weave4fun

It's taken me a little while to get round to this. Finally though,  I have the space and,  in the form of the remains of a large pile if shafts we got shot of from work over the summer,  the materials. Lots of pieces of wood of uniform dimensions. Nice strong stuff too,  tasty. Also,  the drop saw makes short work of cutting the stuff down. I drew up some plans the other night,  and built the frame and Castle today. The castle has been built in such a way that I expect to be able to be able to swap different shedding systems in and out. The castle is probably a little tall just now,  but I thought better bigger than smaller. The first shedding mechanism I'll install will be counterbalance,  then maybe a countermarche and perhaps eventually a jack mechanism,  though I'll need a router to do that,  so it may have to wait for some time. Also,  there are lessons to be learned in the process.  Even in the building of the frame...

I've been thinking about it for a while to be fair. What I'm thinking about is an 8 shaft folding jack loom. The interesting part comes when I point out that I'm going to build an electric dobby controller into the bottom of it so it operates from one pedal and a computer program. So far I've been thinking and thinking and I'm basically roughly copying the kind of frame you'd find in a Siever's school or Baby wolf loom. Basically it's like an X that folds up on itself with the castle in the middle. Should be able to reduce it's depth from 3 feet to about 1 for storage. I don't think it's really that difficult to design the loom frame, aside from building the beams and making the ratchets and so on, which I may just jigsaw out of thick MDF. I have most of the wood I need asides from some panelling and I need to buy some aluminium sheet to make the shaft dividers with and also to hold the shaft bodies together with. The rising levers w...

I had the priviledge this week of paying host to Laura Fry and Kerstin Froberg. Sadly, they arrived the day before the bank holiday and had to leave the following afternoon so were unable to receive the tour of the School of Textile And Design they were hoping for. Never mind though, as weavers are weavers and we love to talk about weaving. Over dinner and a pint or two we discussed many subjects including Vadmal, the pros and cons of AVL looms and the routes by which each of us came to weaving. It was a very nice evening and a real delight to meet other weavers with such a depth of passion and knowledge. Why I didn't take any pictures I'll never know, I guess I was just too busy chatting away about looms and yarn and going on about how I learned to weave upside down and back to front and made myself do everything the hard way (which stands me in good stead when I have to rescue other people's warping errors). Interestingly, I'd had it in my head the Laura wa...

I love Jacquard weaving. It's official. You'll probably notice an interesting wee effect there in the black areas of this cloth. The reason for this is that this cloth has 2 layers but 4 different wefts, meaning there's always 2 wefts floating in the middle of the cloth at any time. This is what allows me to weave 4 seperate colours across the width of the cloth. Which is pretty neat. Jacquard weaving is pretty neat, but it's difficult to wrap your head around it unless you start off simple. Luckily, I have a love of geometric patterns.    That's a wee taster of one of my coming final samples. I'm not shouting this stuff to the rooftops.  This is something I find pleasing. My sister's new puppy, Lenny. Thinks he's a draught excluder, currently here trying to get a rise out of my Eris

Not much else to say. Sometimes you run out of heddles, or perhaps you have to add one after you're started warping due to a threading error, so here's how I do it.

So, the looms at college are not generally as clean as I'd like them to be. This is to be expected as I'm a little bit odd when it comes to looms. My loom at home is tenderly cared for and loved whenever I see it. Which isn't often, sadly. But heyho. Anyway, I was unhappy using shafts that had all sorts of random, bent, different sized heddles, many on the wrong way round and some crossing each other. So I found a couple of rounds of barely-used heddles in a cupboard and decided to take the old ones off and put the new ones on. Also, I wanted to clean the loom anyway, as I am unhappy with the idea of weaving on an unclean loom, it seems like it'll make the cloth dirty. And I don't want dirty cloth. So, for the first time in this establishment I have orderly heddles. And a clean loom. I don't know if I mentioned that I managed to get texsolv put on all the looms instead of the manky old cotton string, so now we get better shedding. Hurrah! I love...

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...