New Adventures : Triangle Looms and Continuous Line Weaving

I've been kind of quiet the last few weeks on this blog.  Some changes with the memory storage on my computer make digital photography cumbersome enough to avoid it altogether.   I've been missing the tactile sensuality of quilting and fiber arts.   I want to use my hands and have something to show for it ...   Not just pixels that can disappear into the ether at any moment.

To that end, my husband has been helping me build a 7-foot Triangle Loom for the last 2 months (or so).    We just finished it last weekend, and I started weaving on it this week.   Goodie!  In the photo above, you can see it hanging on my design wall (with a Chinese Coins quilt-in-progress behind the "empty" triangle loom).  Basically, it's a giant pin loom big enough to produce a triangle shawl piece of woven fabric big enough to wrap around a good-sized adult.  And yes, I do wear stuff like this around the house.  Winters in Wisconsin are cold, and even though we heat the house with wood, parts of the house not near the fire are cold.   It started a few years ago when my sister sent me a triangle shawl from Japan.  I started wearing it to bed, wrapped around my shoulders, amazed that it made such a difference in keeping me warm.  Then I realized I could make  more ...

I have a small table loom that I got a few years ago. I even took a class to learn how to handle the warping procedure, but even now, I still need help with the warping side of it.  The appeal of continuous line weaving on the triangle loom is that you use a single strand of yarn, and you warp it as you go.  The warp builds itself along with the weft.   It's pure genius!  But more about that later ...  I'll post a separate article about building it.   Once you get the hang of weaving this way, it's a nice meditation up and down, back and forth.  It keeps me moving, too--and out of the snacks.  

So far, I've put in about 3-hours of weaving, used up 1 skein of Homespun yarn, and started a second one.  The weave is building nicely!

 

The weave builds from the corners.  Here you can see it building with perspective down the loom.  This particular yarn is giving a nice subtle plaid in red and blue.  

 

The only thing is that it's so big, it's not very portable.  I may have to build a smaller one that I can travel with!

Happy Weaving!