Falling back into Weaving

I have seriously been considering selling my 12 Shaft Louet Spring Loom, since for the past ten months it has been idle.  Well, now that my knee pain is under control and I’m feeling perky again I thought I’d give the Spring one more warp to make sure that letting go was the right answer.  We have two Louet Springs in the studio, a Louet Spring 1 from 2008 and the other an Original 1990’s Louet Spring; so we thought we’d better see which one we want to keep.

So Ngaire and I swapped looms and I put a warp on the Original Spring loom.  We thought it would be interesting to see what the differences were and if that factored into which one we should sell.

I put on a painted silk warp that was one of the ones that I dyed last summer.  This was the last warp I made and it had on 132 ends and the dye colours were super subtle.  Well, 132 ends are far too few when the sett for silk is a minimum of 24 epi; so borders were on my radar.

I found a very pretty pattern in the Strickler 8 Shaft Pattern book and built my scarf from there.  I found some silk in a complementary blue colour to bulk out the width and chose teal tencel for the warp. This is the border sequence I chose.

The most notable difference that I noticed in the looms right off the bat is that the Original Spring is made of heavier gauge timber, it just feels more solid and tends to move around less.  The second difference is the distance from the castle to the back beam is about 5 cm longer, not sure why that has changed but there is more headroom when you’re working with the lease sticks.  The third major difference is the braking system which is a tad more cumbersome to use.  Frankly, it feels just the same and actually feels more secure on the floor.

Now, that I’m actually weaving again, I find that my knees are doing great as long as I take a short break now and then so I’m really enjoying the whole weaving process.  Here is the scarf off the loom but unwashed.

The scarf is a joy to weave and I’m really stoked at the end result which is a lovely scarf and as a bonus, I think we’ll hang on to both looms for now because weaving feels fine!

Here is the beauty shot!  For Sale.

Right now the stars of the garden are the grasses and my urns one on each side of the garage at the front of the house.  The flowers are Scaevola aemula or Fairy Fan Flowers and they bloom from June to December.