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.

Here I am on a mid October evening, sitting at the computer, thinking about weaving. Now that I have most of my software moved from the laptop pc to the new desk top model, I can start to think about some of my less common software. One of those programs is PCW-Silver from Fiberworks. Who ever heard of that one. It is one of the possible choices of software for handweavers. And that of course, is one of my other hobbies. I am currently very impatiently sitting around waiting for my new Louet Spring Loom to ship from the Netherlands. It will be 12 shafts, 14 treadles, 43 inch weaving width. A significant upgrade from my current 24 inch 8 shaft direct tie up Ashford table loom that I have had for the last eight years.

Waiting, waiting.

Ok - it has been a full year since I blogged - and it may well be that long again, but I was lookin' at some one elses blog, so I quickly signed in just to say hello.

Labor day . . . or a paid day of not laboring for my employer.
Now there is a contradiction in terms.
I spent some time this morning trying to down load a couple of MP3 files from a few podcasts that I find interesting, but I found that some of the pod cast authors are not particularly good at HTML, so their connections were bad. That got me started looking for ways to subscribe to their pod casts and have the download be automagic.

I found and downloaded something called FeedDemon ( http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/feeddemon/default.aspx ) which then I was able to set up to keep track of the podcasts for me and download new of the mp3s when they occur. At least that is the theory, I did use it to download some past episodes that I will try to catch up on.

Oh . . . what podcasts?
http://catholicunderthehood.com/2009/08/31/203-hospitals-and-holy-fools/

Daily bread

I stumbled across a web site called www.thefreshloaf.com, it's a baking and bread making site, with a "forum" and message boards about baking bread. So I thought I would add my own 2 cents worth to it. Here is what I posted:

My very first post to this esteemed bread board!

I have been lurking here reading for a while, and in particular looking for information on simulating a brick or clay oven by use of a BBQ grill. While the topic is mentioned in some posts, most folks seem to then get into a discussion of pizza. Now I love pizza as much as the next person, but that is not really what I want to bake. I am after bread on the grill.

To that end I have begun experimenting on my charcoal grill with methods by which I can bake bread. The first time I tried was a total disaster! The top crust looked great, the bottom was burned beyond recognition, and the inside was still quite doughy! Yuk!

But one learns from one's mistakes. So I have now had a second baking, and while the results were not spectacular, they were certainly acceptable, and the bread tasted good. What more could one possibly want?

Thinking that I should reduce the number of variables in the process, I chose a very simple bread recipe, "Daily Bread" from the King Arthur Flour web site. You can easily go to the King Arthur site and look for this one. I've made it before, and I know it is both good and simple. Your very basic white bread.

That means that the variable in the BBQ baking will be in the baking process not in the bread itself. So for the baking process I use a Char Griller, barrel type grill. This is a fairly good sized grill, not one of the standard kettle grills. I really want to simulate the effect of a brick oven or earth oven, so I needed some masonry. For that I chose to use the pizza stone, and a terra cotta flower pot. My pizza stone is about 14 inches in diameter, and I used a 12 inch diameter terra cotta pot. I know that there is concern amongst many about using pottery from the garden store. But my thoughts on this are that the bread is not touching the big pot, it is sitting on a pizza stone, and that flower pot is just resting over the top of the bread providing the simulated masonry.

I pre-heated the grill, stone, and pot to about 400 degrees (f), and the moved the flower pot long enough to slide the bread dough onto the pizza stone, added just a bit more charcoal to maintain, but not increase the temperature. I was worried about how the process went, as the first time I tried my bread was burned after only about 10 minutes. So this time I opened up and took a peek after 20 minutes when I had not yet smelled burning bread.

The crust was just barely beginning to brown. Added another shovel full of charcoal and closed things up again for another 20 or so minutes. By then the bread was a light golden brown, and when percussed it had a hollow thumping sound. So off the grill and onto a cooling rack for a bit.

Then the first cut, it looked pretty good. Tastes just fine. But I wish I had gotten the crust just a wee bit crunchier. I think I will have to continue experimenting to get this just the way I want it.

What? You ask about pictures of this process. Surely I can provide those, but not here, you must make a quick trip to my Flickr page. Here is the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12687649@N06/sets/72157621922724906/

Thats all folks