A long, long time ago, I made this little model of a warp-weighted loom, and after a few more years, I set it up again properly, trying to scale things down as well as possible.



The model has come in handy for a lot of occasions now - it's the perfect way to very quickly explain how a warp-weighted loom works, and much easier to transport than a full-size one. For weaving purposes, though... it is obviously not the most suitable thing.

For actual weaving on a warp-weighted loom, you need a full sized version. And due to some people putting a flea into my ear, I've been pondering the question of how to organise a loom-weaving workshop, in logistical terms. Because you'd obviously need a loom for every weaver...

Now, in my personal opinion, the weaving itself is not the crux in learning how to work with a warp-weighted loom. Yes, you can of course muck up things wielding the shuttle and beater - but according to my experience, the stage where the main decision happens on whether you will end up with thread salad or a proper fabric is the setting up of the loom. Which also happens to have a lot more steps, and a lot more varied tasks, than the actual weaving itself (which is, basically, change shed, beat, insert weft, repeat). So to learn the how-to, I would actually aim to teach setting up... followed by a bit of weaving.

Whether the one or the other, though, you still need a loom for every weaver. Preferably one that is a good, efficient tool which would be suitable for production weaving. Also relatively cheap and easy to make (even without a woodworking workshop and lots of tools), suitable for normal-sized women (a plus would be easy adaptability for body size), and with the option of making it free-standing (in case the workshop area does not have enough wall space). It should be possible to take it completely apart for storage or transport, preferably with no single piece longer than 2.2 m.

The most important measurement for me, at the moment, is a suitable and sensible depth of the natural and artificial shed. How deep does the shed have to be, in order to weave comfortably? At one point, it will be too shallow to pass the shuttle (or weft ball, or whatever) through. (Obviously, the wider the fabric, the more fiddly this might get.) Making the shed deeper than necessary, though, means that you have to pull your heddle stick out further than necessary each time, and that is not very efficient.

Mathematics say that the depth of shed and height of loom will dictate the angle of the loom, and thus how far its bottom will stick out from the wall, and thus how far forward you will have to lean to pull the heddle stick, and how long the rests will have to be for the artificial shed - so, basically, everything.

Which means that construction-wise, deciding on a smart depth of shed is the most important thing... which also means that if any weavers with experience on a warp-weighted loom are among you, please let me know about your thoughts - and your experiences with shed depths!

I've finally managed to get the remaining two kinds of linen yarn into the shop system - a white one and a thicker beige one, both from organic Belgian linen. They've been wound and ready to go in for a while now, but I had not gotten around to writing the description and making the photos.

Which has both happened now - and I've taken the opportunity to do a comparison pic of all the thicker linen yarns in the shop, which looks like this:



From top to bottom, these are the thick linen yarn in unbleached and in white, the thick half-bleached organic yarn, the goldbeige yarn, and the white organic yarn. They are all Z-/ss yarns (which means they consist of two individual plies, both s-spun, plied together in Z direction), they are all strong, and especially the white organic yarn has a very nice, tight ply.

You can find them all in my shop in the yarn section, in case you now find yourself in need of some linen threads...

On my task list for the upcoming weekend is a presentation about medieval fabrics... and on my personal task list for this thing is "explain samite". Because I believe that, if you are interested in the fabrics used in the Middle Ages, you need to have at least a very basic understanding of what complex weaves are, as they were used for high-status garments throughout the High and Late Middle Ages.

There are very few people these days who still make medieval-style complex weaves, and one of them is Sylvia Wiechmann, who runs a weaving workshop in Munich. She made a reconstruction of a type of samite called "Kölner Borten" a while ago, and has a video on Youtube showing how they are made, and explaining the process. In German - but maybe watching it is still interesting for you even if you don't understand the text:


 

Tax things and bookkeeping things are some of the details that I had never thought about before I suddenly became my own company, and then, when I had to deal with them, they were quite the scary thing for me. It became much better after a while, and with the discovery of a relatively easy-to-use, but still very professional, bookkeeping programme that does not cost an arm and a leg each year.

Meanwhile it has become more or less routine to do the bureaucracy stuff regularly. And then, every quarter year, I have to take care of tax stuff - one of the inevitable things when you have your own company (even if it's a tiny one). Which means I have to sit down and take care of the bookkeeping that has not yet been taken care of, make sure all the numbers tally up, and then file the report and send the money owed to the state.

Which, you guessed is, was part of the things I did today - and this time around, it included checking a stack of past entries to find the elusive mistake that had snuck in somewhere. I used to think that it's not hard to type off numbers correctly, especially not if you have a habit of double-checking them, but it turns out that at some places, I had clicked a wrong button (and I had actually mis-typed at another point, so the issue had to be fixed in more than one place).

So there you are - the exciting daily (or quarterly) things in my life! Though in this case, I prefer non-excitement quite a bit above this kind of interesting.

I am, now, very happy that I finally managed to find it, and that I have now fixed it, and consequently things feel much, much better. Since I discovered that the numbers must be amiss a few days ago, this has sort of irked me continuously - after all, mistakes in book-keeping are a Bad Thing (TM). Now my tax stuff can be finished and filed and sent off as it needs to, and I'll be a happy woman with nicely corresponding numbers again!

I'll be giving a workshop about brocading in tablet weaving next weekend, so today saw me drawing lots and lots of little dots - thankfully, using the computer and appropriate drawing software made this a lot easier. (The whole thing was also helped by the fact that we'll only be using 15 tablets. There's a lot less dots in 15 rows than in 55 or more!)

So we'll have a selection of nice simple patterns to use in the workshop, all nicked from actual historical bands - though I suspect that we'll not get down to the actual original size of many of these bands, which was in most cases (for around 13-17 tablets) at somewhere between 4 and 10 mm in width... rather tiny.

But then, the tinyness does help with the bands looking quite spectacular. There's a small band with a dragon-like motif in the Irish National Museum Dublin, for instance, that looks just like solid gold. It's tiny and has really thin threads, and I'd love to show you a photo of it, but alas, it's copyrighted... so I'll have to keep the blurry photograph that I have of it to myself. Sorry.

Today was spent doing re-stocking actions - among them: fixing bands to both distaff sticks and embroidery frames. As the distaffs in question were hand distaffs, though, the first step was to saw the dowels to the correct length and then round off both ends of each dowel.



The distaffs were, after that, rather quick to finish in comparison to the embroidery frames, which have a lot more of the small copper nails holding the bands in place. And of course these nails need to sit at the proper place, and they have to go into pre-made holes so they will go in properly and not bend instead... and no, don't ask me how many bent nails it took me to finally learn that!

The first few nails are always a bit extra exciting, and fun to hammer in, but it does get a little boring after a while. Even worse, the sound of hammering makes it hard to listen to podcasts while working, though otherwise, this would be the perfect mindless job to enjoy some nice stories or other interesting things to listen to.

The restocking action was rounded off by refilling my spindle whorl boxes and portioning off wool for spinning. So it was a productive day, and I even found time to spend a few minutes outside pruning our willow fence - it's that time of the year again.

I've mentioned working on the fabric info thing - and one of the things I really want to include is lesser-known weaves. Well, weaves lesser known today, I should say, because back in their hey-day, things like samite and Rippenköper definitely were well-known.

Rippenköper is something that I wasn't really familiar with either; it only had a relatively short time where it was the Thing (or at least one of the things). It's a twill variation, made by changing over from 2/1 twill to 1/2 twill after a few wefts, which results in narrow stripes giving a pleated effect. Since this is a weave where you will see more of the warp or more of the weft depending on which side you're looking at, if you have warp and weft threads in different colours, it will also give you a colour stripe effect.

If you're curious about that weave now, Carolyn Priest-Dorman has written a blogpost about it a while ago, including a pretty picture of a Rippenköper she wove in the background of the page - you can go check it out here.