I am keeping a notebook while I weave yardage for the jacket. I’m keeping track of time spent, amount woven, things that work and what don’t. How the handspun is (or in most cases not) holding up and why.
I auditioned nearly all the shuttles I have in the house. The Bluster Bay Swedish-Styled Shuttle won the day. The low profile allowed the shuttle to pass under my floating selvedge without any manipulation from me. All the other shuttles were just a little too tall, and skimmed over the floating selvedge threads. My Schacht Mini-Boat Shuttle came in a close second. But the open bottom dragged on my warp. Given how quickly the Zephyr and my handspun fuzzed up, I didn’t want to put any more stress than I absolutely had to.
I’ve heard complaints that the shed is small on the Fireside Looms. The shed seems perfectly adequate to me, but I have only woven on one other loom — my Gilmore Gem II. It’s possible that it has a small shed too, given that it’s a workshop loom, but it works for me. Without the floating selvedge, every single one of my boat shuttles fit through the shed with plenty of room to spare.
Here’s what the fabric looks like. The color runs are a bit longer than I originally envisioned. My dyed black is a little bit less saturated than the Zephyr Ebony, so it is still visible. And the “random” didn’t turn out to be quite so random.
I sleyed the handspun through the reeds first. I had planned on 2 handspun threads per inch, so I just pulled them randomly through the reeds, 2 per inch. Sometimes they were next to each other, sometimes several dents apart. However, when it came to threading the heddles, it seemed that most of them ended up on heddle #5. It almost became a game while I was threading the heddles. I needed something to amuse me for 900 threads! Because they were 2/dent in the reed, I could fudge a bit and move them to either 4 or 1.
So far, I’m pretty happy with how the yardage is turning out.