Ya know, I've had this silly blog for a few years, and I actually post once or twice a year - hardly much of a blog is it?

There is actually much more on my youtube channel than here.  But if I would regularly use this it might be worth while, now if only I could discipline myself to use this. . .

But that would then make this feel like work.

Double weave

I finally finished warping the double weave shawl today, getting the loom "tied up" and was able to begin the weaving of the two separate layers that will become the front sides of this shawl.  The colors look great!  Double weave takes a bit longer to do and I have to be careful, lest I inadvertently somehow lock the layers together at some point.  But I am being careful, and with about 6 to 8 inches woven so far, I'm off to a good start.

Warping Direction

Which direction should one warp their loom?
Front to Back or Back to Front!

Before I had my Louet loom, I always warped front to back. I know most people tend to go the other way, but I learned to warp a loom from Deborah Chandler's book, "Learning to Weave", and while she explains both methods, she covers FtB first and then does BtF. I just never learned the other way. And since it was about 6 or 7 years after I read that before I took my first weaving class, that didn't do anything to change my mind. Besides, the weaving instructor at Siever's, where I took that one class, did nothing to disabuse me from warping FtB. She was teaching Double weave, not basic setup.

Why am I even discussing this today? The Louet loom came with a DVD that I have studied carefully, it teaches BtF warping. I have now tried warping BtF a couple times and I have learned a few things about that method that I want to comment on.
The loom is designed to be warpped BtF. Once one follows the clear directions in the video then BtF is not the tangled mess that I had always previously thought it was. So I will use that method more often in the future.

But right now I am in the middle of warping up the loom to make a double weave L shaped shawl for my mohter-in-law. This will be made with Harrisville Design's Shetland weight wool. Which is a lovely looking, but very "sticky" yarn to work with. I have the sneaky suspicion, confirmed in the Louet video, that there are occasions when FtB wraping makes sence, and when I need double the threads per inch in the warp, and very sticky yarn, that FtB is the way to go with this.

In the past I sometimes skipped having a "cross" in my warp as I wound it onto the warping board, and often I ended up with tangles in the warp as I pulled it through the reed.  So now I am being more careful about using a cross to keep the threads in sequence as I warp.  This should keep the threads straighter and easier to work through the loom.

So here is the partly sleyed reed for this project.  I have about 2 more inches to sley and then the rest of the set up process before I can weave.  But I am really enjoying looking at the colors in this warp.  And I wanted to just make a few comments about this.

It is the first Sunday of December, the 2nd Sunday of Advent, and we spent the day at http://www.heritagehillgb.org/ (Heritage Hill State Historical Park). We started this almost 18 years ago, although there was a time in the middle when our group had had a falling out with park management that we weren't there. In any case today was very nice. All of the "usual suspects" from Gorrel's Company, of the 60th Rgt of Foote, the Royal Americans, were present. Usually I weave, or something, but today I brought my brown bess musket, and I did all of the soldier type interpretation. I must have fired off about 20 rounds (all blanks) from the bess, and gone through the firing order for almost 200 people. I do so enjoy explaining the history of our area, and the British Colonial involvement with our part of Wisconsin. It is such an unknown bit of local history.

Anyway, we had a lovely day, and a great dinner in the "court house". So wonderful to be with old friends.

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...

A couple of things on my mind this evening.

I just posted a thought on facebook, but that will go away within a day as other things come flitting by quickly on there. I was honored this evening to be a member of and Eagle board of review for the Boy Scouts. This is the third time that I have sat on an eagle board of review, and all have been interesting. I am happy to say that all three of the boys, over the course of a couple years have received their Eagles. Tonight was Ryan Simonet, I guess I only got to know him and his family through scouts, and now that we met them there, also through church. But Ryan was very impressive in the board of review this evening. He really does deserve to be an Eagle scout.

Secondly, I am impatiently awaiting the arrival of my loom. Got an email this morning saying that it is in transit. It must have come thru Canada, because the freight tracking shows it in upstate New York, yesterday mid afternoon. I've watched the tracking on line, as it moves west, last seen in nothern Indiana, and scheduled for delivery here in De Pere (the trucking company says Green Bay) tomorrow some time. So I will work from my "super secret secure location" tomorrow so that I can be here when the truck arrives with the loom, all 165 lbs of it, how the heck I'm supposed to get that off of a truck I don't know yet.

It's November 4th! Does this constitute "mid" November yet?
It seems not. I checked with Dawn, from whom I ordered the new loom, and she has heard absolutely nothing yet on shipment of the loom from Lochen, The Netherlands. And since it will probably take a week or more for a boat to sail from somewhere in Europe to somewhere in the US, and then its probably got to go to a distribution center to be taken out of the container and then LTL or FedEx or UPS shipped to me. My guess now is that "mid" November means the day after Thanksgiving.
I suppose that means I can finish up the set of towels that are on the Ashford loom right now.