I made myself a triangle loom this week, and wove a shawl with handspun this weekend. I am so tickled! It was a lot of fun to both design, build and weave.
I made it out of 2″x4″ oak strips. The weaving dimensions are 180 cm across the hypoteneuse, and 134 cm along the sides. I set the pins 1 cm apart along the hypoteneuse and 7 mm apart along the sides. This left me with about 2.5 cm extra on the sides, so I just pounded in a couple of extra nails to fill the gap. I just skipped 2 pins on the sides as I wove. I put a coat of orange oil/wax on it, but couldn’t wait for a second coat before I started weaving.
The yarn is handpainted merino that I spun up and navajo plied last winter. I had over 300 yards, which I thought was enough for this shawl, but I ran short by 9 pins. (See the gap? That was all that was left to go before I ran out.) So, I dug through my stash, and found some dark blue/turquoise wool/mohair blend that I had been spinning on my turkish spindles, 2-plied a ball of it to finish up the shawl. That’s the darker stripe down the middle you see.
Off the loom, the long edge measures 163 cm. Not a huge amount of take up. It’s now sitting in the washer to full. I’ll measure it again tomorrow to see what the final measurements are. I’ve decided not to edge the first shawl. I wanted to see what an “unfinished” edge looks like. In the future, I think my preferred finishing technique would be a crocheted/scalloped border. I’m just not a fringe kinda gal. Besides, fringes look natty after a while. Especially with wool.
This was a lot of fun, and I can definitely see me making several more of these. (I should hope so, after all the work into building it!) I made the loom so that it comes apart easily into 4 pieces with 2 allen key wrenches. This is good, since I’ve already stepped on the nailed edges once, and christened it with my own blood when I bumped my elbow into the nailed edges. Oh, well, no woodworking project is complete without some bloodshed. At least, not in this household.
Tooting my horn a bit. I designed this, made up the parts list, cut and pieced this thing together myself. I ran my plans by Martin (I flunked Statics and Strengths of Materials in college, and my balsa wood construction was the first to crush under pressure in high school). He helped hold the wood strips while I cut with the miter saw. And he helped with pre-drilling the 550+ nail holes and hammering them in. Otherwise, I’d still be driving nails (and my neighbors nuts).
Oh, and here‘s a picture of the donkey pieces on the blocking board, waiting to be pieced.