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With all of the preparations out of the way, I can finally start on the actual weaving process for the woven table runner I’ve been working on.
After hours of working with 162 nine-foot-long strings, keeping them perfectly untangled so they could pass through a rigid plastic comb-like device to be wound on a bar, I could use some relaxation.
Last week, I finished tying the strings onto the back support bar of the loom and loaded my shuttles with sage and ivory yarn. With these steps finished, it is time to start the weaving process.
My loom is a mobile model, designed to be moved around and used wherever. It does not have a stand, or even a designated spot in the house. When it is not in use, I slide it under my bed to keep it out of the way.
The mobile design gives me a lot of space to work with when I am not using the loom, but it also means that I have to find the room for the loom when I want to use it.
In my case, I scooted my computer chair back from my desk approximately two feet, and hefted my loom onto my lap. It was not so much heavy as it was bulky, but at 32 inches wide, anything would be difficult to manage.
I placed the back side of the loom against my desk, nestled the grooves on the back side against the worn desktop, and braced the front of the loom against my stomach, with the majority of the support relying on the arms of my computer chair.
The rigid heddle on my loom is different than traditional looms, in that it serves to move the warp strings up and down and is used to pack the weft strings into place. In laymen’s terms, this means that the heddle controls which direction my strings under tension will go, and how tightly the back-and-forth strings will ultimately be packed in.
The heddle has three positions on my loom, creatively called up, neutral, and down. When I lift the heddle into the up position, the comb-like plastic part lifts the strings in every other slot up by about two inches.
When I move it to the down position, the strings move down by about two inches, and when it is in the neutral position, all of the strings on the loom are at the same height. The space between the strings in the up or down position is called the shed, but that is not overly important.
What is important is that the tension on the piece remains consistent enough so that when I position the heddle so that all the strings are up, that all of the strings actually go up. If one or two should fail to move in the proper direction here or there, or even sag a little too far, my cross-threads will go over instead of under, and problems will arise.
I shifted the heddle into the up position and started from the left-hand side with the green string. The up and left choices are a habit, one that I developed early-on during weaving.
I made it a habit after I once spent the greater half of a project re-weaving what I had accidentally un-wove after getting my ups and downs confused with my lefts and rights.
To create the houndstooth pattern that I want for the design, I needed both shuttles going at once. I started my green out by moving it from the right to the left, and leaving about eight inches of the yarn tail hang off the left side.
I adjusted the yarn with my fingers until it was straight, then moved the heddle from the up position to the down position.
Shifting the heddle from up to down requires a good bit of strength. Pressure keeps the heddle in each position, and it is a pressure that has to be constantly battled while not stretching the yarn out.
I put the heddle in the down position, and passed the green shuttle back through the yarn. The loom took care of the over and under sorting for me, and the sage green yarn fell neatly into place.
I tucked my pinky finger in where the yarn was looping over the last lengthwise string, and then adjusted the string so that it was at approximately a 45 degree angle to the first string across the loom.
I then tucked the shuttle under my left arm, and dislodged the heddle from the down position. I brought it up to the neutral position, and gripped each side of it. I pulled it toward me, careful to keep it straight as I went.
I teased the string through so that the loop I had left with my pinky disappeared, careful to keep it from pulling the strings in at the far right side, then adjusted it with the heddle again.
Once finished, I moved the heddle back to the up position and slid the shuttle under the strings to rest on my lap. Then, I introduced the ivory shuttle, and passed it back and forth in the same manner as the safe had earlier been, complete with the adjustment of the string with the heddle after each pass.
I shifted back to the sage yarn, careful to move it so that the sage yarn looped around the outside of the ivory yarn as I did.
And so, I began to weave. Left to right with sage, adjust the string with the heddle. Move the heddle to the next position, right to left with sage, adjust the string, move the heddle, left to right with white, and so on.
The houndstooth pattern began to quickly take shape on the newly-formed cloth, created by the way the two yarn colors interacted with each other in the weave.
Join me next week as I run out of room on the strings in front of me, and have to advance the warp strings for the first time. My cat, Mari, may even use the woven cloth as a hammock while it is still on the loom. It is one of her favorite ways to assist me, after all.
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Gretchen Richards is a reporter for the Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She is a fifth-generation artisan, and skilled in multiple art forms.