Nilus
I begin to appreciate the intimate relationship some people feel with their cars. What a bizarre contraption is a loom! No wonder the French word is the same as the word for a job. It's a thingummy, a whatzit, a collection of specialized parts virtually useless to any other craft but weaving.
The raddle, which I made yesterday, appears near the bottom of the photo: a long strip of wood with 90 nails ½" apart, used for sorting and spacing warp threads. Upon arriving home from work, I tackled the rest of the maintenance. All moving parts have been oiled so the loom doesn't squeak anymore. After a Promethean struggle with the beater, I managed to get the bolts tightened so it is better aligned. I concocted some cotter pins from wire clothes hangers.
Danny arrived around 8 p.m. and settled down to work. I boiled pasta and reheated sauce for dinner.
After dinner I cut new cords and tied up the treadles in the basic formation, replacing the old mess of strings and hooks. The makeshift cotter pins didn't work especially well. They're supposed to slip easily in and out of the eyes on the treadles (while also clipping securely in place) so you can handily change the formation, which determines the weaving pattern. The handmade pins are hard to work with. For now I don't need to change patterns mid-project, so they will suffice, but eventually I must obtain real ones.
I discovered that every time the third harness lifts, it catches and clatters against the fourth. This has obviously happened a long time, because the edge of the fourth harness is worn. I can't see how to correct this. Everything works fine; the third harness is just noisier than the others, and that's that.
Finally the loom was ready. I began dressing it with the warp (the mass of measured threads) I made a couple weeks ago. In the back-to-front method, you begin by slipping one end onto the warp rod attached to the back roller bar, visible at the top of the picture. Eventually each strand will be threaded through an eye in a heddle. In this photo, the heddles are the multitude of small vertical wires suspended within the four harnesses. For now I skip the heddles, draw the warp through the harnesses and spread it to the full width of the finished project, using the raddle. You can see how I've begun spacing the threads from the left edge. Eventually they'll extend just as far to the right. They must be kept precisely in sequence. This is a painstaking process.
Suddenly it was 11 p.m. and I had spent the entire evening working on the loom. I stopped, sat down in the armchair across from Danny, and started nodding off.
I must have dreamt about the loom. When I woke up this morning I realized there are far too many heddles for this project-a few hundred on each harness. Once the threads are spread across the width of the loom, before I feed them through the heddles, I must put them under tension and spread them to their full width across the back roller. The heddles will get in the way. I only need about 200 heddles on each harness, so some need to be taken off.
In order to lift the harnesses out of their slots, I have to remove the warp. Will I undo the sorting I've already done, or slip the entire raddle back through the harnesses? We'll see.
I'm getting to know this loom like a person: quirks, foibles, attributes, injuries and scars. There is no equivalent tool in any other craft I've learned. A while ago Danny gave me a set of interchangeable knitting needles, which I love working with, but they do not inspire the mixture of affection and frustration I've begun to develop for this loom. Leclerc Looms calls this model the Nilus, but I'm considering christening it the Nimbus 2000. And I haven't even begun to weave.