Recently I have taken up again with fiber arts, learning twining (which I'd never heard of) and inkle weaving (which I've wanted to know how to do for years). And, having acquired an inkle loom at long last, I also tried out card weaving on the inkle loom (a common practice).
I have to say I have mixed reports about my inkle loom. At first I was quite happy with it. It wasn't perfectly balanced to weave in my lap but I could make it happen, and it worked great sitting at a table. And it was in fact quite a bit easier to warp a card weaving project on the loom as opposed to the various and sundry ways I'd tried over the years to warp up a backstrap project. The most finicky part of any inkle loom is inevitably the tension bar. The need for a good tension bar is, in fact, why I didn't attempt to get one of my more hardware-inclined friends (or husband) to simply make me an inkle loom. The rest of the design is straightforward enough. But the tension bar is tricky.
My tension bar broke yesterday.
I was about a 1/3 of the way into my second full project on the loom, having also finished a very short inkle project on it. My first full project, a belt for a friend, came out beautifully. I need to get a better picture than the one here, but all I had handy was my cell phone before I gave it away. It's a pattern of diamonds based on an Anglo-Saxon archaeological find. I used 100% wool due to a desire for authenticity and temporary insanity...but despite getting bogged down for weeks when I had to back-trace a mistake which is painfully difficult and slow and tedious when working with wool, it wasn't as bad as I remembered and I think I'd do it again with enough incentive. At the very least I think I want one for myself before I give up on wool for another eight years.
That turned out well enough that I got ambitious. The next pattern I tried is easily the hardest I've ever tried. It is closely related in concept to the next hardest pattern I'd ever attempted. That previous one is still half-finished in my mother's attic. I despaired of ever getting it going again after such a long gap--I'd already been working at it for over a year off and on when it got relegated to storage. But after the project I just did, I think I could pick up the other one.
This pattern, known as the ram's horn pattern, was a real pain. I didn't start with the best directions--I used a blurry printout of a blurry scan of one page of what I think was a longer set of instructions. I recopied it once in pencil to get a better look at it and then later on the computer with color to help with my threading. The biggest problem was that I misread the S/Z threading instructions for nearly half the cards, five on one half and five on the other of the 22 card pattern.
I entered what I had threaded into Guntram's Tablet Weaving Thingy (GTT) and then played with it until it made the pattern I had expected to get. If only I'd thought to do that before threading, it could have saved me a lot of grief. Realizing that it was the S/Z threading rather than a mis-aligning of cards was bad news. I had three options at that point: painstakingly untie and unthread the mis-threaded cards, and possibly some of their neighbors given that I'd done a semi-continuous warp, and then rethread them correctly; cut the knots off to rethread, reducing the time by about half but reducing the final length of the project by several inches; or see what I could do with the threading I had.
I chose the latter option, determining that the core of the design could be salvaged by flipping some of the cards and turning them so that the outline color--white--was still where it was supposed to be. My inside and outside colors became somewhat muddied, but still came out in fairly pleasing places. This was, thankfully, a test project in cotton since I was well aware there might be difficulties with so complex a pattern with such minimal instructions to go on, so I was willing to be slightly cavalier about the whole thing.
An acceptable compromise pattern determined, I began weaving. The right half of the pattern immediately looked just as expected, but the left was off. After tweaking it about, comparing it to the pattern and the opposite half, weaving and unweaving about 5 times, I finally got it all aligned properly and I was off.
During the first 1/3 of the project I still encountered problems frequently where I would get off the pattern one way or another. The turning pattern was a lot to hold in one's head. But I got the hang of it, in both directions, and then I was off.
And that was about when the tension bar broke. I don't really understand what's wrong with it, but the cap on one end has come off and the bar itself won't loosen. It'll turn, but it seems to tighten no matter which direction it's turned and is actually marking up the wood, it's so tight. Very frustrating.
At last I decided to treat the tension bar like one more fixed bar, removed the project from one and then two of the other pegs, using other objects--a bobbin of thread, a flat package, a ball of twine with a hole big enough to fit over one of the pegs--to increase the tension again, removing them as needed to ease the tension. It was very jury-rigged, but it worked, and I finished the project.
It's a fantastic size and weight for trim, in lovely rich colors, but I may keep it as a belt until I make a more belt-like belt for myself. That might be dangerous though. The longer I think of it as all of a piece, the harder it will be to cut it for trim.
Anyway, my success with multiple projects has inspired me weave more, yet the problems with the tension bar make me hesitate to start new projects until it's fixed or replaced. In any case, it's very good to be playing with string again.
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