Autumn Leaves

My needlepoint is finished and back from the framers. I like the tessellation and I shall certainly use the colours again.

Unknown Brackets on Beater Box

At some stage in the past someone has screwed three L shaped brackets to the bottom of the flying shuttle beater box at each end so that one arm of the bracket sticks up vertically in front of the box with gap between the bracket and the front of the box of about half an inch. I presume that they are later aditions as I can see no reference to them in the Leclerc documentation.
They look as if they are designed to hold something that slots into the gap. I don't want to remove them if they could prove useful.

Counting heddles

Earlier I said that I had checked the heddles for this project. The statement was true but useless as the basis of any planning because what I had missed somewhere along the way is that there was a completely uneven distribution of heddles between the shafts.
So what I had to do was get all the rubbish of the castle, then remove the top of the castle, slide out the shafts and then remove and add heddles to get an even distribution.   I used cable ties to slide the heddles on and off the heddle support bars and there were no mishaps. Look at the build up of dust and fluff on the frame.

What took the time was that this exercise provided an opportunity to do several other maintenance tasks;

• Get the vacuum cleaner nozzle in amongst the jacks and lamms
• Clean and polish everything exposed by the removal of the shafts
• Lubricate the metal links between the lamms and the jacks
• Colour code and number the heddle support bars (for ease of threading)
• Clean the shafts
• Find a proper home for all the stuff that was on top of the castle

Beamed at last

The warp for the Big Block Blue Blanket is safely on at last. It took slightly longer than expected but it is done. The next task is to distribute the heddles evenly. As I am using the full width of the loom I can't have the spare heddles bunched up at the sides of the shafts, they must be spread out amongst the active heddles. I have been caught out by this one in the past on a table loom.