As you might have gathered from Friday's picture, my loom didn't come fully assembled. In my mind, this is a good thing, because there is nothing like assembling a piece of equipment to help you understand how it works. The castle of the loom was fully assembled, but I had to put the pieces together for the base, the beams and the overhead beater.
The instructions that came with the loom were quite good, and it really didn't take much time at all to assemble. Of course, the husband couldn't let me use the little screwdriver that came with it to screw things together, he had to go find the bit for his cordless drill, which not only sped up the assembly time, but also made the project incredibly interesting to Ms. Z.
I was without my camera for the assembly process, otherwise I'd have a couple of darling pictures of her wielding a socket wrench, trying to be help tighten down the bolts for the overhead beater. Z is absolutely fascinated by the loom, it's parts and what it does. She loves playing with the shaft levers and moving the beater.
Once you've got a fully assembled loom, well, it just seems wrong not to figure out how to get a warp on it. And since it has 8 shafts, I really wanted to do something that used all of them. So, I've decided I'm going to do a series of Rosepath (you can see a 4 shaft example of the weave structure here at WeaveZine) samplers using a dark blue warp and backround and either a light blue or white foreground color. I'll talk more about what's going on when I start to have pictures of the project.
Because it's a sampler, I decided to keep it narrow (just 5"), so it didn't take very long to measure my warp (120 ends, at 24 e.p.i -- I'm using 10/2 perle cotton), sley my reed, thread my heddles and get the warp wound onto the back beam.
With a little luck, I'll get it tied onto the front apron bar tomorrow, test out all the sheds and maybe even start weaving!
The instructions that came with the loom were quite good, and it really didn't take much time at all to assemble. Of course, the husband couldn't let me use the little screwdriver that came with it to screw things together, he had to go find the bit for his cordless drill, which not only sped up the assembly time, but also made the project incredibly interesting to Ms. Z.I was without my camera for the assembly process, otherwise I'd have a couple of darling pictures of her wielding a socket wrench, trying to be help tighten down the bolts for the overhead beater. Z is absolutely fascinated by the loom, it's parts and what it does. She loves playing with the shaft levers and moving the beater.
Once you've got a fully assembled loom, well, it just seems wrong not to figure out how to get a warp on it. And since it has 8 shafts, I really wanted to do something that used all of them. So, I've decided I'm going to do a series of Rosepath (you can see a 4 shaft example of the weave structure here at WeaveZine) samplers using a dark blue warp and backround and either a light blue or white foreground color. I'll talk more about what's going on when I start to have pictures of the project.
Because it's a sampler, I decided to keep it narrow (just 5"), so it didn't take very long to measure my warp (120 ends, at 24 e.p.i -- I'm using 10/2 perle cotton), sley my reed, thread my heddles and get the warp wound onto the back beam.
With a little luck, I'll get it tied onto the front apron bar tomorrow, test out all the sheds and maybe even start weaving!
That's glorious. I love seeing looms in action. I just need to find a few hours to get mine back into action. I miss it!
Cool! Isn't it an awesome feeling to have it done?