Fiber Monday - It works!

When I bought my floor loom back in November, I knew it was a good price for what it was. I talked with the woman who had owned it and she said she had woven many items on it, but she physically couldn't weave any longer. I knew it could be warped because it came with a warp on it. But there was always that question in the back of my head of whether or not I would be able to get the loom working. 

Since it was so hot last week and I wasn't gardening, I used my free time to finally finish dressing the loom. Once I had it all threaded, I began to wind the warp on the back beam. And my warp somehow became tangled. It was a mess. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to figure out how to fix it or if I would have to junk it and start all over again. J. got home from work while I was in the middle of messing with it, and just went downstairs to start dinner. Eventually I did get it sorted out and didn't have to abandon the warp. That felt good. Very, very good.

I wound it on the back beam and then got the warp all tied onto the front. It was at this point that I realized that I must have done something wrong because I couldn't get any tension because the brake wasn't working. J. helped me figure out that I had wound it on the wrong direction and I was trying to use the brake backwards. So, I had to untie everything, unwind the back beam, and then rewind it all going to the correct direction. 

I finally got it all tied back on and fixed the tension and began to weave. 

(This isn't a photo of the error, this is post fix.)

I wove the first set of of the gamp when I realized I had a threading error. I left it there, not wanting to decide what to do about it at the moment because my frustration level was very high. By morning I had come to the conclusion that I needed to unweave everything and fix the error. The photo above, is how much I ended up unweaving. Unweaving, like unknitting, is not nearly as much fun. 

Happily, the threading error was not dire. It was merely a duplicate thread, so I pulled it out and decided to call it good. I got everything tied back on again, and started weaving... again. This time it worked, thankfully. 

Here is where I am so far.

The loom works better than I had hoped. Taking the weaving classes helped immensely so not only did I know how to dress the loom, I also knew how to fix my mistakes. I love watching the patterns emerge. Here is a close up of some of them.

The beauty of making a gamp is that I can look at it, find a particular pattern that I want to weave something out of, and I know who to do it. I have a feeling it is going to stay at this point for a few days. The weather is beautiful and I still have a lot of plants and seeds which need to get into the ground.