Post #3316: On the loom again

I completed a piece of weaving this week, for the first time in about a year. It’s not that I haven’t had anything on one of my looms – I do have some tea towels I put on the smaller Julia loom ages ago. But the warp went on poorly, making it an inconsistent and frustrating weave, so the towels are as yet, undone. The larger Berga loom seemed daunting to me, and until recently was being used as a repository for other projects (the loom bench makes a great resting place, the upper rails are too convenient to hang things from).

But in a flurry of “I can do this”, I agreed to weave a piece of material for a waulking workshop later this spring – and for that I needed to weave a sample using materials from my stash.A sample serves to orient me to the kind of fabric I might want to make, and in this instance, I needed to ensure I could get myself through all the steps of the warping and weaving process on the big loom again.

The good news is that I still know how to design, calculate, warp, and weave a piece of cloth! Not only did the warp go on without *any* problems (a small miracle), but it was a lot of fun to weave – using some of my favourite colours, and switching up the twill weave pattern throughout. Using a heavier weight yarn for this helped to make it a fairly quick project, easy to thread and satisfyingly fast to weave off – 2 weeks start to finish – about 15 hours in total.

As much as I like the texture and pattern of this fabric, for the final piece, I’ll end up doing a plain weave instead of a twill. I would like to be able to turn the finished cloth into shawls and cowls to sell as a fundraiser, and the twill at this yarn weight is just a bit too dense for that. I’m also going to weave something in lighter, springier colours in keeping with the time of year we are doing the workshop. This is why we sample!

I will have to order more yarn for the piece I want to weave, and that’s going to cost some money. So in the meantime, I’m warping the loom again to weave a meditation shawl. You can see that warp in the header photo on this post – it’s comprised of a fine weight alpaca yarn in silver, which will be woven off using black merino wool of a similar weight. Both of these luxury yarns have been in my stash for a number of years, so it feels like a free project!

In the end, it will likely look a bit plain compared to this week’s plaid—a simple grey-and-black weave—but it will serve me well in the Zen meditation hall, where dark, unpatterned garments are the norm.

I’m in the process of threading right now, at 16 ends per inch/28 inches wide, that 448 ends that have to pass through the heddles and sleyed into the reed before the warp can be tied up. Though this is somewhat time consuming, I don’t mind threading and sleying — it has a certain mindfulness quality to it, and if the warp is properly organized, it goes smoothly. (For the weavers in the crowd: every since I started using the AVL warping wheel on my sectional beam – my warps are always properly organized.)

Slow going, but very satisfying. And getting some cloth off the loom this week reminded. me of the magic that is turning string into cloth. String into Cloth!

I’m back at it now, another 224 ends to thread and then I can get the beater bar back on the loom and pass all the strings through the reed. By the end of this weekend, I should have a warp to start weaving!