Grass carpet

Now the "grass carpet" is woven, too, still in twill coruroy. I used five or maybe six different yarns for the weft, in cotton and linen.
Here it is, hot from the loom:



About the cutting, Collingwood writes that there are two ways: either you cut "straight up" or you follow the "twill line". I may have misunderstood how to cut "straight" - found it very difficult to identify the logical "straight".
Anyway - to the leftit is "twill cut", to the right it is "straight". The right side has pile of different lengths, but it doesn't really show.



Apart from the fact that a table loom is too flimsy/weak to properly beat a structure like corduroy, I also found that I have too long tabby stretches (or perhaps I should have used a different pile weft) - the ground shows too much.
(OTOH - we've had a dry spell here - it almost looks like my real grass-carpet, er, lawn:


As a comparison, here's my only previous experience of corduroy - a proper rug quality, with proper rug yarns. I wove it ages ago, and usd it for my weaving bench. It is double corduroy, and the two parts are cut with different methods, with a bit of un-cut in between. I tried to figure out which part was which, but I couldn't...



Still pondering how to achieve the flight of the cellophane one. Maybe I should try it with fishing line for warp... but that has to be on a "real" loom, if at all.

Flying carpet?

The new theme for our guild is RUGS.
As you may have guessed, rugs is not what I usually weave. So, to make things more interesting, I decided to weave (very small) "different" rugs. Like... a flying carpet?

Literature studies did not yield much on the construction of flying carpets, so I made a few guesses: wings, it will need wings to fly, yes? And wings... fly wings, bug wings, fairy wings, they are all transparent and shiny? So: cellophane for weft.

The first technique that came to mind was rya knots. But I wanted to thread for something more, er, efficient, so I threaded up for what Collingwood calls double corduroy.

Here are the first samples:



The knots were impossible. After two rows the tension was completely off, and my patience was rapidly waning.
Went on to the double corduroy. In the first sample I used the warp yarn (linen 16/2) for the tabby picks, and also extended the tabbies some.
For the second sample I used the cellophane for all wefts. It looked better, but was too stiff for the hazy idea I had about mounting (a flying carpet has to be flying), so I re-threaded to what Collingwood calls twill corduroy.



It is now woven. I meant to do a "woven edge", but (as you can see) I have to practice a lot before I can do one that looks ok. With patience thin again, I decided I could do a plaited fringe at the other end...



This, too, is a bit stiff, but if I re-think the mounting...
In the meantime, I'm weaving off this short warp as a grass carpet (the word "lawn" could work in a textile environment, but hardly about rugs).

The techniqes of rug weavingcan be downloaded from handweaving.net.

Here is the castle

This is the top of the castle.
I admit I have not tried to take it apart, but think it would be more that a-pain-in-the-thumbs to put it together again, even if it is not glued...
At the bottom of the structure there are both screws and visible glue, so that's no option either.

#¤&@¤£# !!!

Why am I doing this??? And twice in a week, too...

I don't particularly like table looms. Then this thingy came my way, had 8 shafts and was cheap.




So I bought it, sight unseen. I mean, a loom is a loom, even if it is a table model, right?
I had very limited experience with metal heddles, but, thought I, a heddle is a heddle.
Then I wanted to test my new-to-me sample loom - and... soon found that I don't like (rather "hate") the heddles on this loom. They won't slide (except if I handle them one at a time), they tangle (how is still a mystery), the eyes are too small for all my heddle hooks...
So I wove one small narrow warp, and put it under a table.

Then came the guild's anniversary exhibitions, and we decided we needed a dog. The dog itself was made of hex mesh, but it also needed a tail. I decided to weave it a tail, on the Lillstina. (It also got vadmal ears, but they came from existing scraps)
I made a 5 cm-or-so warp, with 4 ends of steel wire (to shape the tail) and some rug warp. As the tail was only to be 20 cm-or-so, it was ok (sort of).



Again the loom was put under the table for a couple of years.
Next time it came out was for a "culture day".
This is me, weaving a shawl.



For that shawl, I really had to move some heddles. Couldn't figure out any way to do that in an even moderatlely efficient way, but got them moved.
- The shawl came out allright - a woollen stripe in the middle, wich created nice ruffles after wet finishing/fulling:



One-and-a-half year later, I needed some illustrations for an article. Did not want to try to warp the AVL with a meter-long warp, so out Lillstina came again. That was on Monday last.

But... apparently I have not had my share of, er, punishment? yet, 'cos as soon as that little warp was done, I decided to make another warp...

Dear readers - . How is one supposed to move heddles on a loom like this?!?
Fortunately, there was only one shaft (and fortunately, it was near the back) that needed more heddles. I had to pry the heddle bar out with a plier - and the only way I could figure out how to put on heddles was one-by-one... There is no way (that I can see) that the heddle frames can be taken out, and there is no way (that I can see) to put those new heddles on in a bunch. #¤&@¤£# !!!
Here it is, next-to-last shaft raised, heddle bars pried out of their holders.



(And it was a pain-in-my-thumbs to try to pry them back again... and no pliers big enough to use...)