Arrrgggghhhh!

Remember that mystery warp that came my way on the Cherryville Counterbalance Loom when I borrowed it? You know the one that I was just sure would be no problem to weave off with a smart easy twill pattern? What was I thinking? Arrrggghhhhhh! The warp is a huge mess… the warp must have come partially off at some point, and it was just looped back over the beam and hanging in knotty piles at the back of the loom! We had to do some major loom changes before we got to the warping process. The loom was using two dowels hanging from a third bigger dowel to hold the shafts in place. The dowels were different weights which didn't help the balancing problem, so off they came!Although I still haven’t got this loom balanced correctly yet, I needed to keep moving forward so we changed the jury rigged dowels that were on the loom to the heddle horses that the manufacturer sent with the loom. Pretty aren't they? There are even nifty shaft holders to keep everything in place and the shafts even while you are threading, so we put them on too.

I'm using instructions on tying up a Counterbalance loom from Laila Lundell’s Big Book of Weaving. I’m getting there, but oh so slowly! I highly recommend this book for new and even intermediate weavers; and of course those like me who are trying out a new loom system. The book has wonderful diagrams of how the heddle horses should work and it’s very easy to understand how it should work; it’s just a bunch of fiddling that needs doing to get it to work! I unraveled the warp back to where I could see some order, about 3 yards back, and knew I needed lease sticks. One by laborious one with my daughters' help we’ve pulled each thread through the lease sticks, over and under ad nauseum, then pulled through to the front where it now languishes in neat bundles.I’ve double checked the number of threads, yet again,and naturally just to make this a much longer process I have decided I don’t want to do the Landis Valley Linen pattern! I want to weave the whole warp off in one piece and then cut to the appropriate place mat size. Now back to the computer I go to figure out a pattern that doesn’t need borders. Stalled again.....Arrrgggghhh! Right now I have one of each major type of floor loom in the studio - very neat, but a bit crowded!

Weaving Words
The word clue comes from cliwen, Anglo-Saxon for a ball of yarn. There are many legends about adventurers finding their way out of dangerous mazes by using a ball of string…thus any aid to solving a puzzle became known as a clue!