New Frame Loom

I've been tinkering with card loom designs basically since I started weaving. I've been through a few iterations, and now I think I've got The One, at least for how I normally work. 

Since all of the actual work in card weaving is being done by the cards themselves, the loom itself can be simple, or even not exist at all. This could be a pair of posts stuck into the ground, as was Roman practice, or a freestanding structure like the Oseberg loom - which is just the two posts method, but combined into one piece of furniture. Card lends itself well to backstrap, where you've got one end tied to some furniture and the other to your belt, but my back isn't a fan. So a loom really only needs to do a few things: hold the work stable, be easy to advance the warp through, let you manage your tension and twist, and give you ergonomic access to the project. Easy enough, but how exactly you go about that can make as much difference in your experience as your cards do.

When Ulfhildr helped me get started on card weaving, she loaned me an inkle loom, and she showed me her personal board loom with a vertical peg on one end and a simple board clamp on the other. Tie the far end to the peg, manage your tension with the clamp. I never tried the latter; the former was handy in that it has an adjustable tension bar, but it has a major downside when circularly warped as intended: the upper length is hard capped by your pegs, and twist can only be undone by weaving backwards. There are creative ways around these problems, if you individually knot your threads, or you tie off your warp at either end, but at that point, you can build something with fewer parts and more workspace - hence the board loom. Your workspace is the entire board, and everything past the ends isn't important.

Shortly after, I saw a pair of different friends had put together a different style of board loom, with risers on both sides, and horizontal handles built into the board at each end for tying off. The first loom I made myself was a hybrid of the two; a riser on the back to keep my warp horizontal, with a clamp on the near end to simplify securing the completed warp. That worked rather well, so I went back and made a longer loom, this time with some improvements. The longer one has the carry handle on the side, making transport far easier (the original loom got this as a retrofit), and the hole in the riser that was originally for threading finished product through got moved up near the top. This makes an extra handle the warp can be tied off to without wasting the space between the riser and handle. For border cards, which are twisted the same direction through the entire band, I installed fishing swivels that I could tie off to, which let me simply push twist out of the relevant threads. 

This still left some points where I had to actively manage the threads. The non-swiveled threads all got tied to the handle as one large bundle, combed out when relevant, and then all had to be tied back on as a group, hoping that one of them wasn't a little bit more slack than the others. And, as twist built up and increased the tension, that required releasing the clamp incrementally. Not the end of the world, but advancing the warp is a chore.

I don’t use the longer loom much; it has extra space for twist buildup, but it’s big, heavy, and fatiguing to weave so far away from yourself. Hard to pack out to other places, but usable at home given the right table.

This design worked well before I discovered the joy of warp weights. With warp weights, which need to dangle through the back handle, this means the loom must be set on the corner of the table, or I have to use a TV tray that has a short enough surface that the loom can sit straight. With that setup done, though, everything else becomes easier. Each tablet has its own individual 3oz weight free-hanging, so the tension is always perfect after setup. Twist can get pushed out through the spinning weights, so I never have to weave in reverse unless I want to. And when I need to advance the warp, I can just unreel a couple wraps of thread from each weight, reclamp, and move on. 

Most of my weights are lead wire from the fishing aisle, encased in 3d printed cases. While in most cases, I like my gear pretty, the printed case was chosen for practicality of shape. I have twine leaders on them, so I can work closer to the end of my warp. To get more weights later, I coated some bank sinkers in enamel paint. These are smaller, but the paint chips.

Last year, I saw a friend up in Winter’s Gate (who later became my Laurel) carrying around a super simple frame loom, which worked when simply propped up on the edge of a table. The weaving is thus done in your lap, which makes everything easy to reach, and the weights can hang down between your knees.

 

My first frame loom is currently in someone else’s hands to pass on the art of weaving, so in lieu of dedicated blog post pictures, here are a couple from when it was new. I made it 11” by 20” or thereabouts, with a two-stage brake pointing to the inside of the frame. The only complex workmanship was cutting out some relief in the top of the beams to give myself some workspace, and an angled joint at the base board to keep everything square. I like the 90 degree rotation of the clamp, because threading the work around the center piece provides a lot of braking force without going too hard on the screws. 

I had some unused boards from the shield project, so after some experience, I made myself the second loom. It turned out with a bit less precise workmanship than the first, owing to less premeditation, but I’ve incorporated a couple of design tweaks. The first design secured the bolts with toothed T-nuts on the near face of the loom. This threatened to split the wood and showed more hardware on the outside of the piece, while also not securing the bolts square. Realistically, with the clamp assembled, the bolts will never come out, but the new solution is better anyway. A pair of tacked T-nuts, sans tacks, is now recessed into the opposite side of the board, providing a more conventional hold that isn’t structurally dependent on the clamp in any way and generally looks neater.

The crosspiece is now shaped instead of being straight across. The cutout on the near side is just to reclaim a 1/4” of workspace from slightly different board placement, and the curved front edge ideally encourages the warp threads to cluster together. On the original, they would try to spread out to match the warp weights, which makes the cards separate and stop holding each other upright. The curved bar works to some extent; the threads still walk outwards gently, but not quite as much as they used to.

Lastly, the curved cutouts at the end of the boards hopefully will encourage the loom itself to center on the table. The straight boards on the original could sometimes slide off the table edge sideways, which results in a very awkward drop as the whole thing tries to fall into my lap and tip sideways. With the cutouts, the weight encourages it to self-center. I've been using it for a few months now, and I've only dropped it twice, so I'd call that a success.

I've now got my setup refined to the point that I can kill downtime at work by weaving, which has helped me waste a lot less time playing solitaire.