Loom lights

I have never been completely happy with the lighting of my work as I am weaving. I have no problems during the day but when I have to rely on artificial light my arrangements have been less than ideal. I have used lights clamped to the uprights of the beater (are they called swords?) and some LEDs just above the reed. Quite good but the fell has always had a bit of shadow about it.

I bought a light designed to go under a kitchen cabinet and I have rigged up a sort of gantry that is attached to the front uprights of the loom. The result is brilliant (literally) and I have been weaving away quite happily this evening with not a shadow in sight. There goes my last excuse for an uneven beat.

The photo shows the left hand side of the arrangement and the LED lights on the beater can be seen. I shall tidy up the cable arrangement and fit a small pelmet along the top. At the moment the uprights are held in position by cable ties and clamps. When I find time I shall make some wooden clamps do that things look a bit neater. Clamps and cable ties are great for this sort of thing – one can experiment and move things around without having to harm the loom.

Differential Shrinkage Scarf - Progress

We are having a very nice summer and what with camping, gardening and messing about in boats I have spent a lot of time Not Weaving. Momentum has picked up now, mainly because the scarf is intended as a Christmas present.

Sleying the reed

In a my last post I wrote about how I cleaned the reed. It ended up a nice dark grey colour which unfortunately was an almost exact match with the dark grey of one of my weft yarns. Needless to say I had a couple of sleying errors and they were close to the centre of the reed.

In the past I have balanced the reed on boxes when sleying; silly, it is much easier to hang it from the superstructure.

Open sett means see through cloth

When I started the weaving I had a problem because I found it difficult  to see the fell clearly and judge my beat. The set is very open (12 ppi for the Mora and 16 ppi for the Merino) so the cloth is see through with lots of visual distraction coming through from below.

Three lights at the front of the loom

I put extra lighting onto the loom. The little clip on lights that I have put onto the beater uprights are invaluable - I use them all the time and move them around as needed

Light behind the beater

The sample

In addition to the three lights shown above there is a neon light (turned off in the photo) attached to the back of the top beater bar. This shines down and through the red giving a good view of the fell.










This is the sample. I have made it larger than I normally do because it will be needed for determining the amount of finishing that I will need to do to get the right degree of shrinkage and pucker.

Measuring 14 ppi 

 In theory I should be beating the red Mora wool to 12 ppi and the grey Merino to 16 ppi. Swapping every 2"proved too much for me so I have settled for 14 ppi throughout. I could probably have set the whole warp at 14 ppi.

Washers (nuts) in the boat shuttle

I normally use end feed shuttles but because this CB loom beater does not have a shuttle race on the bottom batten I decided to use lighter boat shuttles. I had a problem with the spools catching and snagging but a couple of nuts serving as washers has fixed the problem.


I am now well into the actual scarf having woven about 2' today in a couple of gentle sessions. I should make it for Christmas!

TURNING ON, OR BEAMING

Hand Loom Weaving Plain & Ornamental  (1910) - Luther Hooper



From what I have read the warp has to go on before doing the final adjustment to the shafts and tying up the treadles and lamms on a CB loom.


I wound a 9 yard warp and puzzled a bit as to how to get it on. Usually when putting a warp onto a conventional (as opposed to sectional) warp beam my wife grabs the ends, applies tension, and walks slowly towards the loom as I roll the warp onto the beam. My wife was out so what I came up with was this;


The warp was tied onto the back beam and went up to a raddle secured to the back of the loom framework.

(I am not going to get into the debate about the respective merits of traditional european style looms versus jack looms but I do like having places to put things; the light clamped to the top cross beam is very handy.)

The warp then went up and through another raddle that I secured to the top of the loom.

From here the warp went across to the top of the beater of a second loom that was conveniently situated nearby.

The animals on top of the loom controller are a frog, a penguin and a crab.

The warp ends dangled down and were weighted.

I was able to sit at the back of the loom and wind on the warp and put the sticks in. I am never quite sure how many to put in so I settled on 5 per revolution.


Every now and then I had to nip round to the front and adjust the weights It all went very smoothly.

(The computer screen in the background of this picture shows an overshot design, not mine, that I am working on, trying to get some interesting colours happening)

A happy beamer!