Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Vacuums, Turn Signals, and Looms

I bet in your wildest dreams you would never put those three items together in a thought.  I did.

When I was a teenager, my sister Renee was trying to teach me to drive a car with a manual transmission.  We went out on dirt roads (they're not dirt anymore) and she told me when I needed to make a right hand turn, pull the turn signal arm up -- like an upright vacuum (up, right).  I've never forgotten that and you know what?  It came in handy with my new loom.

The heddle is either in the up position or down position when you feed the shuttle across.  Guess what?  It needs to be in the up position when I'm passing the shuttle from the right side of my weaving to the left side -- up, right -- AMAZING!!!

For Eddie, and anyone else who's been wondering -- the warp is the lengthwise threads/yarns in a woven piece, and the weft is the crosswise threads/yarns.

Tonight I got another 20" woven on my scarf in about an hour.  Next time I weave I'll keep better track of my time and inches woven so I can tell if this is going to be a quicker method for making scarves than knitting.  My gut instinct says 'yes'.

1 comment:

Sassafras and Winterberry said...

You are really cooking with steam on that weaving!
Courtney