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Did you know that a fork can be used as a weaving loom? A loom is anything that helps make weaving easier.
I learned how to make fork roses in Girl Scouts, now I've taught my 4 year old how to do it.
You probably want to move beyond fork roses and try a larger loom.
Looms are defined by how they hold tension or how the heddles move.
Looms can also be described by the surface they work on, such as a floor loom, table loom, or ground loom.
My Baby Wolf floor loom is a type of jack loom and quite intricate, but a loom can be as simple as a piece of cardboard I can use to weave a pouch.
On weaving looms the heddles are used to create the pattern. Don't confuse them with the reed which separates warp strands and beats the weft together or the weaving shuttles that carry the weft.
Heddles hold the warp and move up and down with the harness.
Unless you are doing rigid heddle weaving, there are five possible types to use. The self-adjusting types slide along the heddle bar to automatically space out in position.
Ideally, it would be helpful to have a different color on each harness. If you are making your own string ones, you can dye them.
On one project, I had a loom warping emergency! What do you do when you run out of heddles? You make some out of string.
As you can see, I have the flat steel type on my Baby Wolf floor loom, but I ran out on this project and had to add two string heddles for the last strands.
There are different styles of shuttles specialized for different uses. If you are weaving rag rugs, you need a shuttle with enough room for the strips of cloth.
I use a boat shuttle most frequently with my weaving loom because I use a lot of wool yarn and cotton thread.
Different brands like LeClerc and Schacht come in slightly different shapes and weights.
It's a matter of personal preference. You really need to experiment and see which one feels good in your hand.
I began by borrowing a loom on a trial basis, but I had to learn about weaving reeds fast. The old one in the weaving loom was rusted, and I needed to figure out how to buy the right size.
It sounds soft, but when it comes to weaving looms, reeds are actually a large, hard metal part of the loom. It beats against the fell of the fabric.
I think reeds are taken for granted when they're inside the weaving loom, but you realize how big and detailed they are when you take it out. I'm curious about how antique ones were made.
Weaving patterns specify the reed size and dent or epi, which is also referred to as the sett in weaving terminology.
The most common sizes are 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16 dents per inch. The number is stamped in the metal on the end of the reed.
It's most economical to buy one that can double or skip spaces to create other common warp setts, but clumping more than one thread per dent can cause reed marks, so go for higher sizes.
There's an excellent chart in The Weaver's Companion that does all of the calculating for you and gives the order of sley when doing a sett different than the reed dents per inch.
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