Weaving

I've been working off and on, over the last couple of months, in building a simple table loom and trying it out.

The reference book I'm using is an older one, The Joy of Hand Weaving, by Osma Gallinger Tod, second edition. It is structured as a series of lessons, to take someone from being an absolute beginner at weaving, on into a fair number of intermediate and advanced techniques. There's enough in this book to keep the reader busy for years.

The plans for the loom I built are from this book, aside from a few small modifications of my own. I built the loom two inches wider, to allow me to weave fabric up to twelve inches wide. I put the stopping mechanisms for the rollers on the left side instead of the right. And for the reed/beater, instead of using thin cedar strips from cigar boxes to space the warp threads, I used bamboo skewers. You can still get wooden cigar boxes--there is a cigar box reseller here in the Twin Cities--but it seemed like it would be very difficult to nail the strips without splitting them. I found a hint online about using string to space the skewers, which are set within grooves.

All the wood and other parts are from materials we had lying around, except for the skewers, which cost $1.49 plus sales tax. I cheated and used power tools for a couple of steps, but it could have all been done with hand tools.

Once I had the loom and accessories made, I entered the process of achieving mastery by making every single mistake that could be made...to paraphrase physicist Neils Bohr. So far, I've discovered at least a dozen.

To wind the warp, I flipped over the coffee table that is in the picture, and wound around the legs in an X pattern. That worked well until I tried to take it off; the sticks I was using to keep everything straight (lease sticks) slid out and left me with a mess, but I eventually untangled enough to warp the loom with a yard or so of warp.

Then I experimented with using a wide variety of yarns and threads. The teal yarn in the photo was difficult to weave, because it has large nubs every few inches that kept getting caught on the warp threads. Another yarn was very thin, and took a lot of rows to make one inch of weaving. Still, I think it was good to start off with the more difficult yarns, as an attentive beginner.

My first weaving I hung up as a wall hanging. I've started on a small rug, which I will have to weave in strips, then join, but I haven't gotten very far with it yet.

One thing that surprised me about weaving was how tiring it was at first to be reaching so far forward so frequently, until I grew some more muscle to help hold my arms up.