Back after a long hiatus

The family situation that pulled my attention away from weaving for so long has improved, and I am finding I have space in my life again for challenging yet inessential activities.  Since I last posted here I have acquired the reference article I needed to read, learned a lot more about pre-Roman tapestry weaves, and mentally solved the last questions I had about how to weave this project.  More on these issues as I get closer to the parts of the project where they become relevant; suffice it to say, there has been a lot of string-related squeeing around here in the past month or so.

Today I mended six broken warp threads—again, all from the center of the warp.  Then I checked the whole warp to make sure it's all in good weaving order.  I will spend some time this afternoon reviewing my posts and notes to help me re-learn the dance.  I'm glad I left myself those breadcrumbs!

Tomorrow I hope to resume weaving after I go pick up the book the library has on hold for me.

Audiovisual Aid

For years I've wanted to take and post videos of my work with the warp-weighted loom.  Until now, my access to technology required a second person to act as tripod and operator, and that hasn't worked out very well given the relationship that needed to exist between the camera and the work.  But today, thanks to advances in technology, I was able to take my first videos all by my ownself using Google Glass.

Most of what I took today isn't good enough to be postable.  The equipment limits each video to ten seconds in length, and I have to learn where to look and how close to get.  I'll be taking a lot more as I learn about how to take effective ones.

Here is a sample of the kind of videos that will come along as I am able to make them.  This particular video shows part of the dance that occurs in the Back Again (or Return) row of weaving.  After putting the weft through it, the countershed is dropped and the initial resting shed must reassert itself.  I strum the warp all the way across to help the threads shake themselves loose of one another.  This process makes two kinds of noises, the strumming sound and the clink of the loom weights as they rock and settle back into their resting position.

Stay tuned for more videos, hopefully within the week.

ETA:  Technical difficulties solved.

#throughglass

Spinning fates and the Song of the Loom

I really want to go to this:

Spinning Fates and the song of the Loom: the use of textiles, clothing and cloth production as metaphor, symbol and narrative device in Greek and Latin literature.

A one day round-table (June 1st) at the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre for Textile Research.

It's a bit far to go for a day-trip, though. Alas.

Unexpected progress!

Last night's meeting was cancelled so I had more time to work on heddles.

All the heddles are done, and the shed is clean!

I put in the first two shots of weft. Tomorrow I'll take a photo.

Safely secured

This is the hard part of what I did yesterday. Here you see the header band laced through every four threads to a stiffening bar. The bar is resting on top of the shed rod, just for convenience of photographing.

Normally I use a dowel as my stiffening rod. But with a warp six feet wide, it made more economic sense to use lumber than look for a dowel that long, and so this time I have a stiffening bar. This piece of lumber is a 1x2, which means it actually measures .75" by 1.5".

Originally I began using a stiffening rod on the warp-weighted loom for two reasons. First, it gave me better control over the header band than I had simply by stitching it to the holes of my Icelandic style loom's cloth beam. The holes in such a beam are fairly widely spaced. The one time I tried to attach a warp only through those holes, the header band scalloped so alarmingly (more than 3") after I weighted it that I decided that must not have been how it should be done. At the time I hadn't seen any museums' attempts to solve this problem, so I was interested to find out later that other people working with the warp-weighted loom had solved it in a way similar to mine, i.e., with the addition of a stiffening bar.

I also intended my warps to be removable from the loom. The Icelandic loom was built as a teaching and demo device. I wanted to be able to warp it and then, if necessary, remove my working warp entire in order to take the loom someplace and warp it with a teaching warp. By putting the header band on a stiffening rod, I found I could easily remove and roll up an entire warp, weights, chained spacers, heddle rods, skilskaft and all, and set it aside for later if necessary.

I don't intend this current warp, or indeed this loom, to be portable. However, I am so sold on the utility of the stiffening rod that I cannot imagine working a project without one.

It was, therefore, quite a delight to discover in the archaeological record an example of a header band that still retained stitching believed by the examiner to represent lacing to a stiffening rod.

Loom validation

Due to the requirements of this project, Greg and I knew we'd need a very wide loom rather than the more narrow ones shown in most of the ancient Greek depictions. Accordingly, we focused most closely on the depictions of the looms on the Amasis lekythos and Chiusi 1831. Although I believed the loom to be completely justifiable at the width we decided, I couldn't specifically document it the way I have been able to document so many other types of loom and textile projects. That made me just a little bit uneasy, not knowing exactly whether or where to draw that research line that means "beyond this is artistic license that might be flawed." But we decided to let the product of the loom tell us what the loom should be like. Since then I have tried to live with the niggling little doubts I retained.

That changed yesterday, after I received my copy of a book that's extremely relevant to the project. While the article I wanted the book for was disappointing in its general nature, other articles were surprisingly useful. One of them detailed an archaeological site from the correct culture and period where a gynaikon (women's quarters) portion of a house was found, including a row of loomweights between a pair of postholes. The postholes were for the histopodes (uprights) of a loom. It is possible to know something about the width of the loom from this find.

I was delighted to discover that the loom I am working on is right in the zone!

I always enjoy it when I find something after the fact to validate a project decision I've made. While it is always better to know before the fact rather than after, it's still better to know than not to know.

The loom is built!

It's much bigger in reality than it was in my mind, or on top of the car when we were bringing the lumber home from the store. But the ancient Greek style loom is mostly put together.

I spent part of today making a test warp to check gauge. I need to have some idea of thread count so I can make solid calculations of how much yarn I'm going to need. I discovered to my surprise that my natural tendency is to beat the yarn in the header band much more closely than is recommended for tabby setts in that yarn. But I persevered, fighting my usual tendency to beat really hard, and eventually got down to a workable thread count.

Tomorrow I get to finish putting the loom together and make a very long header band. Well, maybe start making the header band. I'm really not sure how long it's going to take me to make a header band for a project this wide, using techniques I haven't used often enough to be comfortable doing. I wish I could document having a tablet woven header band, but I can't, more's the pity. So I learn a new thing; that's part of the point of projects like this, right?

Patience pays off

Yesterday the book I was waiting for arrived. It has more information than I had before (in the form of plates) but still doesn't tell me what I'd ideally like to know. So far my research has not turned up any subsequent published articles or chapters about this textile, although nearly 20 years have elapsed since the book was published.

I'm also frustrated to discover that a major article I'd very much like to read is in a rare book of proceedings not available to me here. It is, alas, happily resident in the library across the country that I used for 30 years. When I first started to do textile research in the 1980s, it was very difficult to find any information at all. The Internet has improved that situation a lot, and but publications are still very difficult to acquire if you're not explicitly involved in an academic context -- or not very well moneyed. It's at times like this that I tend to forget how much easier it is now than it was 25 years ago.

Today the yarn and half the loom weights arrived! Suddenly the project seems a lot more real....

Research day

Today has been a research day.

I heard back from the museum. The person to whom my message had been routed sent me back a very pleasant and helpful response.

I found an article that I hadn't seen in any bibliographies, one which gives me a lot of insight into a find most of whose information was inaccessible to me. I just wish the plates were clearer, and that it had been written by a weaver. Still, I learned some really useful things from it that I will be integrating into the design phase.

I learned more about the ancient history of cotton. That's not mission critical for this project, but it was a related issue and I'm glad I understand it better now. Those of you who know me from other venues (she said, speaking to the as-yet-empty room) may recall my phrase about stomping cockroaches. Well, the popular history of the use of cotton around the Mediterranean is rife with cockroaches (i.e., unkillable pernicious false unfootnoted ideas) just waiting to be stomped. Now I feel like I have put on my StompyBoots and am ready for the next time one crawls out of the woodwork and needs to be squashed.

I also heard from my patron that the loomweights are done. So excited!

Size matters

Today was the day to solve the loom size question. Mission accomplished.

First Greg and I sat down to work out the basics of how the loom should look and operate. That took some time because not all the period depictions look alike. We had to figure out a working set of assumptions based on our experience with building and weaving on upright looms. I'm pretty confident in the design decisions he made; after all, he's done this for me many times now.

Then I had to talk my patron out of expecting a piece three meters wide. I didn't confront the problem straight on, but took a more circuitous route. For one thing, I pointed out how wide all the looms were in the period depictions. Even the widest are not much larger than one person's "wingspan," as Greg put it. If there were ever a case of letting the correct tool lead us to the correct product, this will be one. But because I let the tool's innate logic speak for itself, I never had to hit him over the head (metaphorically speaking, of course!) in order for him to come around. Eventually, after he interacted with a physical sample of cloth in the correct size range, there was a very satisfactory meeting of the minds. So now he is commissioning a piece that is much closer to correct, Greg doesn't have to make a cloth beam so long it's structurally unsound, and I don't have to weave half again more cloth than I expected. It's all good.

Last night I acquired some more technical specs for extant textiles that include thread counts. I am really enjoying how the research process keeps turning up exciting facts that upend old assumptions.

Weighty matter

I just bought 60 loomweights. My patron is buying the other 60, so I will have 120 matched terracotta loomweights in a few weeks.

After all the years of hassle I spent trying to get a set of Viking Age ones, this seems almost magically easy: 40 hours from first contact to "they're drying so I can fire them." Wow!

Can't wait for them to arrive so I can share a photo.