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Plan and Adapt

Weaving takes planning.

You have to decide how wide you want the fabric to turn out, figure out what thread count the yarn or string you want to use will work at, convert the width of fabric from inches or centimeters or what have you into threads, cut that many threads that are long enough (which is a bit longer than you think because the loom will eat a certain length of yarn, called “loom waste,” and then you need a percentage over for the threads to go up and down around each other).

After that you have to thread the yarn through the heddles in a way that will let you get the pattern you want of threads going up and down. And if you want lengthwise stripes you have to do them in the threading step. If you’re not doing tabby weave on a rigid heddle, you’d better decide which combinations of heddles you want to lift together for the warp and weft to make the patterns you want; if you’re using a loom with treadles you’ll need to figure out a tie-up.

It’s enough to make you think that once you have a plan that’s it.

Then, the yarn store doesn’t have enough of the same dye lot. Rather than one big stripe you need to do several smaller stripes or alternate so often the difference doesn’t show or divide them up to use all of one for your warp and all of the other for the weft to get the same effect or…something.

Or the yarn you wanted to use as warp breaks too much, or sticks when you open the shed, so you have to either slow way down or scrap or maybe re-space the warp (salvage it as weft across something else or … ?).

Or your helpful pet gets in there and all you-know-what breaks loose.

If you’re not planning, all you-know-what will break loose constantly, but you can’t just plan — you have to adapt to the feedback the universe gives you about your plan as you go.

To get back into weaving, I had a plan: make up an embroidery frame, order heddles and a reed almost as long as the frame’s width and a shuttle from the Woolery, build a couple harnesses that fit the heddles and rig something up to hold them in place above or below to open a shed, and then it’s a loom so start weaving.

Then the universe gave me feedback on the plan, in the form of a deal too good to pass up, because they were moving and needed it gone urgently, on this:

(technical difficulties — picture of four foot width floor loom coming soon)

It wasn’t local, so if it’d been in most places, I would’ve had to pass anyway. However, it was in Oregon, and I still have family there. Including my father, an over-the-road truck driver, who could fit it into a load that didn’t quite take up the whole trailer.

So, I adapted — cancelled my Woolery order to build up a new one based on things I could use with it like shuttles, found a spot on my workroom wall where it just fits, moved the shelf that used to be there — and now here we are, and just as soon as I can shake loose a nice long quiet moment to plan a project, I get to find out how much I remember.

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Patience

After knitting since the age of 12, and picking up crochet, spinning, and weaving in the handful of years after that, yarn-related crafts requiring patience is not news.

Long story short my loom and I got separated, left behind in storage with family due to limited vehicle space in a move, in 2007 — and later on there was a rat problem in the building, so I’m still not sure how much fixing up it’s going to eventually take. Since then I’ve played with a loop-de-loom, and it’s fun but not the same — once you’ve worked on a loom that can do varying weave structures, work with different kinds of thread and yarn, and get different effects by varying your weft packing tightness, it’s hard to go back to a simpler one.

Or maybe hard isn’t the right word. It’s easy to use a simpler loom than you’re used to, but it’s the wrong kind of easy, where you keep seeing things you could do if.

(If you haven’t tried weaving before, or you want something simple and handheld to pass the time on a car ride, or to hook a new weaver who isn’t into the detailed stuff yet, I’d never tell you not to get a loop-de-loom! But if it doesn’t meet your needs because you like something more detailed, there’s still the whole rest of weaving for you to check out.)

Walking through Hobby Lobby’s embroidery aisle a while back (I don’t go there any more, firing all their workers without severance or insurance by email was my last straw with them, but it’s where this happened), looking for I can’t remember now what, I noticed scroll-style stand-up embroidery frame could be, if you put something in the middle to manage the thread patterns and spacing, not that different in structure from a table loom. That day I walked away from it for a window of opportunity to think it over but I was back a few days later, 40% off coupon code in hand, and got it home and put it together.

Then it sat, because “something in the middle to manage the thread patterns and spacing” was harder than I’d thought. Either a reed and heddles in frames or a rigid heddle, of course, but there’s no weaving supply store here, so my basic options were order online or make something, and I never got that far on trying to figure out how to make something. Raw ideas I had, like gluing together two combs at the bristle ends (and as many end to end as it took) to make a reed, but never convinced myself they would make up well enough to hold together and give precision.

I’d just about gotten something worked out involving hair pins, beads for spacing, two long thin metal dowels, and rubber bands to hold them on with, but I still hadn’t figured out what to do about heddles, and hadn’t started on making a reed that way because the other possibility I’d thought of was cutting down a piece out of a longer rigid heddle that someone was getting rid of because of it broke, if such a thing existed.

The third option was ordering from the Woolery (or other places, of course; however, their support chat’s message when no one is online is “please weave a message,” so, they are clearly my people), especially to fill out the kit if I got to a point where I had almost everything. Theoretically I could have ordered everything from there, up to and including a whole loom, but — while their prices are fine considering the product, we’re talking about a very niche product, and one where the shipping charge would be nontrivial because of its dimensions, so it was hard to talk myself into.

When our coronavirus economic stimulus deposit came in, that gave me something to think about. The transition to working from home has gone well for me, and my husband’s work is so far so good; this is a windfall for us, rather than an income replacement. Like most folks who aren’t in a whole different socioeconomic category, we have a list of things we’ve been meaning to get around to taking care of.

Finishing out the embroidery frame to loom conversion was one of my want-to-get-to-it projects, and I couldn’t help but notice that this would also be a great time to pick back up an old hobby. (Especially since, thanks to early stage carpal-tunnel-or-something-like-it, it’s a particularly good time to add a hobby that makes use of larger movements than those involved in crochet.)

Just to see what it would take, I priced a reed, big pack of heddles, small boat-style shuttle (thought about a simpler one but liked the idea of being able to switch colors with a bobbin swap instead of unwinding the yarn that’s already on there), and some spare bobbins for the shuttle, and it came out surprisingly reasonable, only about $150, which is over their free shipping level (when the shipping cost had slowed me down before) so…I pushed the button. I’ll still need to build some framing-up stuff to fit it all together but that’s comparatively straightforward, a lot of rectangles mostly, and will involve things I can get locally like wood.

Had I been the only one with such ideas, I’d be weaving right now, not typing.

Apparently a lot of people decided much the same thing, that now would be an appropriate time for weaving. Not only is the Woolery scrambling to keep up, when I reached out a few days later to find out why the order was still listed as awaiting fulfillment I found out the reed I wanted, that’ll fit the potential weaving width of my embroidery-frame-to-loom conversion project, is backordered.

By a few weeks.

They offered to cancel or split-ship the order, but — no, I need it all, and I’d just need to order it again later, so in a somewhat unexpected application of “weaving requires patience,” this time I need patience just to get things together to start weaving.