A while ago, I got a commission for a gold and silk band, woven on the rigid heddle. Which delighted me no end, since I just love working with these materials, and I love rigid heddle band weaving, and the band itself is totally stunning in its simplicity. So I did the calculations, and the test run, and everything looked A-OK. Green. All systems go.

I even made a boxloom for this, to have something to wind up the long warp, so everything would stay balanced and nice and tidy. You might remember this:



Well. It then evolved a bit (which was to expect)...



...and for the final run, because the laser had not cut all the slits perfectly and some had a rough spot, I decided to use a wooden rigid heddle (way too wide, but who minds, right?) instead.

The warp was warped, the ends were threaded through the heddle, weaving started... and I quickly discovered that while my calculations for the bandwidth were correct and I had plenty of warp (I'd made it a bit longer, just in case), there were problems.

Tension problems.

The threads, both gold and silk, are fine and smooth and slippery. This can cause an issue when not holding the band at the very same angle to the heddle all the time, because then it will curve (or zig-zag). This is not as obvious with the narrower test bands I did, but with 1.5 cm of width to weave? It suddenly becomes an issue.

The threads are also very, very different from each other regarding their elasticity - which means that though the warp was nicely tensioned at first, it very, very quickly deteriorated.

Well. Tools evolve, right? And when something like this comes up, you cope with it as best you can. Which, in my case, meant... unboxing.

See what I mean here:


There's a white cord temporarily taking my place, holding the woven end of the band (hooray for foldback clips). There's a red cord tensioning the main warp, through the whole room - twice, actually. This is how it looks from the other side:


Because it is easier to adjust the tension a smaller bit of warp at a time, there's clamps a bit behind the heddle:


...and you can see here, in the picture taken before I installed the final thingummygadget (made from a piece of string), that the difference in warp tension is really huge, only a relatively little way into the weaving process.

So here's the coup de grace for this issue:


Silk and gold warp separated, then tied together with a bit of string, and that is used to tension them. Voilà - equal tension for the two.

Next time I'll make something like this from silk and gold? I'll handle things a good bit differently from the very beginning!

Well, what do you do once you have made a box loom? Try it out, of course. So I've been test-weaving some more, again with silk and gold... and by now, it's become a fairly long band:


...so long that I have wound it up and tied it together with the white cord. (That band will probably show up in my online shop, eventually.)

The boxloom, of course, has also evolved a bit during all this weaving:


My original plan to make a sort of reel from acrylic has not stood the test of time - or rather, the glue I used was not strong enough. So the construction (you can see the leftover parts behind the loom, half-hidden by the sandpaper to smooth out any remaining catchy edges) got replaced by a cardboard tube. To keep the warp from unreeling, I have a suitable gear and stopdog, but haven't taken time to install them yet (they are on the far side in the photo), so for now, a clamp is taking on the stopping duty for the warp reel. (I love those clamps. We have a gazillion of them, and they are just. so. handy.) There's an old iron providing the heft that the lightweight materials do not give, so I can beat in the weft without beating the loom towards me.

It always fascinates me to see how tools, and even those that seem so simple, have a lot of details that turn out to be more important, or less important, than you would have supposed them to be - even if you know the textile technique in question, and how those tools get changed and evolve when you work with them...

Here's one of the things I played around with regarding spinnning angles - an overlay of several measurements by several people on the same yarn picture.


It's hard to see, but you'll hopefully be able to make out the angles drawn onto the thread. I find it fascinating that about nobody picked the same spot, and that the results are so mixed (which is probably due to my spinning).

I'm also fascinated by another comparison - two threads, one of which was spun quite a bit firmer than the other one. Measuring the angles, though, gave almost the same result for both. Was that a fluke of my measuring? (I'll probably do a few more measurements to find out...)

Anyway - it stays interesting. And it makes me wonder how reliable the spinning angle is... though I'm quite convinced that there is not a better thing to be found for the archaeological or historical textiles. Sigh.

And here's the promised picture of the other finished thing - the Pirate Robert Hat. As with so many of these things, it's incredibly hard to take good photos of it, which means that the pattern bit is less legible on the picture than in real life, where you can actually make out the crossed sabers. Ah well.


I love that hat, and it fits perfectly. It's almost a shame that it is getting nice and warm outside these days, too warm to wear a woolen hat!

After so many finished things (I also completed a Pirate Roberts hat, and you'll get a pic of that soon), it is obviously necessary to get some more new things under way. There's actually two exciting projects coming up, and for one of them, I'm making an upgrade to my weaving equipment... a box loom.

Box looms are basically holders for a rigid heddle, formed like a box, and with a nice reel or winding thing for the warp. There's an article with notes about the construction on this page here, which served as the basis for my interpretation of the thingamajig.

Mine is, however, differently dimensioned... with a lot more slits in the heddle. I've also not crafted it in the workshop, but in a FabLab, and not from ordinary wood, but from plywood and acrylic (because that's the stuff that is nice to cut with a laser).

As usual with first iterations, it's a bit... wonky, and there are quite a few things I'd do differently next time. So far, though, it looks like it will be functional (and that's the main thing after all), and I'll be testing it soon. Soooon.

Here it is in its half-finished half-glory:


Some more assembly required. It should be up to a bit of weaving by tomorrow evening, though!

It's the time of finished things at the moment, or so it seems - I finished the gold band weaving this morning, and now I have a bit more than a metre of band. It was really fun to weave, and I am thinking of doing some more of it and maybe even sticking it in the shop...

I also did get some nice buttons for my Vignette a few days ago, and I've since finished the cardigan. Finally! So here's a quickly snapped photo of the thing in action:


It's not perfect, but it fits nicely, I like the sleeve length, and overall I'm quite happy with it. Also... there needs to be room for improvement after a first non-sock, non-hat garment, right?

Well. I took a deep breath, and then I did the final calculations for the wonderful weaving project that ended up exploding... so now I have the numbers, and I can tell you: they are not pretty. Not pretty at all.

I'm normally not that far off with my work-time estimates, but there were a lot of unknowns in the project this time, and I did underestimate some of them. So it would have been a non-perfect estimate even without all the explodening - but well, that's how you learn. Or, as a friend of me likes to say: "Lernen durch Schmerzen, Wissen bildet Narbengewebe" (more or less literally: Pain makes you learn, knowledge forms scar tissue).

Which means... the next time around, I'll be smarter, and I'll do calculate things a bit differently. Next time around, we'll also have some more knowledge of how to approach a project like this, and know some more about the vagaries and ficklenesses of handspun yarn.

Anyway, I needed something to cheer me up after that, and what could be more cheerful than shiny gold and silk? So I sat down and did a bit of a test weave, and the result is this:

[caption id="attachment_2963" align="alignnone" width="640"] Sorry that picture is not better - that gold stuff is really, really hard to photograph!


The band is about one centimetre wide, made from (chemically dyed) silk (the good old Gütermann two-ply) and gold thread. It looks fantastic, pictures don't do those gold things justice... and it did make this day much, much nicer.