Friday, March 25, 2005

My Equipment and a warp

I have two floor looms in my "studio" - a 45" Nilus LeClerc with four shafts and a Schacht Mighty Wolf 36" wide with eight shafts. I've been using the LeClerc loom for about three months and am getting pretty comfortable with it. The Mighty Wolf hasn't been used yet but after I finish the carpet that I'm making now I plan to do my next project using 8 shafts.

The big loom:



And the Mighty Wolf:



I've just started a bathroom carpet. I'm using Maysville carpet warp doubled for the warp and part of the weft. The rest of the weft is 8-ply mop cotton. I'm using a trick that I learned to save time warping - I'm making the warp twice as long as I need and making two crosses. Then, when I take the warp off, I double it over, combine the two crosses and I have the right length with twice the threads. A nice time saver. Here is one-half of the warp on my home made maple warping board:

Friday, March 11, 2005

Blog - Day 1

I just read about the shortage of weavers' blogs in Handwoven magazine. I have only been weaving for about three months but my projects tend to have lots of "lessons learned", so maybe someone besides me can learn these lessons, too.

The blog will be mostly about weaving but I'm also passionate about nature and public lands, so some of this will undoubtedly creep in.

I'll post some of my completed projects as I have time and I'll try to keep a running log of current weaving projects as I do them. Mostly I try to do something with weaving almost every day and I take lots of pictures, so we'll see where this goes.