Choosing an Inkle Loom – What to look for

A brief discussion of what I’m looking for when setting up an inkle loom, as far as crucial peg locations go.

I recently spent a week teaching and selling silk at Gulf Wars, a weeklong SCA event, and ended up talking with a nice young lady about the inkle loom she’d bought; she was trying to figure out how to warp it and how to measure the heddles. Coincidentally that’s when I was reminded that a lot of inkle loom makers are not inkle loom weavers. So what follows is a discussion of what I look for in an inkle loom, design wise. (I’m also looking for good construction: pegs and base that aren’t too thin so that it doesn’t bend under tension, construction that’s solid and can withstand occasional drops, etc.)

And yes; I use coloured strings to keep track of what I’m measuring; always check the heddle loop lengths; it’s tempting to assume that it is always the length between the top and heddle pegs, but depending on the loom design this can be quite wrong.

The Four Peg Weaving Area

The four pegs that control the weaving area are the front, top, back, and heddle pegs. Other pegs will be arranged around them, because a pegged inkle loom is warped in a circular warp fashion. These four pegs should not be mobile in any way.

An inkle loom is usually warped with threads following alternating paths – the red path is the “Open” path, which is not controlled by a heddle, and the green path is the “Heddled” path, which has a sharp corner created by the blue heddle. The size of the shed is controlled by the red path, which is moved up or down to create the two possible sheds.

When I start using a new inkle loom, the first thing I do is warp the loom with two loops, one following the open path, the other the heddled path, so that I can measure the length of the heddles, and so that I can check the position of the pegs for weaving. (Sometimes after this check, I decide to use a different peg as the heddle peg.)

Things to look for in the Four Peg Weaving Area

The (red) open path is the one that shifts up and down to create the shed; ideally the green heddled threads stay immobile. As such, I need enough room for the red threads to lift above, and press down below, the green thread. The sheds are created by lifting up/pressing down the red area not covered by the green thread. If the shed is very small, I will need to compensate for that in the weaving, by using a slimmer shuttle or – if possible – choosing a different peg as the heddle peg.

Be careful when checking warping paths, by the way; the warp cannot go around the heddle peg; you wouldn’t be able to advance the band once the woven area reached the heddles.

How to Measure the Length of the Heddles

I like to use double-length heddles; these are loops that sit on the heddledle peg, fold around the warp string, and then back on the heddle peg. That allows you to add heddles easily while warping. When I’m measuring I also tend to colour code my string, so in this case I want to measure a blue (heddle) string long enough to fold the green string down to match the red string, as per the figure above.

Once you’ve got an open and a heddled warp string on the loom, to measure the length of the heddle, start with the blue string above the green. Go down on one side of the green string, around the heddle peg and back up, then do the same on the other side of the green string. Cut, leaving yourself a generous tail, and then carefully tie a square knot so that the green warp string follows the correct path. (For a singled heddle, just go down to the heddle peg once, but now you have to make sure the loop goes around the warp string.)

Once you’ve got a heddle loop cut and knotted to size, you can experiment with the various pegs on the loom to see which two pegs can be used to create a loop of the same size. Use those two pegs to create your heddle loops for the weaving project.

The Tension Bar

The tension bar should not be one of the four pegs that control the weaving area; the tension bar is the movable peg that allows you to shift the band around the loom by releasing the tension, and then tighten everything back into place. If the tension peg is also the front peg, the weaving area will change as you weave, which means the shed created by the heddle loops will change over time.

Having a tension peg near the front usually makes weaving easier since you can adjust it while weaving without having to shift the loom around; it just shouldn’t be the front peg.

Enjoy your weaving …

Now that you have the heddle loops knotted, you can go ahead and warp, alternating open and heddled strings as per the usual inkle weaving.

Playing with Baltic Pickup style inkle weaving (Part 3)

I’ve had a few requests about the rest of the Baltic pickup style patterns I came up with. Like the previous, these are all woven on the same warp, and again, the patterns are designed so that you are always pushing threads down from the upper row and never lifting threads up from the lower row. This speeds up the weaving immensely.

And that’s when I realized that two of the patterns are duplicated, but a little judicious work with a pencil will fix that quite easily. 🙂

Playing with Baltic Pickup style inkle weaving (Part 2)

So I spent some time this weekend playing with the Baltic inkle pickup warp. The rules of the game were simple: two repeats of the simple diamond with the 4 interior diamonds, alternating with a diamond with some other free-styled pattern.

By keeping the edging pattern between the diamonds and the outer diamond’s dimensions consistent, the band feels cohesive, even though every third diamond is something else. Below are 16 possible variations I came up with, while enjoying a Columbo marathon.

Oh, and just one more thing … there are 25 places where the warp thread can be pushed down, or not, inside the diamond. That means that there are 2^25= 33554432 possible combinations, but I’m guessing that many of them lack pleasing symmetries.

Back of the envelop suggests that requiring symmetry along one diagonal reduces the possibilities to about 2^10+2^5=1024+32=1056 (the places below the diagonal line plus the diagonal line), but then the diagonal line can itself be flipped … But the “S” figures are flipped around a vertical or horizontal line; so there are 4 possible axis of symmetry, so 4*1056= 4224 possible combinations that are symmetric.

In short, back of the envelop suggests that I’m going to run out of warp before I run out of possibilities.

Playing with Baltic Pickup style inkle weaving

Baltic pickup style inkle is woven using background threads and pickup threads; the pickup threads are usually either thicker, or doubled up. In the threading diagram, you can see how each pickup thread is place between two threads in the opposite heddle; the white boxes representing the pickup threads. In the diagram one row represents the heddled threads and the other the open threads, and the rows aren’t labeled since it actually doesn’t matter which is which in this case, so why complicate things?

The patterns here use 17 background threads; the 5 leftmost and rightmost threads are woven over a green background, while the middle 7 pick up threads lie nestled between dark blue background threads. The plan is to eventually experiment with the Kostrup patterns, since those are 17 cards wide also, but I needed simple patterns to weave while out and about Monday.

The current patterns are simple diamonds, and by weaving them upside down I only ever have to drop threads from the current row, rather than having to pick up. In the pattern (Baltic Diamonds) squares with circles in them are the pickup threads that are high in each row. If a pickup thread is high but has a grey background, then it gets dropped, resulting in the front patterns we see on the left below.

This is what the pattern with the small diamonds looks like; the predominantly green/blue side is what you see while weaving, the white side is the underside which is much harder to photograph while on the loom.

Here I was working with larger diamonds, and experimenting a little with alternate patterns like the diamond in a diamond and the inner cross. Making the outside diamond a little smaller results in a 2×2 grid of the smaller diamonds, or a 3×3 grid of the larger, and then it’s just a matter of dropping a few extra threads here and there.