Category Archives: Looms

Oak & Fern Bathroom Mat

Looms, Project, Weaving, , ,

The first project to be started in the studio is a bathroom mat/rug for the yet to be completed studio bathroom (currently used as storage for all the bathroom fittings plus a few light fittings that Anne has managed to find at heavy discount). I wove a rug for a customer in Townsend and wound extra warp as I had always intended to weave another rug using the same style of weft yarn. The warp is heavy linen and the weft was a trial of a method to produce ‘random’ coloring through the whole rug. To achieve this I had to ply three cotton warp yarns together first. Two in solid colors and the third in a variegated yarn that contained the two solid colors as well. When woven the colors come and go and form clumps and stripes as colors match from weft shot to weft shot.

‘Pete’ in place on the studio floor. Warp ready to be threaded.

The threading and tie up was straight forward and I was all ready to throw the first shuttle in the Oak & Fern studio. Worthy of a photo (and glass of wine to celebrate).

I wove a few inches using the warp yarn that will eventually be rolled to make a fully reversible binding on the ends. Then on to the actual weaving.

The ply of the yarn makes sloping/diagonal lines appear and disappear – obvious here with the white highlights. The colors in this stripe are the ‘oak’ part of the rug. The new yarn arrived yesterday so I was able to move on to the ‘fern’ stripe. The oak yarn has an ‘S’ twist so the diagonal runs right to left. With the fern yarn it is ‘Z’ twist which runs left to right. This will give a zigzag look as the stripes change.

Each ski shuttle holds enough for two stripes and is a full bobbin worth of yarn. I need to adjust the tension on my Ashford Traditional wheel as this needs a fairly high tension to wind on. The twist goes in fast so the set up has to be fairly free flowing or too much spin ends up in the yarn. I’ll get some pictures as I get into ‘production mode’

In the meantime with another fine day before rain I’m working up on the roof putting on shingles so won’t get to the weaving until tonight.

Macomber Modification

Looms

Way back (10+ years) when I acquired ‘Big Mac’ – a 56″ 8 shaft Macomber Loom – my first job was to clean everything – repaint and resurface, find replacements for missing parts, and one of the biggest jobs was empty years worth of accumulated sunflower seed hulls from the hollow space at the center of the warp beam. They had almost certainly been put there by industrious mice over a period of a few years when the loom was stored in a garage. No real damage to the woodwork or metal parts of the beam.

As the loom was pretty well in use from then on and inside I hadn’t worried about something similar happening, but just this last week I moved the loom from the temporary location in our spare room to the studio space (finally). The build is far from complete, but as the studio portion is clear and clean and covered by a roof we thought a) we should be using it and b) it would finally clear a couple of rooms in the house of their accumulated weaving/spinning/fiber ‘stuff’.

Living surrounded by 18 acres of forest pretty well ensures we have the odd rodent and despite the fact there are occasional sightings of a Black Rat snake in the garage I had to make sure we didn’t end up with a similar stash of sun flower hulls.

In the picture the black cross bracket holds the central axle, with a small triangular gap between each arm. I cut out some thin sheet steel to fit and then tacked them into place. All my other looms are either solid or sealed so now with this fix hopefully the rodent problem is solved, although I’ll be checking.

‘Big Mac’ will be set up to weave the 2020 Christmas towels which if I get underway this month it will be the earliest start yet!! Time will tell.

Guild Activity

Looms, Project, Weaving

I volunteered (was volunteered?) to run the January program for the Scenic Valley Handweavers Guild (scenicvalleyhandweavers.blogspot.com) as they had a gap in their program.  I recalled a program we had at the Wellington Weavers Group I had participated in during our year back in NZ.  The group set up a loom (it was an 8 shaft table loom) with a white warp with a point twill threading then each member participating wove their own yarn as weft in one of the many suggested variations of treadling.  Anne and I both produced very nice looking towels when our turn came up.  The idea was you wove your sample and then moved the loom on to the next person on the list. It seemed like an ideal exercise for this guild as it would give our rigid heddle weavers a chance to experiment with a table loom.

Phyllis (who owns R&M Yarns where we have our monthly meetings (www.rmyarns.com)) had a nice handmade table loom out the back, and I took on the task of dressing the loom before the meeting and preparing some basic guidance for using the loom and some information on drawdowns and designs that might be woven on the point twill (for 4 shaft) threading.

20190114_114826-774x1032

The warp was 8/2 cotton (donated by Phyllis) and I wound on enough for 10 people to participate (weaving around 22 inches of their chosen design in their choice of 8/2 cotton (or other) and some space between woven tabby to make into rolled hems.  The threading almost went perfectly, but unfortunately I discovered a threading error – made a quick replacement heddle and fixed the error, but I should have checked a little bit more thouroughly.  It looked right on the tabby sheds, but I didn’t check if I had fixed it for the twill sheds. As it turns out the error looked to be gone, as on a tabby shed the fix I did put it on shaft 2 and it would have looked the same on shaft 4.  Unfortunately for twill it was the wrong choice (should have been 4) which I didn’t pick up until I started weaving twill after my header/tabby hem!  I left it in and pointed it  out during my intro!

My own choice for pattern and color was for a potential gift towel set done in red, white, and blue (the white being the warp) and the colors coming in from the 2/2 twill weft shots.  The point twill will produce diamonds if woven 1234, 1234, 1234, 3214, 3214, 3214 and repeating, but I expanded that sequence by not only weaving 2/2 twill but starting with 1/3 twill then 2/2 twill then 3/1 then reverse and repeat with each having a portion of the complete sequence.  This stretched the diamond out and shows varying amounts of the white background.  I changed between red and blue after each complete sequence.

The design came out reasonably well (minus the white line on the right side – the threading error) and has a certain 4th of July fireworks look about it, so I think it will be a go for making some sets for sale/gifts come May/June.  I’ll do that on one of my floor looms as although the table loom works just fine it is fairly slow weaving when you have to change each shed by hand.  On a floor loom I can do a direct tie-up and treadle with my feet and just throw the shuttle and beat.

At the February meeting the loom was on the number 7 person so should be all finished by our next meeting.  I will cut the samples off – wet finish them and cut them up to hand out a the following meeting.  For the March meeting we are doing a similar exercise but with a rigid heddle loom which I am looking foward to as I have not had much experience with that type of weaving.

TAG Picnic

Equipment, Festivals, Looms, Weaving

Saturday this week was the Townsend Artisan Guild annual picnic.  The event was held at the Metcalf Bottoms pavilion in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park about half way between Townsend and Gatlinburg.

I headed off a little early so that I could call in to some of the many antique stores on the way north that are often closed when I am traveling to and from Townsend.  Along the way I managed to pick up a couple of old rip saws – rusty but otherwise OK. They will need some cleaning, but rip saws are expensive and pretty hard to find as power tools are to most common option.

IMG_9353

Around 40 people attended the picnic and there was a lot of activity in and around us at the many other picnic tables and a constant stream of folk heading to and from the river.  At mountain elevations the temperature was easily 10 degrees cooler than in the valley where it was in the mid to high nineties.

I also picked up the TAG Harrisville Design loom.  This is the one I have used on multiple occasions to demonstrate weaving.  They are short on storage space and don’t really have any other weavers.  I’ll look after the loom and make sure it is ready for demonstrations and also potentially set up and run some weaving classes for interested members.

IMG_9352

The warp on the loom is the one I put on so that the Scenic Valley Handweavers could use the loom to demonstrate at the last Smoky Mountains Fiber Arts Festival.  I wove the first few stripes to give them an idea how to proceed.  I can see we’ll need some lessons on reversing twill stripes and consistent beating!!

Loom Loss

Looms

Somewhat belatedly but in the process of digging out equipment photo’s I realized I would have to update the status of my loom ‘holdings’.  At the end of last year we lost our storage and workshop sheds in a fire caused by some rodents finding a warm spot for their winter months.

20171218_131340-001
After the fire

It was pretty close to a 100% write-off. Just some metal tools survived and in the picture to the left – the hot tub and decking was scorched but survived (I was frantically pouring water on it once Anne arrived home and was able to keep the back of the house wet!).

There were many significant losses which included my first loom, which my father built and wove on for 20 or so years.  I didn’t have room in the little room I call my studio in the house to store the loom so it was stacked in pieces in the workshop.

112_1203_1
The loom in action in NZ

This loom had followed me around through two local moves in Wellington, then to Palmerston North, then storage and back to Wellington before finally being packed up and moved to the US.

Three or four pieces survived as they were not in the shed at the time and I may try to recover and clean that wood (it was scorched) and make something from it.   However, for that I need to build another workshop and replace a lot of tools!!