Crazy yarns from a guy living on the fringe

Category: 4-shaft Weaving

TOpics containing posts or information about 4-shaft or fewer weaves.

Summer 2021 Projects Part 1

Now that you know a little bit of history, let’s get down to what I have done with this loom this past summer.

I consider Winter and Spring of 2021 to be my “practice time” and seriously got down to putting things I had practiced and learned into something useful.

Towels are the obvious easy start since they are so useful, who doesn’t need a kitchen towel…

I started with Towels for Eric. We have tons of Fiestaware and he wanted towels to coordinate. These were a simple twill using 4 shafts and as you can see, not planned out too much as far as the stripes and twill placement… live and learn.

For the next project, I wanted to pull in some color. I had completed some gamps from Jane Stafford’s online guild and wanted to use a bit of what I learned there. The second set of towels were for my mom. These were just simple plain weave using color gradient as the feature. I used various blues, purples, and pinks to create subtle color shading. I also threw in twining a pink and green cottolin as a weft in one towel and was pleasantly surprised by the “shimmer” effect that it gave the towel. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of the finished towels… That will be rectified for all future towels 🙂

Stay tuned for Part 2 of summer projects, the best is yet to come. Turned twill towels on 8 shafts and turned taquete!

Prepping for Weaving

By the time I had ordered my loom I had already watched dozens of hours of videos on YouTube. I wanted to see different looms in action, see what could be made, etc. I settled on a table loom for the sole fact that I figured it would be easier to convince my husband that a small, foldable table loom would be a good idea to see if Weaving was really for me before I bought a thousands-dollar behemoth loom that would take over our living space. (to be fair he quilts so there is quilting stuff EVERYWHERE!)

So I settled on an Ashford 8-shaft 32″ table loom. It was a good price, looked great, great reviews…

Ashford 8-shaft table loom

Knowing that due to the pandemic, my loom would not arrive for 2-4 months, I wanted to assuage the wait by learning as much as I could so that I could get started right away. I had already watched the videos on how to put the loom together, Kelly Casanova made a great one that specifically showed the assembly of the Ashford loom.

While watching a video from Andy on his Curmudgeon Weaves channel, I heard him mention that Jane Stafford had an online guild. Now, I had watched videos that Jane had done for Louet and had actually watched her warping videos several times so I was excited at the prospect of more from her. I was amazed at the amount of information that she had for the online guild and how inexpensive the subscription was. I joined in the middle of year 4, so I binged the first 3 years for the next 2 months, watching several of the sections a couple of times. There is such a wealth of information and Jane is such a great presenter.

So by the time I received my loom, I had so much information teeming in my mind, once Eric and I go the loom put together, I wound a warp (gnashing my teeth because it looks so easy in all the videos and it wasn’t), got it wound on (a bit easier but still sweat-inducing), and got it wound on and with a whoosh of self-congratulations after having tied the warp on…

…I broke down because the shed wouldn’t open right, everything looked weird, I was devastated. I had prepped myself, walked through everything as I was doing it, I was such an idiot. Then, I noticed, I had not put the tie-on rod over the cloth beam, but under it. I did the first of many, many, many stupid mistakes. Once I retied the warp the feeling of elation came back and I was weaving!

Next time, my first real project.

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