Well, we more or less got weaving

What with recent weaving references online, and Caro rocking her rigid heddle loom, it all reminded me that I have one . Then Modern Daily Knitting yesterday featured a self taught rigid heddle loom weaver and her scarf.

 I borrowed the book , ebook from the library, she recommended,  last night, started reading right away. Then woke this morning thinking must try this, must try this 

I never actually tried to have a rigid heddle loom. It was donated to the embroiderers' guild, who promptly turned it over to me, figuring I'd probably try it, and nobody else was interested 

I really like the compactness of the rigid heddle loom, so unassuming you can put it away.  And promptly forget you own it.

 I spent some time trying to figure out the order of business with it, supplied myself with the missing heddle blocks after I found I couldn't really thread it otherwise. 

Then I found I needed a sleying tool to fish the warp threads through the heddle, didn't have one, but found a very fine crochet hook did the trick.

I made this wallhanging, using all kinds of threads and little experiments. 

Then I got doing other things and the loom just sat, until today. 

Anyway, this morning I figured here goes with the math needed to figure out how much warp will be needed for a scarf. I found this, very helpful

I was operating with a few deficits. I no longer have a studio with a big worktop for clamping a warping c clamp to. I appear also to have lost or winnowed all the c clamps. And I had to work around this.  I've never had a warping board,  nor a warping peg, but my improvised clamps worked okay.

So here's the doings

Grey mixture cotton knitting yarn for the warp, some variegated knitting yarn for the weft. Nice shuttle, handmade by some artisan, lovely to handle. You can make shuttles from cardboard, and  I have, or used butterflies which I've tried and didn't like in this application. Nice for small tapestry though.

I spent quite a while just finding the tools and remembering how they went, then figuring out how to create a warp with the limitations at my disposal. 

One of the limitations was that my left hand kept locking up and going out of action, from overuse. So I had to keep stopping to work the joints back into place, but oh well.

Here's how I managed, in stages, using bathroom grab bars and a three pound weight , see how many parts of my life contributed today 

At this point the dumbbell is keeping the tension while I get lunch.

Using the grab bars involved cutting off the warp at both ends, rather than having a loop arrangement.  Next time I  know how to do it better. 

It made keeping tension harder, a lot of adjustments, but threading the heddle easier, all separate warp threads 

So here's the current state of play

And tomorrow is another day! If this turns out to be an actual scarf, acceptable and wearable, it's going to the Sock Ministry. 

This evening I'm knitting. I know how to do that.

Happy evening everyone, I spent the day wrestling with thread so you don't have to!