Weaving Again - First Glimpse of 8-Shaft Waffle Weave Towels

Who-hooh!  I'm weaving again!  Using all 8 shafts on the BIG "Mary Meigs" Kessenich Floor Loom.  It took a long time to get things set up, threaded, and wound on, but here we are again!  You have no idea how happy this makes me!

This is an 8-shaft waffle weave for towels.   It will have a lot of texture one it is wet-finished.

 

I'll be using the 2 big Jim Hockett shuttles, which seem to work well for this weight of 8/2 cotton yarn, and the expanse they need to travel through the open shed.  They have a nice weight.  I love the Schacht kayak shuttles, but they are too light-weight for a job this big.

This is a kit from ?? that I bought a few years ago, but never made because my "little" floor loom wasn't wide enough to do them justice.  Now I also get to practice using all 8 shafts -- 

It's a pretty simple pattern, just zipping up and down the treadles: 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 

Most of them are not too bad -- I was concerned that with the extra shafts added to each treadle, some of them might be too heavy to push down.  So far, the only treadle that is a challenge is #7 because it has 7 of 8 treadles attached to it.  Sometimes I have to stand up to get that one to work properly.  The rest are pretty easy.

Before I could do the fun part of weaving today, I still had to lash onto the cloth beam.  That's sorta why I needed the treadles to be set up with plain weave / basket weave -- so I could make sure I threaded everything properly and had a good open and clean shed.  This method has you open the shed for plain weave, to make it easier to insert the lashing cord.  That worked well enough.  So on to the next step ...

Setting up the treadle beads.  I used the bed in the guest room as a work table.  Each bin has a wooden bead with a number corresponding to the treadle in the pattern.  I had it written out ahead of time on the notepad, so that I knew what I'd be programming.   

 Then I laid them out in order, and started threading the rod that sits on top of my beater bar.

 

And here are the treadle beads installed atop the beater bar, and ready to be used. 

As I said, it's a pretty easy and straightforward treadle pattern -- maybe the easiest I've done in a very long time!  The Mountain Cucumber Coverlet had more than 300 treadle beads!   

I should go back and oil all the moving parts of the loom to make sure things run smoothly with this project. 

This is not even a 6-yard warp, so I don't think it will take long to weave through these 2 towels. ;-) 

More Treadle Tie Ups for the Big Loom

View from under the BIG floor loom.  

 

 

This is the tie ups as listed in the pattern.  All those black squares are to be connected to a treadle. 

Then I realized, the treadle tie-ups for this project will be much more complicated than anything I've done before.  By my calculations, I will need 43 tie-ups, and I only have 24 chains-S biners and cotter pins on the loom at present.   Even if I flip the treadling map in the pattern, I would still need 37 chains, so why not just go for the 43?  It means a trip to the local hardware store for some additional supplies.

My Dear Husband volunteered to get under the loom and help get that set up -- That will be for next weekend, which will give me plenty of time to think things through ...

We stopped at the local hardware store for some supplies:

 

Plumber's Chain -- We needed about 12 ft, and that is exactly what they had left on the roll, at $2.39 per foot.  I know, some people use the nylon heddle chord, but I think they must have much lighter looms.  Kessenichs are sturdy and solid.  Plus, that white heddle chord looks fragile, like it would easily shred.   And it's not available at my local hardware store.   Someday this might become too heavy for me to treadle, but not yet.  Plumber's chain is native to this loom.  That's what it came with, and that's what they were using when it was made n the mid 1960s, so that's what I'm going with ...

 

S-Biners for attaching the chain to the treadles.

 

Cotter Pins that will be bent and shaped to attach the chains to the lams.  Again, there may be other solutions, but this is what was on the loom to start with.

 

This is the unit I had to build 24 more of. 

 

First, I cut the chains to length and attached the S-Biners.  

My husband shaped the cotter pins -- I'm not sure what dark magic he performed in his basement workshop,  but when he emerged, they were shaped and fit perfectly.

  

 Here are the NEW completed tie up chains, ready to be installed.

Now to get to work under the loom!

 

First I used the 24 existing chains, S-Biners, and cotter pins to tie up the treadles from right to left.  When I ran out of the supplies, I used the new stuff.

Pro Tips: 

 

• I numbered the lams so it would be easy to tell them apart.

 

• I used 2 blocks of wood (upper left in photo above) to separate the lams from the shafts, so I could easily work on threading the chains and securing them without needing extra hands to hold them down.
• Prepare the cotter pins ahead of time. 
• Drop the chains down from the top instead of trying to feed them up from the bottom (as I've been doing for the last 10 years).

 All done!