It's here!

The loom arrived yesterday and has been put together by my wonderful boyfriend. I have a request to finish on the Spears loom and then I can get started on the Ashford. I also have three days off so I can play.

Happy bunny? Who me!

Weaving loom - patiently awaiting...

I bought a spinning wheel a couple of years ago, dabbled with it a bit and got reasonably good at it but to be honest it's very tiring on the hands because you have to guide the wool between your fingers. It was good fun to have a go with it but I can say I've done it and now I can say I've sold it!

And with the ill-gotten gains from the transaction, I can justify buying a loom. I've got to that stage of one hobby in - one hobby out. We don't have the space for the steady accumalation of hobby equipment although both of us have had a damn good try at seeing how much we can fit into the house over the years.

I have purchased a 36" Ashord rigid heddle loom from Twist Fibre Craft in Scotland and also bought a second heddle kit for added versatility and the Ashford book to inspire me. They were ordered last Tuesday and like an excited five year old I had hoped for them to be here for this weekend but really expected them to be here next week, hopefully in time for my Friday off.



Needless to say I got the stand as well to go with this monster, and then I can start to make a dent in this lot. I'm thinking once I've gotten over the scarf stage, I'm going to be looking at using the loom to make fabrics that I can sew with. I've seen some very nice skirts that have been made out of woven fabric. The second heddle allows me to make a much denser fabric than the two more open weave items I've done so far.



But until then I've started to warp the Spears loom with rather long lengths of white cotton and I mean seriously long, probably a bit ambitious but hey, I'm an optimist! Then I'm going to weave some yellow, green and purple in bands and see what comes of it.

First go at weaving

I've been pottering away for the last couple of days on an old Spears weaving loom I bought a few months back on ebay. I hadn't even bothered to open the box until yesterday. The loom itself appears to be in good order although missing the shuttle - my wonderful boyfriend stepped up to the mark and set about making me a substitute out of plastic which works brilliantly!

Needless to say there's no instruction book in the box but there are some instructions for how to warp the loom in different ways on the inside of the lid. Luckily enough the person who had it before me had set up some cotton thread warps allowing me to just get started - a bit like plug and play!

This is the first weaving I've ever done. The yarn I used was one of the multicoloured Opi sock yarns and I have to say it looks quite good.

After that I tried warping the loom myself. The loom is 25cm x 32cm and I wanted to try a scarf. So to make the long threads (apologies for my lack of knowledge regards weaving terms) I wrapped wool vertically around one of the living room doors so I could get roughly the same lengths. I decided to do 8 strands of green, 16 of purple and 12 dark red. Then once I was happy they were roughly even came the task of threading them through the heddle and then making sure the tension was even as I rolled them up. I tied them to our shoe rack to get them all even as I wound because it was low enough on the ground and could take the tension and would not move when I was winding the threads onto the loom. I tried to set myself up so I could be a bit self sufficient and not have to rely on others to be around when I wanted to start a project.

After that it was just a case of choosing a colour to weave. I was only going to use the light yellow to begin with but felt that was going to get a bit boring so alternated it with bright red and blue. I started some of the weaving late last night and then spent a few more hours on it whilst watching the reruns of It's Not Easy Being Green (great show!) this morning and managed to do about 1.5m. I'm happy with the results and am now going to have a hunt for a better loom to use.