Louet Loom

Here it is the Saturday after Thanksgiving and I am finally sufficiently along with the new loom to make a few comments. First, as Sgt Friday would say "Just the facts". The loom has been here about 2 weeks now, I won't go into the long sad tale of the delivery, suffice to say that the trucking company and I were not great friends.

With assistance first from Sassy-Cat, and then from the lovely and gracious Judi, I managed to get the loom assembled in the first weekend after it arrived. As can be seen in the photos here, the loom came in two rather large boxes. The big box contains the "castle", the pre-assembled part that has almost all the strings, and which holds the "shafts and heddles".

It took most a Saturday to do the physical assembly of the loom. Not quite finished until Sunday. And then on Sunday I started organizing the loom to actually use it. The assembly proceess was not particularly difficult, but it is tedious, and requires close attention to the instructions which are in the manual that comes with the loom.

Putting 12 each tiny screws into the predrilled holes of all 14 treadles was a really tedious part of the project. But now that I have done a bit of weaving, I can safely say that that is nothing compared to the "PITA" of tying up the shafts for a pattern, but more on that in a little bit.

One more picture of the assembly process and then we will get on to looking at the first weaving project.

I learned to warp a loom from a book, not from a class or any live teacher, so I have been warping "front to back" since I first started weaving. Louet sends along a nice DVD with each loom showing how to warp this particular loom. Of course it shows the "back to front" method. For my first warping of this loom, I decided that I would follow what I know how to do and go front to back. It is what I am comfortable with.



I had a warp already measured for a scarf that I planned to make on my Ashford table loom, but I wound that onto the new Louet. This is for a winter scarf, woven out of Harrisville Design's highland weight wool.


So above you can see what looks like a tangled mess of yarn already through the heddles and waiting to be tied onto the back beam. Next you can see that same warp all combed out straight and tied up.



The weaving pattern here is straight twill.



So now that I have woven one project what do I think of the Louet Spring Loom, was it worth the small fortune that I paid for it?

I am not 100% sure yet !?!? I have noticed some differences in how I do things, and it will take me a bit longer to get used to this newer - not yet better nor worse - but certainly different way of weaving.

More later as I think about this some more...