Lately, I've been doing most of my weaving on a Leclerc Fanny Loom. It's a nice little Canadian made loom. Unfortunately, my loom has had a difficult life before I brought it home. A used loom is a lovely thing so far as economy is concerned, but it's a lot like buying a used car - you can expect to spend half again what you paid for it on repairs and parts.
The loom has two main jobs:
1. holding the warp in a way that keeps it organized and easy to work with.
2. manipulating the warp by lifting or lowering individual threads so we can pass the weft through the warp threads to create the cloth.
The warp threads need to be all the same length so we first take a lot of time measuring each thread so that they are exactly the same length. There can be as much variation in length as an inch, but this gets cut off so that each thread is exactly the same length. We then wrap these warp threads around a big beam called a warp beam. We do this in a way that keeps the threads organized. This beam holds the warp thread in place and is one of the most vital parts of the loom. It holds or releases the warp threads on demand.
On the left side of this picture, we can see the warp wrapped around the warp beam.
You can also see that the loom folds up. Two metal arms hold the loom open. These have notches on them that sit on little screws, and if the loom gets bumped for some reason, then they can easily - too easily - lift up and the loom is no longer stable. If it happens on one side, the warp becomes looser on one side and the cloth starts to bend as it is made. Which is exactly what happened... thrice.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
It's a poor workman who blames his tools. Well, it's a poor weaver that sets out to weave the longest warp yet without testing her loom repairs.
The hole where the warp beam sits is too large. It has warn over time because the previous weaver put a lot of tension on the warp when weaving. Seriously, you don't need much tension when weaving most cloth types. I can't imagine anything that would need as much as she did. Even rugs don't need that much. But that's neither here nor there, I'm stuck with a warp beam that moves almost a half an inch. When I'm winding the warp, the beam sits at the bottom of the gap and everything goes smoothly until I beat the cloth, then the left side of the warp beam lifts up so that the left side of the warp is now half an inch longer than the right. This is not good. This does not make good cloth. To fix the problem, we wrapped the rod in Teflon tape but as you can see in this picture, it worked its way out. By the end of the cloth, I had the same problem again - the left side was too loose.
All the while I was weaving this warp, I had to compensate by putting extra tension on the warp. This makes it harder to beat the fell (where warp becomes cloth) so that it produced an unbalanced weave where there are fewer ppi than epi. This isn't a bad thing, but combined with selvedge problems due to struggling with my loom, and we have a more rustic look than I was after.
Then the point where the wing nut holding the warp beam in place fell off, freeing the beam from its constraints...
Most challenging weaving project in a very long time.
Once the towels are washed, hemmed and ironed, I find I really like this rustic look. It's better than the samples I made.
But the problem remains: how do I repair the loom so I can weave on it again. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does need to be consistent and reliable in its behaviour. There are two major places needing repair: the brackets holding the back to the castle and the left support for the warp beam. This is going to be an interesting adventure.
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