A Warped Adventure

 With the tie-up done, tensioning sorted (for the moment), and a warp threaded and sleyed, it's time to do some weaving! I tied up so the center two treadles are plain weave, and the four treadles around them are set up for 2/2 twill.  So from left to right, they're shafts 2&3, 1&4, 2&4, 1&3, 3&4, 1&2.  It's a little weird, but it means I can alternate feet while doing twill, everything is centered, and there's enough space between the sides that my feet don't run into each other. My current warp is 11" wide, 12 ends per inch, and of a grey wool.  It's what I used for testing on my Leclerc loom, so it's a good comparison.  Here's a short piece from when I was working on it on the Leclerc: Just ignore that some of the warp is black, there:  that yarn turned out to be terrible for warp, and I broke a lot of strands while I was working with it.  For this I'm just using the grey. While working, I've run into a couple of p...

 Now that I knew the loom was a loom, not an extravagant paperweight, it was time to get serious about setting it up.  There were still some questions (do I want larger heddles?  How will the shed look if the shafts are all the way at the back?  Am I going to need to replace the warping beam?), but they're not going to be answered except by setting everything up and giving it a try. So I cut off what I'd woven, wound it back to the warping beam, removed the cords from the treadles and lamms, took down the beater, and generally undid everything I'd spent a week doing.  Sadly, it didn't occur to me to take pictures, but it's not very interesting with just a frame sitting there.  Then I started replacing cord with texsolv, and now I understand why it's so popular.  So, more or less in order: 1) Re-hang the shafts.  Since there are no pins for the jacks, I use blocks of 1x2 to hold them in place.  Against all advice, I hung them as far back as po...

In the last chapter, I'd gotten the loom built, but had some doubts as to whether it was really a loom.  At that point, I decided to just go for it:  the goal was to see if it could be made to work, not to see if it ever worked before. As you may or may not know, countermarche looms are... complicated.  This one is a horizontal countermarche, meaning there's a cord that goes up through the middle of the warp to the jacks, and there are two jacks for every shaft.  I'd gotten as far as the previous owner ever had already.  She got it built, but never tied it up or put a warp on it. In the spirit of just moving ahead as quickly as I could, I put some 10 1/2" heddles on two shafts, used loops of poly cord to hold them up, and tied everything together.  In the end the shafts went up and down when I pushed the treadles, so I guess I did it right! (Eventually, after some trial and error.)  In all honesty it wasn't that bad:  two shafts and two treadles l...

 From the beginning, there were some oddities in this loom, but I mostly put them down to it having been disassembled and sitting for a long time.  And the price was right, so I figured some repairs were going to be necessary regardless. Once I got it assembled, there were three things that stood out, and the more I looked, the less I believed it had ever been used as a loom.  After getting it working, I'm even more convinced. First, the cloth beam had ratchet teeth, but they point the wrong way for the feed direction of the apron, and there's no pawl to catch them.  That's easy enough to fix:  just turn the apron around and add a wood or metal pawl.  This could have been a repair by someone who didn't quite know what they were doing at some point in the past. The second obvious issue was that there's a huge crack in the warping beam.  That's a little more of a problem, but it's massive enough that the crack shouldn't be an immediate problem.  If ...

The towels I made, and the lessons I learned. 1) 7 1/2 yards is NOT a good choice for a first "real" project.  It was a lot of yarn to deal with, and trying to warp the loom alone led to some tangling and cursing that might not have happened with a shorter warp. 2) The Artisat is a wonderful loom, but not quite sized right for me.  My knees bang into the cloth when I lift my legs straight up, which leads to some weird postures trying to step on the middle treadles. 3) A loom should not be fitted with felt pads on the bottom and then put on a hardwood floor.  A rug would be a much better choice.  Ideally, it would also be heavier than the Artisat. 4) I really enjoyed weaving, for many of the same reasons I enjoy woodworking:  at the end I have a tangible product, an actual thing that people will be able to look at and use for years, if I've done my job right. 5) If I'm going to keep weaving, which I want to do, I want a larger, heavier loom.  It would also b...

 Not too long after buying the rigid heddle, I found myself wanting to do something more complicated, which meant a floor or table loom.  For me, a table loom felt like a bad compromise:  I had floor space, I didn't have table space, and using foot treadles is supposed to be faster than levers. So I started keeping an eye on Facebook marketplace, and eventually found a Leclerc Artisat for a pretty good price.  It looked like it was going to need a lot of cleanup, but should be usable.  As it turned out, that was pretty accurate.  It needed all new heddles, and some new cord, but with that (and a lot of oil soap), I had a running floor loom! The first few things I put on it were samples:  wool warp and weft, and (relatively) cheap. After I got the hang of it, it was time for something real!  So I found a draft I liked, in "Free Hand Weaving Projects for Beginners", from Handwoven.  Shouldn't be a problem, right?  One warp, 7 dishtowels, a...