Category: Uncategorized

Lovin’ the loom.
It’s so cute.
And so cool.

I’ve given it a rubdown with lemon oil,
and I’ve already used up the warp it came with playing around this week.

So that meant that if I wanted to keep on weaving, I was going to have to learn how to warp it!

Luckily, there are a ton of resources available online.
I joined a couple of weaving groups on Ravelry, and in one forum found a link to a really great video that really helped me to understand the process.

So this weekend I did it. Warped the loom for the first time!

First I had to scour the stash for some yarn that was up to the task.
Then I took to the warping board.

Following the procedure as described in the video, the steps were:

winding the warp,

tying off the warp

inserting lease sticks to hold the cross in the warp,and then
rough sleying the reed,

beaming the warp,

threading the warp through the heddles,

sleying the reed, and
tying off the warp to the front apron rod.

Didn’t get pictures of all the steps, but it seems to have turned out ok- and I am back in business, weaving with my handspun!

Woo Hoo!

I guess it was bound to happen.

I had dabbled in weaving before.
Built a simple frame loom.
Had The Man build me a peg loom.

So you could say I was loom-curious.
But I really wasn’t looking.

Honest.

I hadn’t written anything about it here, but I had recently listed my Kromski Minstrel for sale on Ravelry and Craigslist.
The only inquiries I received were from people who wanted me to ship her, and I didn’t want to deal with all that.
So I thought I would just hang onto her for a while, even though she hasn’t been getting much use since my new lateral treadle model has come on the scene.

Then I got an email from someone local offering a straight trade.
For a loom.

Harrisville Designs 4 harness 22 inch floor loom.

Here she is in my sewing room.

Cool,eh? Already warped and everything. (I didn’t do that, she came with a warp on!)

Yeah, I started playing around tonight with some monkey sweater leftovers.

This is so neat. 🙂

Out goes an old chicken house-

From Property

And in come some new chicks!

From Chickens

Everything is still pretty new and scary for the new girls, but they are very sweet and hopefully they will settle in and learn their way around the pasture in the next few days.

I am very pleased to report that the surgery was a success, and the patient is resting comfortably  on my cedar chest 🙂

Here is the photo documentary of the procedure:

Here you see the underarm area beforehand, with stitch markers indicating the stitches to be “reduced”.

My first step was to mattress stitch the front to the back, down the columns of stitches with the markers. I worked from the underarm down, and then went back and did from the underarm to almost halfway down the sleeve.

Then, I turned the sweater inside out, and machine stitched a single row just inside the line of mattress stitch, just to make sure everything was secured.

Now here’s the scary part. The cutting.

The leftover strips of excess fabric are about 2 inches side each, and I figure with seam allowances and all, I trimmed the width down by about 6 inches total.

Don’t have a picture of me in it yet, but the fit is so much better!