent. I'd thought of several option, I though of

This is my old tablet weaving loom. I guess calling it a loom is a bit of a stretch as it's basically a plank with a couple of bits of wood nailed to it to mount another bit of wood as a rudimentary cloth beam. Anyhow, it served it's purpose fine and all, but I only used it the once to make some particularly intricate bands from silk. It's a bit on the bulky side, and I need more bulky crap like I need a hole in the head. So I made a new one. I wanted to make a tablet weaving loom that was no bigger than it needed to be, that allowed one to weave a long warp, that had a spacer (helps both with combating twist and with keeping a consistent cloth width) and that most importantly could be made in pieces, shipped across the world in an A4 packet and put together without any nuts, bolts or glue. This loom also combines the technique I've found most helpful in tablet weaving (the spreading board) with the basic technology of a handloom. One of the benefits

Oioi Still not been posting much to the old blog recently. Things have been a bit busy. Been visiting my brother in Greece, and so much moving. So, yeah, life's been a bit hectic eh. So, I was staying in Galashiels and working at the uni as a technical assistant, repairing and maintaining the looms and running the power loom. First off, at the end of last summer, I moved my tools into a farm outbuilding at a pal's place in Earlston, about a 20 minute drive away from my house. I got a little bit done there, but not that much in the grand scale of things. Then in April I decided to rent a garage unit in the same town and moved my tools there. I then found a cast-iron dobby head online and decided to buy it and get the floor loom back from up north. The funny thing about this was that the dobby head was in the deep-south of England, which required two days of driving and added about £150 onto the (very reasonable) price of the thing. The thing came with a compressor.

Woop! So, this is largely Roslyn's idea. She had the idea of doing a kind of stepped-backwards grade in blocks on a dogtooth weave. As it goes, I misunderstood her and when she said dogstooth I heard herringbone, which is kinda odd, but it's still a twill I guess, so it works. Anyhow, we talked over it all night. I say all night, I mean till 1am. We didn't literally stay up all night mucking about with pointpaper and coloured pens. That would be obsessive to the point of compulsion. We might like weaving, but not to the point you'd have to call the men in white coats. So, anyway, this is going to be a sampler scarf. Now I made a mistake here when I was making the warp. One of the blocks is 4 ends too wide. I wove all this then Ros said "is that bit a bit bigger"? So I took the measure and it was, then I counted the ends and it had 32 instead of 28. So that's annoying. Now, this yarn is expensive stuff so I'm going to actually unpick th