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...

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!

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.

Though I love all (or, well, almost all) textile techniques quite a bit, and I work in a good number of them, weaving cloth is not among those. There are a bunch of reasons for this - one is space consideration (looms take up space, and quite a bit of it if you want to work seriously), another is the limited time that any day has, and there are only so many techniques you can fit into one life while still doing them justice.

Another reason - much the same reason why I don't dye my own fabrics or yarns - is that there are enough proficient people out there who already know how to do it, have the equipment to do it, and are willing to do it faster, better, and probably much more efficiently than I could do it if I started out now. (That does not mean that I won't jump at any chance to dabble in these techniques, have some fun with the equipment and get some more practice.  That, after all, is both for my enjoyment and for furthering my understanding of these crafts. Or do an experiment concerning them. But I won't offer anybody to hire me for that kind of work, as I do for other techniques.)

Narrow wares, however, are a different beast, and I've done my bit of weaving these. So imagine my delight when I found out that there is a repp band weaving tradition in Ireland that is still a little bit alive: Crios belts.

Makes my fingers itch to do a little more rigid heddle weaving...

I've gone through my list of things that I might want to blog about, and as usual, the list is long... but not all of the topics make for a quick blog entry, or a link list.

What is in there of potential interest to you, though, is this: Plans for making a tape loom. They are from a magazine that was published a while ago, and then went through bankruptcy. It's a relatively simple tape loom, though not as simple as my contraption (which is basically a stick in a board with a holder for the rigid heddle).

If you haven't tried band weaving yet, but get the chance - give it a go. It is a really nice pastime, a rather quick way to get some tapes or bands, and since it's quick and does not use oodles of material, it is a nice possibility to try out some funky colour combinations, too.