Swedish Loom Rescue: Part 1

Someone posted on Ravelry that there was a loom looking for a home. It was in pieces, had belonged to the lady’s grandmother, and was more of a restoration than the new weaver could conquer.

I couldn’t resist.

So, I came home with a pile of wood and got to work.

The shape of the body and those overhanging arms make me think Swedish loom. The lady said they lived in a Scandanavian community near Camrose, so … that would fit.

I get the impression it’s had several incarnations. The loom frame is put together with pegs (no nails, no screws), even the ratchet is attached with a wooden peg.

The overhead bar that the heddles hang from isn’t quite right though, nor are the metal heddles … this kind of loom would traditionally have string heddles on pulleys, and the beater bar (which is made partly from plywood) doesn’t rock properly …

I need to build a cradle, and add some adjustable support pegs, like this:

(A piece of wood with holes drilled through it then sliced in half on the table saw oughta work.)

Regardless, the adventure has been keeping me out of trouble for the last couple of days. So far I have:

• Sanded everything with the palm sander
• Stained (many many coats)
• Waxed
• Rubbed dry
• Cleaned all the metal bits
• Reassembled treadles and lamms (with better spacers than the chunks of wood that were on it – I used lengths of garden hose between the treadles as it’s nice and quiet, and the round rings you use for connecting PEX tubing were exactly the right width for the lamms)

Next up :

• Fix the hanging beater (add cradles and pins so it rocks properly)
• Figure out what’s up with the heddle support (I think it’s too wide, and the pulleys have an extra hole I can’t figure out – I think I’ll make a new heddle support that can be pegged in place / lifted out)
• New warp beam (I’m thinking a big-ass fence post … )
• New tensioning system – probably a live weight system like this
• Possibly a new cloth beam, or just a new apron on the existing beam – I need to see if the crack in the beam is making it uneven or not
• Add a crank handle to the cloth beam (I’m looking at a ship’s wheel, which would be an easy way to get something like what Glimakra uses on their looms)
• Make heddle bars and horses
• Order Texsolv heddles and loopy chain stuff for tying up treadles
  

 

This is fun. :)

Weaving with bamboo and organic cotton

I have some lovely bamboo here in a nice bright green, and I thought it would be great woven up into some baby blankets or something similar. I ordered some organic cotton to go with it, and wound my warp bouts this morning.

I didn’t have enough yarn to do the full width for a blanket, so I warped up what I did have and pondered a little. It is about 25” in the reed, which will shrink down by 10-15% once it’s off the loom and washed, so the width is just about right for a placemat. I leafed through the weaving drafts I have printed out by the loom, and found this one, from LeClerc, for a tea towel. The fabric is a nice texture, and it really shows off the different threads nicely … plus the treadling is easy.

Note for other weavers: I do the tie-up so that I can “dance the treadles” – left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. In this draft, I tie up as shown, but to treadles 4,2,3,1: that way the treadling is 1-3-1 (left-right-left) and then 2-4-2 (right-left-right). It makes knowing where your feet are on the treadles a lot easier: I can tip my foot sideways a little to feel if I’m on the outermost treadle or if there’s another one next to my foot, which makes confirming that I’m on the right lever a very quick, tactile thing. I’ve been weaving a 1-2-3-4 twill lately, so I have to concentrate a little to keep the alternating pattern on this one, my feet automatically want to move across to the next treadle after each throw, so being able to check quickly without bending over or having to raise the shed and then look to see if it’s right is a big bonus.

Here’s a picture of the first sample piece:

I put on around 12-15 feet of warp, and each placemat takes one full 50 gram ball of the cotton. I have ten of those, so I should be able to weave most of them on the warp I have. I may do a set of six placemats and then a few longer pieces (table runners, centre pieces, tea towels, something like that) if I get bored, and I think I should have some variety for the craft show … which is coming up soon, so I have to get this weaving underway!

I wasn’t planning to head back to the loom, but maybe I will do just a little more. It’s such enjoyable “work”!

Working

I love my work.

Hand dyed yarns which will be packaged with my knitting patterns as shawl or sock kits.

Gradient dyed alpaca/wool lopi, which will be weft for a coat/vest/blanket (not sure which yet).

One blanket finished, the next started.

You might be able to tell that the twill direction changes at the centre: if you look at the second blanket, with the lighter weft thread, you can see the diamond that forms at the centre of the dark purple stripe which is the middle of the blanket, that’s where the angles meet. It isn’t particularly noticeable on the first blanket, but it’s showing up nicely on the second.

A day in the Garden

Today was the Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, and it was really fun.

When I left home the weather looked great, but before I got to the garden, it started to sprinkle with rain. It never really came down hard, but it was off and on drizzly all day and my choice of footwear was suboptimal for the conditions. I had slip on shoes (because I was going to be spinning and I take my shoes off when I spin) that got soaked … and my bare feet were frozen in no time.

However, I found a spot to set up underneath a lovely big crabapple tree, where I could hang the woven coats for everyone to see…

and then tucked my table and wheel under the branches where I was sheltered from the rain:

After a couple of hours I was thoroughly chilled, so I took my sweater off and wore my gray coat – hey, I can model it while I work! Lots of people were interested in the coats, I gave out  lots of cards so hopefully there’ll be some orders through the Etsy shop.

I haven’t posted the new swing coat design on Etsy yet, but it’ll be going up soon … here are a few better pictures of the Creamsicle coat. (Yes, I’m taking custom orders for other colours, or this coat in wool/alpaca!)

I love the swingy centre back pleat. It’s really comfy and warm – one lady tried it on during a bit of a rainshower and stayed under the tree chatting with me until the rain passed, keeping warm in the wool coat!

I sold a few small items, and got to meet and talk to a lot of great people. It was a really fun day!

Now to finish the last minute packing arrangements and catch some sleep before the early (early!) departure for Ontario tomorrow morning!

If I tried to put all this in my daytimer…

… I’d need an extra page.

So here's what I've done so far:

I got the motorhome cleaned, scrubbed, and smudged with incense. Put bedding on the beds. Loaded some canned goods into the cupboard. Stove, water, and water heater tested. (Need to test the furnace tomorrow!) Tried to start it, no go, probably needs a boost – The Reluctant Farmer is taking care of that. Took out some of the shop stock so that at least that much will be ready when I get home from Ontario. (More on that in a bit.)

I've also been doing a bunch of laundry in our new washing machine - the old one died a long-anticipated death on Thursday morning, and we were able to pick up a new one (well, new to us – the people had listed it on Kijiji just that day, and their place was not far off my route home from counselling, so it worked out perfectly). The new machine is WONDERFUL – it’s really big, and very quiet, and doesn’t dance across the floor or complain about being unable to drain. When I arrived to pick it up, the people were there talking with a friend who’d obviously come by on his way home from work. I recognized the company name on his truck, as it’s the same place my friend with the horses works. I asked if they might know one another and sure enough, they do. “Oh yeah,” the guy said, “he was talking to me about this McGavin’s Bread wagon he’s gonna restore …” I laughed. “He was at my house yesterday with one of the spokes for that wagon, I’m taking it with me when I go to Ontario so my wheelwright friend can make copies!" Apparently that detail had been mentioned in the conversation … it was quite a coincidence! I felt all, I dunno, famous or something.

So, laundry – which dries nice and quick outside in this sunny and somewhat breezy weather, and motorhome prep, and also getting ready for the show tomorrow. It’s Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, and I’ll be there selling my woven items, one hand knit scarf (in really wild muppet yarn), and my books … and weaving, and spinning, and generally just being a fibre artist where everyone can watch. I also have some fabric with me so I can do the tests of ecoprinting with the plants that grow in the garden in advance of our workshop coming later this summer (the workshop is the last weekend in August, also at the Garden). I’ll need to be there a bit early so I can wander off and get plant samples rolled up into fibery cocoons for steaming and colour setting. They have to sit for a few weeks, so I need to get them wrapped and steamed before I leave so they can sit and do their marinating thing while I’m off gallivanting around.

I did get the wheel, spindles, and all my stuff out into the van tonight – and I took my gray coat, to show as a sample of what can be done for custom work (it’s also a different shape, so I want to have both the swing coat and the blanket coat there to display) … and I grabbed some yarn so I can warp up the little loom once I’m there. I’d sort of thought I might do that ahead of time, but really, I’m out of energy and I’ll have plenty of time tomorrow as the show goes from 11-4, and warping is just another part of the whole adventure so people might as well see that too.

Oh, and yesterday I did most of my packing for my trip to Ontario – I am gone all day tomorrow, and I have to be at the airport for 6:30 Monday morning (which I clearly did not process when I chose that flight time … an 8:30 am departure seems quite reasonable, until you factor in the need to be at the airport two hours early and the fact that it takes over an hour and a half to get to the airport from home). We will be adding in time to stop for coffee on the way, trust me. I’m heading to see my parents, and then my sister and brother in law will join up with us for a day, and Friday I’ll be heading to Burlington for the Ontario Handspinning Seminar where I will be helping out my friend Wheelwright with his antique spinning wheel sales and assisting during the keynote speech he’s giving. Oh, and doing the last minute assembly of the giveaway items that he was asked to make for the Saturday night banquet! (I know what they are, but I think they are a surprise so I won’t say.) It sounds like it’s gonna be a blast.

Then once the conference is over on Sunday afternoon, I’ll hop on the train and go to Oshawa to visit some of my Chosen Family, and Monday afternoon I fly back home.

Then I do a bunch of laundry, go for groceries, load up the motorhome and head to Olds for Fibre Week!

I am gonna need all of July to recover from this, but it’s gonna be an awesome ride.

Stay tuned for more of the adventure!

Sheet music for weaving

I mapped out the sheet music for the Ode to Joy with the colours I used in the warp for the fabric I made, since I want to be able to easily explain it to people at the Artist’s Day on Sunday.

For those who can read music, here it is, in colour!

Artist’s Day at the Garden

I’ve been staggeringly busy getting ready for Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, which is this coming Sunday (won’t you please come out and see me?) in Lac Ste Anne County.

Here’s the blurb on the event:

Art in the Garden
Sunday, June 9th, 11am-4pm
George Pegg Botanic Garden
Outdoor show and sale featuring local artists, art demonstrations, live music and children's activities!
- Adults- $8, Students/Seniors- $5, Preschool Children- Free 
- Admission includes a showbook with artist biographies and entry into the door prize draw
- A wide range of artists: fine art & sculpture, pottery, photography, woodwork and fibre art
- The children's art corner will engage the youngest visitors 
- Local musician Neil Lightfoot is gathering an eclectic mix of singer-songwriters to entertain throughout the day
- Many artists will be demonstrating their crafts, providing an opportunity to not only see art but experience the artistic process!

- Refreshments & Garden Memberships will be available for sale

Now, as one of the artists, I needed to have things to sell at this lovely event … which meant I needed to spend some time at the loom!

So, I have the Ode to Joy works completed: the fabric was really interesting, in both the multicoloured cotton and the purple cottolin (cotton/linen blend). In the end, I got three tea towels, three headbands, and two placemats from the warp that I wound, and I’m quite pleased with it all.

There’s also the green tea towels I had done earlier, and the samples I wove when I was first testing out the cotton on the loom – those ended up as a drawstring bag, which would be perfect for a sock project on the go, or maybe a small shawl in progress.

Here are some pictures of everything together:

And here’s one of the headbands, in use taming my rather wild mane:

And oh, there’s also a gray wool floor mat, which I don’t have a photo of, and the Creamsicle Coat, which is now all finished: hood, cuffs, pocket, buttons, and lovely back pleat.

Everything’s been tagged and folded and is ready to go to the sale on Sunday.

Now I just need to warp up the little loom so I can do my weaving demo while I’m there, and find something to spin and choose a wheel to take along so I can demo that as well … and yeah, we’re good to go.

The music begins

I did some test weaving on the Ode to Joy warp yesterday evening, and settled on a draft called ducape, which creates a vaguely ridged fabric with interesting little rounded oval designs when you look closely at the contrast between warp and weft threads.

Non-weavers, just skip this next bit … it’s not in plain English.

The draft was found on the not2squareweavers blog, many thanks to the guild for sharing their favourite weaving drafts! Threading is a simple 6 thread repeat: 2-1-2, 3-4-3 and the tie up is 3, 2, 1&3, 2&4. You can (obviously) weave plain weave with treadles 3 and 4 alternately (for hems, for example) and then the body of the pattern is treadled 4, 1, 3, 1 and repeated – you never use treadle 2.  You end up with these neat little rounded blocks separated by a ridge, it’s a lovely fabric and very easy to weave and treadle, and it’s really easy to see if you’ve made a treadling mistake too. I’ve threaded this at 20 epi, using the Louet Organic Cotton. I am using floating selvedges as the weave gives you wobbly edges without them.

I’m not attempting to pattern the weft, just weaving in the same set of colours as the warp at random intervals and for random widths. I did notice that the black is particularly striking … I may try doing one whole length just with black weft, and see what that looks like, I think it could be very interesting.

The fabric is a little wider than I had originally anticipated, partly because I forgot to thread the last (well, first) section yesterday, I found it today and cut off the sample I’d done, threaded that last bit, and started fresh. I like how it’s shaping up.

Yes, that’s bubble wrap you see – when the fabric gets long enough that the beam it’s rolling onto has come all the way around, the knots that are used to tie the warp onto the front bar end up pressing on the fabric. This creates uneven lumps of tension which muck up the weaving, so padding is needed. Most weavers use a piece of cardboard, but I happened to have a big roll of thick bubble wrap right there, so I used that. It pads things out  nicely and keeps the tension smooth.

More weaving is on the schedule for tomorrow, as well as a custom blending project that I need to prepare: I am going away for a few days over the weekend, as The Reluctant Farmer has a conference to attend and I get to go with him (!) so I need some spinning to take with me. I have a Top Secret Commission to work on that involves some custom blending, custom spinning, and then some knitting – so I have to get all my gear together before I head out on the weekend. I mean, the most important thing to pack (after the bathing suit for the hotel pool) is the fibre projects, right? :)

Music, math, and fabric

I was looking around for interesting ideas for what to weave next, and I stumbled across a kit for some tea towels that were called Mozart Towels: the colour progression was based on the Jupiter Symphony, with different notes associated with different colours, and the number of threads used in sequence based on the duration of the note.

Well, now that’s a cool idea!

So, I thought about my favourite music, and immediately decided on the Ode to Joy.

(If you haven’t seen this video, please do take the time to watch it. It makes me cry with happiness every time I see it … especially when the little kids start directing in the background!)

Okay, let me just dry my eyes here …. good heavens, I love that music!

Right. : sniff : So.

The hymn version of the Ode to Joy is 16 bars long, and only requires six notes to map the melody line. Six notes, six colours. Sixteen bars, at twenty four threads per bar and twenty ends per inch, that’ll be a bit under twenty inches. Perfect.

So I sat down with the sheet music and a spreadsheet and started counting out music notes, then I laid out my yarn cones in an octave and tapped out the melody to see how the colours worked. I settled on a colour mapping that went from black and gray in the lower notes to bright orange and red in the upper, and got it all planned out in Excel.

Then, I wound each two inch segment of the warp on warping pegs, counting out the threads (six for a quarter note, three for a half) and beamed each segment onto the loom as it was completed.

Wind…

Beam onto the loom…

And there’s the entire score!

Read it from top to bottom (which will be left to right on the loom) …

Joyful, joyful we adore Thee

God of Glory, Lord of love

Hearts unfold like flowers before thee

Opening to the sun above.

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness

Drive the dark of doubt away

Giver of immortal gladness

Fill us with the light of day.

 

Threading will be an adventure for tomorrow or the next day.

Backstrap Rigid Heddle Loom

Tomorrow and Friday I’ll be at an alpaca show doing a spinning demonstration, something I’ve done several times before – always a fun (if tiring) time. Some other spinner friends come too, and we get to play with lovely fibre for a couple of days and explain it to people as they come by to see the animals. It’s cool.

I wanted to take some weaving along this time, so we can make something with the yarn that is spun. We have taken a full sized Rigid Heddle loom in the past, and could have done that again, but I wanted to try out the extremely portable backstrap loom setup, just to see how it worked.

I ordered a small rigid heddle (one of the advantages of owning a fibre shop!) and did a bit of reading online … and voila, a loom:

(Sorry about the sun glare.)

That’s a purchased rigid heddle, a stick shuttle I found upstairs, and two pieces of bamboo and some short dowelling. And some string. Oh, and the green piece of test-weaving I did back when I first got the loom works perfectly as the backstrap! It was way too thick and unweildy to be a scarf, though it had approximately scarf-sized-dimensions, so it is wrapped around my back and tied with loops of string to the bamboo pole closest to me.

I’ll get some more pictures of the loom in use at the alpaca show, but yep, it’s easy and affordable! The only tricky part is figuring out how to hook the loops on the wound up rods so that they don’t unwind on you, but with a bit of trial and error I got that figured out.

So, that’s where I’ll be for the next couple of days – then a workshop on the weekend, so I expect I’ll be pretty tired by the time this is all done!

---

Got some pictures of the loom in use at the Alpaca Show:

Things I learned:

• The top bar of the loom needs to be firmly affixed at both ends so that it doesn’t wobble side to side; this helps keep the tension more even.
• The sett on this heddle is quite wide, and the weaving looked best with the weft yarns doubled up.
• To hook the belt loop over the bar so it won’t unroll, you need to: loop the string over both bars (the big bamboo stick and the small dowel that the weaving is rolled against), then take the bottom of the string and loop it around once more, then hook the string under the dowel and out over the top of it. By catching the string on the dowel, when the whole thing tries to unroll as you put tension on it, it is stopped by the loop at the dowel. This was the trickiest part of the whole thing, but once I had the hang of it, it was fine.

Not many words…

… but lots of threads.

Test piece with organic cotton, twill weave.

Many small pieces, all different colours. Twill. Will probably take the resulting squares and stitch them into a bag.

Lots and lots of threads. Most of which got handled multiple times as I made many, many errors in threading. Pretty, though.

Finally weaving. Realized that heddle 1 <> heddle 2 and modified the tie-up, miraculously changing the pattern into the alternating squares it was supposed to be!

About 20” wide, first tea towel woven to about 26” long. Two yellow stripes, peacock blue (which is like a really dark teal) for most of it.

Green linen weft. Feels really crunchy. Doesn’t draw in anywhere near as much as the cotton, should do interesting things in the wash. Expanded the plain weave in the draft to spread out the little boxes more and show off more of the weft colouring.

Plain weave: a study in mindfulness. You have to focus carefully so that you get even pressure on the beater bar (and mine has a wobble, so it always puts more pressure on the left than the right, meaning I have to position my hand carefully when I pull back on the bar). Lovely emphasis on the warp colours. This became an extra long tea towel (or I suppose a table center piece thing, like a runner but shorter?) at 27”, with one narrow pattern band at each hem.

There’s still enough warp on there to do at least two or three more …but I’m quitting for now.

The rest of the week is likely to be busy – I see my counsellor for the first time in a year tomorrow, and then I’ll be doing a spinning demo at the alpaca show later in the week, and a yoga-and-journalling workshop on the weekend. If things are a little quiet around here, don’t worry … I’ll be back with lots to tell you, I’m sure.

Resting

Apparently, I can still overdo it without realizing it.

I spent most of yesterday weaving – trying out different ways of working with a point twill draft. I made a bunch of squares – sort of napkin or large coaster kind of shapes, all different. I think I might sew them together into a little bag, actually.

I finished off the warp this morning, got it in the wash and started winding on for the next project – tea towels. Well, that’s the intent, we’ll see what happens when I start weaving.

(If you’ve read any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion books, you may be able to identify the colour scheme. I hope to do all five.)

I got a little over halfway and had to quit – my back was aching and I was very, very tired. I lay down on the couch for awhile, then we had supper and I went outside to close down the Cow Buffet (i.e. put Sasha and George back in, they’ve been out eating down the hay bales now that I have a tie-out for George) and feed Izzy the Bottle Lamb again. She’s loud, but cute.

And then I got back on the couch and realized … yeah, I’m absolutely knackered. Can’t breathe properly, and I’m so tired. It’s like when I was first off work, that kind of feeling. I expect it’ll pass soon enough, but for the moment I’m resting with the laptop and surfing weaving designs.

I hope you have a restful day!

A horse blanket, on a horse!

Remember the test weaving project I made? It was the sample weaving for the coats, a horse blanket of 100% wool, which proved that the fabric I was after would work for the coats … even if it did shrink a little more than I anticipated, making it a bit on the small side for a saddle blanket.

Regardless of the unusual sizing, I gave it to my friend on Friday night: he has several horses, and rides regularly … and he’s the guy who gave me my Canadian Production Wheel, just because he saw it come up at auction and thought I might like to have it. (He’s a wonderful human being.)

Today he sent me a picture of the blanket on his horse:

Yes, that’s an Aussie saddle – kind of an unusual configuration for this part of the world, but they are designed for steep hills and close contact with the horse, and they are very, very comfortable. Since this blanket ended up not being a standard size, it might not work with a regular Western saddle … but, as the subject line of the email this picture came with says, it’s “like it was made for him”. It fits perfectly on this horse with this particular saddle.

Yay. :)

The coat, on a person. Me, in fact.

I wore it when I drove to get the mail and take my library books back … yep, it works. :)

Hand woven wool coat: completed

It’s done. :)

This is:

• approximately 3 pounds of yarn
• five hours of loom preparation
• around eleven hours of weaving
• about two hours of finishing work

Every single thing was done by hand. Seams all hand stitched then pounded flat with a rubber mallet while still damp from a final washing. Buttons picked out of a bin at a local antique store and carefully fixed to the wool. Button loops made of braided leftover warp threads. It’s about three of my work days, and very much worth it, I think.

Once it is fully dry, I’ll get some pictures of it on an actual person, but you can see what it looks like here.

I’m very pleased with it, pleased enough, in fact, to say that I’m ready to take requests, if anyone would like one made. The yarn comes in a wide range of colours: two or three blended together seems to give a very nice effect, but I think it’d also be lovely in a solid bright colour, like red. (I have always loved red coats.)

If you’d like one, send me a note* and we can discuss the details! For $325 you can have a custom woven knee-length coat in your preferred colours, with hood and cuffed sleeves, closed with your choice of buttons, toggles, braided ties, or metal clasps.

 

* Contact information is available on the main Apple Jack Creek website.

All the pieces

I warped the loom today for the sleeves and got them woven – yep, all in one day. I started warping midmorning and was weaving by just after lunch, finishing both sleeves by late this evening.

Here’s a sleeve on the loom: it has stripes in the warp as I was running low on the light gray used elsewhere in the coat. I really like the effect, and I think I’ll plan to do striped warps on most of the production coats.

They’ve now come out of the wash, and they fulled up nicely just like the other pieces did:

And, now I can see all the pieces together:

The long body pieces are on the back of the chair, partially covered by the hood, and the sleeves are on the arm of the chair.

The darker yarn was used on purpose at the hem and cuffs, as those are the parts most likely to get dirty, and I figured it might show less on the darker yarn. :)

Tomorrow, it all gets put together into a coat!

The first coat, underway

I got the loom threaded and sleyed today, and started weaving the first ‘body piece’ of the coat. It’s woven in two big pieces, left side and right side, then the hood, then the sleeves.

Here you can see the bottom edge of one of the body pieces: hemstitched to help it hold shape during fulling. The bottom is  woven in a dark gray on the medium gray warp.

About twelve inches up from the hem the weft switches to a light gray, and the rest of the body will be woven in the lighter gray. I’ve been going very slowly, as I have some knots in the warp that are giving me trouble so I’ve had to experiment with different ways to work around them. The fulling process will hide most of the spots where things have been sticky, so I’m not worried, it’s just one more skill to learn.

In about four hours I wove 3’ of fabric.

Tomorrow I should be able to finish this body piece and start on the second, at least that’s the plan so far.

It’s not as complicated as it seems

The following opinion may be blasphemous but I'll say it anyway: I don't think there is anything particularly 'mysterious' about weaving. There are a zillion ways to thread the loom and make patterns, but the basic things are all the same.

To weave, you need to know these things:

• how to get your warp ready and beamed on with even tension (and there are actually several ways to do this, so you should try them all and see what works best for you and your equipment)
• how to thread your heddles and sley the reed (which is different for various types of looms, but essentially consists of poking a thread through a hole, sometimes with the aid of a little hook device, keeping track of where you are in the sequence as you go)
• how to do tie ups (if you have treadles) (which means connecting two things together with a loop of string and/or  clips of some kind)
• how to properly toss the shuttle / manage selvedges (keep the edges snug but allow extra thread on the weft toss so your edges don’t draw in too tightly, and do it evenly)
• how to hemstitch (this keeps your fabric from unravelling, and there are several ways to do it – the one I like best is basically a loop around a group of warp threads followed by a blanket stitch into the woven fabric)
• how to wet finish your fabric (because it ain't finished till it's wet finished: this means washing and possibly steaming or otherwise abusing your finished fabric so it ‘sets’, the specific technique varies with the fibres involved)

The rest is details and practice.

The equivalent for spinning would be to say you have to know how to prepare and select fibre, how to draft, how to insert twist with whatever equipment you have, and how to ply. I mean, yes, there's a lot of fine detail that isn't covered in that short list, but if you know how to do those basic things all the rest comes with practice and looking at what you are doing and saying to yourself "how could I do this more efficiently/effectively?"

For weaving, looking at different pattern drafts and skimming books about weaving is really interesting to me - like looking at knitting patterns and seeing different ways of constructing objects with sticks and string, or watching other spinners work with spindles and wheels and picking up little tricks from how they hold their hands or whatever. You figure things out as you do them: you realize “oh, if I thread the edges in basketweave, I don’t have to worry about the twill not catching on every pass” or “this fabric will collapse a lot as soon as I take it off the loom, so I need to be gentle with the beater so I don’t squash it too much now, it’ll snug up later on in the process”. Or, a really cool thing I learned from a library book recently, “If I skip a bunch of slots in the reed then do a bunch side by side, I get fabric with vertical stripes of solid fabric interspersed with more open sections”. (I want to make curtains like that.)

But, really, it's just not as hard as it looks. The basic steps are the same, whether you are working with 2 shafts or 12 - it's not that you thread heddles and tie up treadles differently, you just have more of them. Yes, designing your own patterns gets more complicated with more options but there are so many references out there, why wouldn't you start off by following what others have worked out, see how it works, and then go off on your own? That's how I learn, anyway.

And now, I’m off to wind a bunch of bobbins. Gotta start on a coat!

It’s off the loom …

The wool blanket is off the loom and in the washer. I hate this part: waiting to see how well it fulls, how much it shrinks … gah! It’s spinning right now, so the Big Reveal shouldn’t be much longer.

While I wait, let me tell you what I have learned so far:

- beaming on the warp took me about 2 hours (this is a full 38" wide warp, so very wide)

- threading and sleying took another 3 hours

- tieup and lashing on was about 30 minutes, maybe a little more

- sampling is a good thing: I had originally used a non-standard twill tie up (it's threaded in regular 1/2/3/4 twill progression, and this tie up made sort of a basketweave kind of appearance in the twill) but the shed wasn't opening as wide as I needed, so I switched back to regular twill

- threading the edges in basketweave  makes nice selvedges, without having to fuss with a selvedge thread

- in an hour and a half I can weave about one foot of fabric on a warp this wide (it’s much faster on a narrower warp, as the shuttle doesn’t stall out partway across as often and I can go faster)

Oh, and one of the cool tips I learned from a library book on weaving has to do with how you tie up to the treadles.

When you treadle the pattern, you step on treadle 1, pass the shuttle, treadle 2, pass the shuttle, treadle 3, pass the shuttle, treadle 4, pass the shuttle. Normally, you tie up the treadles so they go left to right (or right to left, whichever) 1 2 3 4. However, that means that when you treadle you use the left foot twice in succession then the right twice in succession, or you have to scoot sideways and criss cross your feet. Simple solution to this: thread the treadles so that, left to right, they go 1 3 2 4. This way you go left foot (on the leftmost of the 2 left treadles), right foot (on the leftmost of the 2 right treadles), then left foot (on the rightmost of the 2 left treadles) and right foot (on the far right treadle). They called it 'dancing the loom'. It's really way more comfortable! Sometimes I hit the wrong treadle, so I'm working on getting used to where '2' is under my feet, but it's working pretty well.

Ooooh the washing machine just chirped the “all finished” noise!

: rushes off to check :

HEY, IT WORKED!

There’s a close up of the fabric. But what’s really awesome is the drape!

It’s got a lovely hand to it – it’s not dry yet, of course (we don’t own a dryer, Mother Nature takes care of that for us at no cost other than patience) but I held it up and let it move around and I can tell it’s just what I was after. Lighter than I expected, this might be more of a fall and ‘nice winter days’ kind of coat, but most of the world doesn’t hover around –25C all winter. (Come to think of it, we haven’t been hovering around –25C much this winter either, knock wood. We’ve had very strange weather.)

There’s a lot of shrinkage – which is expected with this much wool. About 10% in length and almost 30% in width (because there’s draw -n on the loom as well as the shrinkage from the washing). I should be able to ease up the draw-in a little by modifying my weaving technique.

The blanket started out at 38” in the reed, and was 34”x51” before washing (4” is too much draw in, I’ll have to work on that). After washing it measures 27.5”x44” … which is possibly too small to be used on an actual horse, I’m not sure (most saddle blankets are 32” square). If no horse wants it, it’ll be a fine ‘over your legs in the back seat’ kind of blanket, I’m sure!

Okay, off to do some math and figure out what I need to do for warping up the loom for the coats. But tonight is knitting: I have a sweater on the needles that needs finishing!