With the work on the studio stairs still underway all the looms are in ‘storage’ positions out of the way of the actual building. I have deadlines to meet on the next two projects so one solution was to move ‘Gypsy’, the HD 21 inch 4 shaft portable loom into the kitchen. The work I had to do was to re-sley the reed to see how my combined card weaving/floor loom would look on a 10 dent reed rather than the original 8 dent. The first test was at 8 dent and each group of 4 warp yarns has to go through the same dent in the reed. This spread it out a little too much so that the weft showed up in the finished sample. Typically you don’t see the weft in a card woven sample. The warp yarn easily moved around in the dent at 8 so I was confident that at 12 it would work and bring the warp yarn groups closer.

The re- sleying worked fine and then the tying on of both the card woven portion and then floor loom parts.

It has taken a while to get the tension and beat ‘right’ as while the card woven part in now better, the twill weave on the floor loom sections is now a completely different sett. It was 2 ends per dent in the first example (16 epi) and is now 1 end per dent (10 epi). It requires just ‘placing’ the weft rather than an actual beat.

I’ve ended up with the card weaving upside down, hence the second photo of the underneath of the woven portion!!

I’ll carry on weaving this now so I have plenty to be seen at the guild meeting in October where I am going to show everyone how it is done.

In a typical ‘the best laid plans of…’ fashion yesterday we set off into the forest to gather some firewood to heat the hot tub. We’d not gone more that a couple of hundred yards when the definite sound of heavy rain on trees could be heard approaching from the west. We turned around and barely made it back to the house before a heavy deluge started and along with some thunder, continued through until lunch time. Out backup indoor plan was to start teaching Anne how to do beaded kumihimo ahead of the May 2027 Birchwood Fiber Festival ( https://birchwoodfiberfestival.com/ ) where she will likely be assisting in a class teaching students this technique. We had to time how long various aspects of the process would take so that we could see if it was going to be at all possible in a 2-3 hour session.

First step was to wind yarn (20/2 unmercerised cotton) into groups of 6 and attach them onto the tamas (bobbins). With that done we then had to put the required beads onto each strand.

That all went smoothly and we attached the 8 tamas to the marudai ready for braiding. I used mine and Anne used the marudai I had made as a test. The idea was to be able to demonstrate the actual techniques without having to swap places on the one marudai. We braided 1/3 plain braid then 1/3 with beads and then 1/3 plain again. The basic plan for a class is we would have everything up to almost the end of the first 1/3. Everything would be set up and ready to go from then so the new student only needed to learn the basic braiding moves then braiding with beads then finish off the last portion. Seeing this was a first time for Anne we timed her as our ‘test case’ Sadly she is a very quick learner and once started was almost as fast as me and she didn’t make any mistakes (like I did, requiring an un-braid, re-braid to fix putting two instead of one bead on one turn!!). It still showed that our basic plan still seems sound.

We have noted any improvements to be made and I’ve ordered the clasps to make these into necklaces or if the plain braid is cut shorter; bracelets. Once we cut them off and finish them I’ll drop the pictures into a future post.

We can now return the ‘craft’ table to normal kitchen table work, and now the loom is up and running move that back to the studio. We’ll have a kitchen again.