Loom!

I finally found a loom!  It is a Rasmussen Loom, made in Seattle about 30 years ago.  The company was sold and is now known as 'Montana Looms' with headquarters in Missoula.  This is a table loom (I was looking for a floor loom), it has 4 harnesses that are operated by the levers on top of the castle instead of by treadles on the ground.  It's weaving width is 26" and everything is in pretty good shape.  Heddles are rust free.  It came with one 12 dent reed.  I bought it on Craigslist from a man in Auburn who just found he didn't have the time to use the loom as much as he wanted.  He sold it to me for $150!  A comparable table loom brand new would be around $1000.

I compromised some in this purchase from the ideal loom I have been searching for (a Macomber Floor Loom).  But I'm quite pleased with this intermediate machine.  I think it will satisfy my craving for a few years and then I can reassess my needs and space availability.

I lack a whole bunch of supplies to make weaving faster and fun.  I think I'll just slowly invest in pieces over time.  In the short term I bought a heddle hook and a simple 8" weaving shuttle.  It proved to be enough to get me started.

I really need one of these (pictured left), a warping board.  Warping your loom is a fundamental process to weaving.  This board allows the weaver to quickly and uniformly measure all the warping strands for your work.  I don't have a warping board, so I used instead the legs of a few dining room chairs.  This worked OK, but much of the precision was lost.  If I were dedicating a lot of time to a serious project I would need to buy (for about $60) or build a warping board.  

This is my first product on the loom!  A scarf, made of one skein of sock yarn, 100% merino wool, in simple plain weave.  The weave is nice, tight, and consistent.  Good experimentation.  The actual weaving process (after the loom was warped and threaded) took about 4 hours.  I estimate that is about twice as long as it would have taken me on a floor loom.  But I found that I didn't mind flipping the top levers so much as I thought I would.  Success!  The one thing that drives me crazy about weaving is the waste created in the warp... check out the pile of unused warping thread (Above right)!  

Looking forward to more experimentation with the next project.