Thoughts from my first big project

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 be nice if it could beat harder without sliding, and maintain higher tension.

6) Stripes are fun, but if your draft uses picks instead of inches for measuring them, and you don't manage the same picks per inch that the draft expects, your towels are going to be unpredictable lengths.  That's OK, and was honestly kind of fun, but I didn't think about it until the second towel was a very different length from the first.

So I knew I wanted to keep doing this, and I knew the Artisat was not my perfect forever loom.  After a lot of research and some thinking about what options I wanted, I came up with the following wish list:

1) Taller.  I want to be able to work sitting straight up, and not whack my knees on the breastbeam.

2) Heavier.  While it would be nice if I could shift it if I needed to, I really wanted it to not move around while I was using it.

3) More versatile.  Jack looms are good for a lot of things, but run into trouble at the outer limits of low and high tension warps, as I understand it.

4) "Better" shed.  It would be nice if the shuttle didn't nose-dive through the shed quite so often.

After figuring that out, I knew I was stuck looking for a countermarch loom.  A counterbalance might work, but from what I've read they're not great for unbalanced weaves, and I didn't want to limit myself.

So I said to my partner "Well, I know what I'm looking for, and it's a countermarch loom.  But it's going to be a while, unless someone puts one on Facebook Marketplace for $500 or something."  Given that the usual price point is about $2000, I figured I wasn't going to have to think about it for quite a while.

Cue Facebook Marketplace showing me an ad (less than 24 hours later!) for a $500, one-of-a-kind, 125 year old countermarch loom.  I held out for a week, but then went to look at it.  I figured it was going to need some work (and all new heddles), but even if it ended up costing another $500 to repair I was going to be way ahead of the game, so I took a chance.  It's an 8 shaft, 12 treadle countermarch, and fairly small for that, though a lot bigger than the Artisat.  It also has some oddities... but I'll talk about those in a later post.