So while I’ve been quiet here, I’ve finally been weaving on the 12 harness Leclerc. The design of the loom, it turns out, has some major, and annoying, flaws. Worst is the way I can’t adjust the harnesses so that the string, traveling from back to front beam, lies flat. Since the heddle eyes are below this level, the strings all come off the backbeam, slant down, go through the heddle, and then slant back up. There’s enough distance between the first and twelfth harness that when all the harnesses are down there’s a visible deformation … And there’s tension issues, too. Between that, and getting the loom warped, and then trying to fix it, it took a little longer to get weaving than I had hoped.
But as long as I’m weaving relatively narrow ware, and am careful, I can make it work. So I’ve been working on the rug mugs. In this picture you can see the pattern below, as well as previous pattern. The warp’s path was particularly problematical when the higher-numbered harnesses were down. The edges are not ideal (I keep meaning to weight those two edges, and then I keep forgetting, but …)
The pattern I used for the latest rug mug is an earlier variation of the one on the left. The other challenge of that pattern is that in some places there are floats over 5 strings.
So the next two mug rugs are going to be a) the left pattern, and then b) the right pattern.
And I’m still playing with the same warp so I haven’t changed the threading through the heddles on the harnesses at all. There is still so much room to play here …