Friday, December 11, 2020

More looms

I bought myself an early Christmas present: a Swedish band loom. I wanted one four years ago when I first heard of them, but I started small with an inkle loom to see if I'd like weaving bands. And I do! So when I saw one on a Thanksgiving-Black Friday-Early Christmas 10% off sale, I decided to go for it. 


It's kind of hard to see with my messy background, but it's a really simple loom. You sit in front of it, as it's pictured, with the warp running from left to right. The cloth beam is on the left and the warp beam is on the right - both have metal ratchets and pawls to advance the warp. There's a pulley on top of the tall post in the middle (just out of the picture) that is used with the foot treadles to raise and lower the two sets of heddles. You weave perpendicular to the warp, passing the warp from front to back and back to front, which takes a bit of getting used to since most other weaving you sit in front of and pass the weft from side to side. What makes this loom better, in my opinion, than an inkle loom is that you can have a much longer warp and you don't have to raise and lower the heddles by hand, leaving your hands free to keep weaving, which makes it go very fast. 

I started another Christmas ribbon to try it out. The warp is 6 or 7 yards, so it's going to take a while! The shiny knife at the bottom of the picture is a weaving knife - beveled but not sharp and used to beat the weft as I weave. 



I also recently acquired my tiniest looms: they're about 2 1/2 inches square. I bought them at Cost Plus World Market and thought they'd be a fun little loom to try out some color or texture combinations or make a little tiny weaving. The instruction book is actually pretty good - I flipped through it and it explains weaving in correct terms and shows how to do both tapestry and plain weave on this little loom. The box says "not intended for children", but I think it might be fine for a 10-12 year old, though a larger simple frame loom might be easier for a child to work with.



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