Tying a New Warp to an Old One, Lashing On, and Handling Pesky Color Changes

I recently finished three dish towels on Julie, my Swedish counterbalance loom. The design was a six shaft, combination of plain weave and 3/1 twill stripes.  I liked how they turned out, the weaving went quickly, and it was a single shuttle weave for the most part. I decided to wind another warp in different colors and rather than thread the six shafts all over again, to tie them to the old warp.

I wound each stripe of 30 or 40 threads separately, tying the cross on each bout, and placing a tight choke tie about 12" - 18" from the cross. I threaded them onto lease sticks at the front of the loom.

I left the previous towels on the loom and attached my tarp clamp temple to the edges to support them when I started to snip threads.  I clipped and tied one thread at a time and tied with an overhand knot.

I don't think I saved any time, but it was easier on my eyes, neck and shoulders than threading six shafts of texsolv heddles. Everything was right in front of me. The knots slipped through the reed and heddle eyes with only a little gentle coaxing.

These are the two towels after taking them off the loom and wet finishing them. I wove them each with a different color red.

I used the lashing on method after winding on my second warp.  I am becoming a fan of this method, which I learned from Milissa Ellison Dewey in one of her Facebook weaving group  posts. It is fast, easy, and gives a nice even tension to the warp. I wish I had a link to post here, but can't find anything.

Below the dark blue line is the finish of the first towel in these colors. It was woven in a light gray.

I like the look of cross stripes, but can add a fair amount of extra time to my weaving and usually requiring a second shuttle.

I am not a proponent of calling errors a "design element", but I did make an error that I decided I could incorporate into the design. I intended on using a double white line evenly spaced, but accidently did a triple line, so I changed my design to alternate two and three. It isn't an error any longer!

I decided on a two pick white stripe because it is easier to overlap the ends and creates no build-up on the edges.

I measured a few pieces a bit longer that twice the width and unplied one end on each of them. The bundle is lying across the towel.

I use a stick shuttle to push the weft piece through, so both ends hang out from the edges, and then beat.

Changing to the next shed, I push both ends in until they overlap. One end is already unplied. I check for a good overlap length, allowing for my angle, and trim to the correct length and then unply the other end and overlap in the shed and beat. Once I determine the proper length of the piece of weft, I cut the remainder of them and unply the ends ahead of time.

The overlap is hardly visible. (Click on the photo to make it bigger.)

This is a great technique for weaving rag rugs if the plan is for only two passes and it saves on trying to tuck the ends in at each edge.

I use the same method when doing a single pass of rag when doing rugs, but cut the strip half the thickness and a little more than twice the width of the rug. I wrap the rag around the outer selvedge threads and overlap in the same shed, somewhere away from the edges.

I'm really liking the look of this towel, and think my goof was a good one.

Dyeing With Black Walnuts

I’m trying to get some projects wrapped up before leaving on our train trip next week. I’ve been dyeing some yarn with black walnut. In the first photo, on the right, is how it looks straight out of the pot and on the left is after it’s been rinsed. The skein on the right is from my friend Mark Maier's sheep, and the rinsed skein is some rug wool I purchased quite a while ago.

These are both rinsed skeins. Considering how dark the skeins were before rinsing, they lost a considerable amount of color.

 The dye bath was made from husks that had already turned black, and the liquid was very dark. I simmered the husks for a while and then let it sit for a couple days before straining the solids from the liquid.

Yesterday, I heated the liquid and then added hot washed wool yarn and simmered it for a while. Then I let it soak overnight and rinsed and dried it today.

I don't have enough time right now to do any more dyeing, even though there is a lot of color still left in the pot. Doing a gradation experiment or trying some different mordants would have been interesting. I'm wondering if adding a mordant such as alum would have made the yarn darker.

Perhaps next year I will do some experimenting with it again. I read that a darker dye can be obtained from the green husks or the the nuts without the husks.

Patience and Persistence Pay Off

For a little over a year, I have been working my way through this book with my 10-shaft Swedish counterbalance loom.

I started out with four shafts and a coarse yarn, making a table runner.

 Moving on, I skipped over trying a 5-shaft weave because it sounded a bit more complicated than I was ready to tackle. Six shafts was next on my list.










This was fun to search handweaving.net for a six shaft pattern. I chose #49712.

My friend Julie gave me the counterbalance loom I have been working on, since she had owned it for a long time and never used it.  I asked her what she wanted for it and she told me to weave her something. When I got to the time to try eight shafts, I decided to make her a Teddy bear.

It was back to choosing patterns again.  I wasn't going to weave for a single bear, so chose several patterns to pick from.

Jenny MacPokebeary joined Julie's family, and she loves the clothes and tartan Julie made for her.

I'm in the process of making other bears with the above fabrics.

I was finally ready to try five shafts, and that brings me to my frustration over the last few days. I chose a fairly simple pattern I found in a Handwoven magazine from Nov/Dec 2009.

My problem was with the tie-up of the counterbalance loom. Four shafts are pretty straightforward, but when more than four are used, some additional maneuvering around needs to be done.

 All the tie-ups start at the top when hooking up a counterbalance loom, with the pulleys, shaft levelers, the height of the shafts and beater, lamms, and last of all, the treadles. 

On page 218 of The Big Book of Weaving, the author gave instructions to hang five shafts with four horses and four pulleys. I think I tried it with various adjustments about three times, which meant getting under the loom and disconnecting all the treadles and lamms each time, leveling the shafts again, and doing all the tie-up again. Nothing was working well enough to get a good shed. 

In the book, under the first instructions, she mentioned switching to the eight-shaft pulleys if the first way didn't work.  I wish I had tried the second way first, because it worked!

Here is a side view of the shafts, horses and the two 8-shaft pulleys. Each pulley unit uses four horses. The first horse connects to shaft 1 & 2, the second to 2 &3, the third to 3 & 4, the fourth to 4 & 5.  The other pulley unit connects in a mirror image of the first one.

Right side horses connected to the shafts.

Left side horses. Note the mirror image to the right side.

A test gave me pretty good sheds so I wove a little scrap yarn.

I'm a happy weaver now!  This warp will become place mats or a runner.

Warp and weft is 8/2 cotton in black, navy, red and white.  It is sett two per dent in a 12 dent reed for 24 ends per inch (epi).

Weaver's Friend Shafts and Heddle Repair

This loom only has two shafts, so it would seem like the restoration of these parts should go quickly. That is an erroneous assumption, because there are a lot of small parts that make these two shafts do their job well, and ended up being a two day job. Of course, I was not working on them more than a few minutes at a time.

The cast shaft brackets were removed and shown in my previous post.

The long metal bars fit into a couple brackets that are attached to the loom frame.

The metal heddles on this loom were not in real bad condition.  They had a little surface rust, but nothing that couldn't be fixed.

I removed them by threading craft chenille wires through the top and bottom loops while still on the shafts, to keep them in order. For a two shaft rug loom, there were a lot of heddles. I wired them into eight bundles and then pulled the shaft bars out of the shafts.

I started the process of removing the rust on the heddles by soaking them in a tub of vinegar, one bundle at a time.

My energy level was just coming back following my most recent chemo treatment, so this was a good project, taking just a few minutes at a time.

After soaking for a while, I took a scrub brush to the bundle to remove any loose rust and then rinsed them.

I mixed a jar of water and baking soda to give a final neutralizing rinse before blotting on paper towels.

I placed the bundle on a tray in my oven, set at 200 degrees F. to dry.

I just left them in the oven until I was ready for the next bundle, anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple hours.

After removing them from the oven, I sprayed the bundle with silicone to keep rust from forming again.  They will need to be wiped down well before using them to make sure any dark residue is removed.  I will make sure to not use a white warp for the first run of rugs.

An electric sander was the quickest way to remove the corrosion on the shaft bars.

I almost forgot to sand the edges, the most important surfaces of the bars. The heddles won't slide without them being smooth.

I finished up with a silicone spray.

The wooden frames weren't in too bad of shape.  I started by sanding them just enough to remove any lose finish, but not enough to remove the stain.

I have tried numerous things to spruce up the finish, but found that sanding, followed by wiping well with lacquer thinner gave the best results if the stain was pretty well intact. It helped smooth out the remaining finish and stain.

Once all the loom pieces are prepped, I will finish all the wood with a polyurethane varnish.

Weaver's Friend Progress

The Weaver's Friend loom is still in pieces, but I am slowly making progress on its restoration. I could have just reassembled it and started weaving, but where is the fun in that? I know myself well enough to know I wouldn't enjoy working on a loom that didn't feel nice. If the wood looks dirty or rough, it would bother me.

Here are the little steps I have accomplished so far.

I chose something simple to start. This handle and pawl only needed a light brushing before a coat of spray paint.

This is the part Bob made to replace the broken one. I did get a coat of stain on it yesterday, so it doesn't look so naked.

The cast iron parts on both frame ends were removed and painted.

The bottoms of the corner posts were originally painted black but much of the paint had worn off.  Here is one end drying after a new coat of paint.

Both end pieces were painted with a dark red trim around the frame. I mixed some paint and touched it up with a couple coats. It is probably a bit brighter than the original color.  I did tone it down with some brown.

The opposite end. The stenciling on the bottom rail needs some touch-up.

Not a perfect touch-up, but legible now.

 This is the cloth beam.  The ends couldn't be removed without stripping the flat head screw slots, so I just covered the wood and spray painted the ends.The ropes were not in good condition and needed to be removed.

The ropes were nailed into recessed holes and I couldn't pull them out because the wood was so hard.

My neighbor happened to come by so I enlisted him to try and remove the nails. All it needed was some muscle!

Various other parts were painted.  I wish I knew the names for them. Some of them do have a letter and number cast into them, for identification purposes when the Reed Loom Manufacturing Company was still in business.

Back beam brackets. Numbered L23 and L24.

Shaft brackets and screws. They attach to the bottoms of the shafts and are the connections to the four pitmans. Number L8.

There is a little more done, but I still need to download the photos, so I will save it for the next post.