Easy Sundays

Spending Sunday nursing a cold and threading a loom seems a pretty good balance. It’s certainly a distraction and I did it without any hiccups…or sneezes.

The warp is a Tussah silk tweed with lovely shades of warm tones including yellow. I’ve got some handyed Ramie from Japan that will go across it as weft but once I got going changed to silk.  I set up the 4 shaft kit once again on my Saori loom and the six metre warp threaded and beamed in a couple of hours. Such is the friendliness of the loom and tools like the cross box.

I threaded the loom 1,2,3,4, with occasional bouts of 1,2,3,4,3,2,1. The idea being to throw in a point twill every now and again. This gives me plain weave plus the option of twill patterning any time and also, more importantly, twill inlay. Twill inlay will sit in the cloth differently to an inlay simply placed into the plain weave shed and seems to layer the colours in this warp in a nice way.

I came across this lovely video of a weaver in Japan. You’ll notice that some aspects of the loom such as the removeable back beam are similar to the Saori looms. I know back beams are removable on many looms but previously within a small craft situation I hadn’t see it. Well, onwards with weaving.