While I wait for my yarn and shuttle to arrive for my table loom weaving project, I have time to work on some sewing and mending.
Rodrigue has a favourite old wool jacket that’s full of holes, from regular wear and moths, and during the pandemic lockdown, I ordered a “speedweve” type mending loom— but never used it.
These little looms were originally sold in the 1940s, and now they’re plentiful on Etsy. They’re fairly simple to use, and allow you to weave a small patch directly onto a piece of clothing to conceal a hole.
I got some darning yarn in compatible colours from a local knitting store, and got to work, using the project as a chance to practice some basic weaving patterns.
Arbitrary PlaidDiamond TwillGinghamBig Chevron TwillChevron TwillPlain Weave and EmbroideryMini HoundstoothBasketweavePlain WeaveMini HoundstoothJacket FrontJacket Back
At the outset of this venture, we identified three holes that needed mending, but by the time I was done, I’d made 11 patches. The more acquainted I became with the jacket, the more worn spots I found.
The patches are messy in spots– sometimes unavoidable because near the seams, the fabric was too bulky and would slip off the loom. But I’m overall satisfied with the finished look of the jacket, and I learned a lot while doing it– including that sometimes it’s easier to just weave directly onto the garment, setting aside the loom.
Most importantly, we’ve saved a beloved jacket from the landfill, and I’ve reignited my mending habit, which is definitely going to serve us, in this time of an impending trade war.
I’m reasonably “confident” that I’ll be able to get some sort of product to emerge from between the teeth of Frankie the Frankenloom, so I order a shuttle, some hooks and needles and other bits and bobs that seem like they could be useful, and critically, yarn.
I don’t yet know what I’m doing, but that doesn’t stop me having big ambitions for this yarn.
According to the manuscript for a pamphlet Bessie collaborated on with journalist Marjorie Major sometime around 1972:
The colours of the Nova Scotia Tartan represent:
Blue for the sea and the sky
Green for the trees
White for the surf
Red for the lion on Nova Scotia’s crest
Gold for the Royal Charter
I too, intend to create a tartan. But I’m from Montreal, Quebec’s land of bike lanes, orange construction cones, and hanging out in parks. My allegiance lies not with any charter, but with the Metro system. And I’m allergic to wool, so wool is out. The tartan will probably be a cotton blend. Likely a hand towel. I’m interested in utility, not dignity. I select:
Grey for the bike lanes and potholes
Orange for the cones, the changing leaves of fall, and the Orange Line of the metro
Blue for the province, the St-Laurent river, the sky, and the Blue Line of the metro
Green for the parks and trees and the Green Line
And I can’t count, so I forget to buy some yellow for the long summer days, bright January sun, and of course, the Yellow Line.
They’re all cotton-linen, in a fine gauge, perfect for dish towels.
I set about making my first warp– the strands that stretch through the loom on the vertical axis, making it possible to weave back and forth through them. (The book does not explain this– or at least not at this juncture. I have to look it up, lol.)
The Warp and Weft explainer image from Wikipedia
The first project in You Can Weave is a placemat-napkin set in a simple weave. So we won’t be making the Montreal Tartan just yet. I decide to start with a nice grey & blue scheme, and I choose the grey for the warp because no part of me is thinking ahead to how hard pale grey yarn will be to see when photographed over and over in dim winter light.
The steps of making a warp appear very detailed and complex on paper. I remind myself that children are meant to follow these instructions, and try to relax.
The book explains how to measure for your project and its affordances. I believe I do this part accurately. Pretty sure. It’s not complicated math but there’s always a possibility my ADHD will try to change a digit in between reading it and writing it down. I measure several times, which will either make it more accurate, or introduce a new error every time. Exciting!
Then we get to the measuring that I definitely for certain mess up. I have to count the teeth of my reed several times, and then I lose track and try it a different way, and every single time, I get a different number. Pah! I’ll average it.
One thing is for certain: the teeth of my reed are roughly twice as far apart as the ones in the book. Looking at how skinny my yarn is, I imagine this will result in a wider weave than intended– maybe too wide.
Buying new yarn isn’t an option because these spools cost something like $15 each, and I already bought four of them. I’m committed.
I decide to move ahead with what I have and find out what happens. I don’t mind a bad first result if it means I viscerally understand why it is bad, because I made it bad with my own hands, and felt the texture of its badness.
Our carpentry teacher in theatre school taught us that there are two ways to learn anything– “the Easy Way and the Hard Way. The Hard Way is to read everything about it, measure assiduously, quadruple check everything… and the Easy Way is to just try it once, and screw it up completely.” I take great heart in this advice, and refer back to it regularly.
Next I need to place my pegs, which is straightforward…
Except that I don’t have pegs, so I use some chairs, following a trick I picked up from a YouTube video.
I put my nearly-invisible yarn spool in a bowl on the floor so it can’t roll around everywhere, and begin winding, according to the pattern the book dictates.
This could be a huge, boring pain in the butt, but I put on a podcast or three, and gently wind away, swaying from one chair to the other and back, 200 times or so, and I find it quite meditative and soothing. It takes me basically all night, but I enjoy the tranquility of it.
The book explains when to tie bunches of yarn together, and how to make sure you’re crossing the yarn in the right place, and right direction, and make sure it doesn’t uncross later, when you untie it.
At some point, Penelope comes around and decides to help me test the mouthfeel of the yarn, and its suitability as a cat toy. 10/10 with bonus points in both cases, but it does slow me down a little.
I tie everything down, probably more than I need to, because the 2d drawings of yarn are not always adequate for understanding a 3d space.
And then I’m able to remove it, and set it aside until I’m ready to dress the loom. I had originally planned to dress in the same session, but I’m starting to understand this is a slow process– at least for me, in this stage of learning– and I’d rather confront the next step, fully rested, with a clear head.
Not only do I not have yarn, but the loom is missing some parts, and I don’t know enough about looms to know what’s missing.
I momentarily wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake. What if I never figure out what this thing needs, and it turns out to be a lemon?
You Can Weave doesn’t have anything specific to say about what to do with the funky old loom you bought at a bike repair clinic. But I can pick out cases where Bessie and Mary have outlined what to do, if you don’t have exactly the thing you’re meant to have.
I’m especially fond of the illustrated explanation on page 20, suggesting how to make pegs out of an old broomstick, or a few plain metal bookends. (Bookends! How exciting. I’m not sure it’s easier to find plain metal bookends than pegs, in 2025.)
Weaving is an old technology. We can apparently find suggestions of weaving as far back as the paleolithic age, 27,000 years ago. It shows up in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, the Inca civilization, and tombs from the bronze age, in China.
There’s no known causal link between all our cultures and learning to weave. It’s a primordial tech solution everyone figured out independently, in response to having both fibre, and a need to wrap something– usually people, either the living or the dead.
“A Maya weaver (name not noted) shows us how the gorgeous textiles of highland Guatemala and Mexico are created on this ancient weaving mechanism, which requires simple tools but a great deal of skill! Demonstration at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA/USA.” – image by Melinda Young Stuart on Flickr.
People have been improvising looms for centuries (and still dotoday), using whatever they had around, in whatever way made sense in their culture. Seen through that lens, my incomplete loom is a head start, not a hinderance.
How much of a head start do I have? Let’s evaluate.
A table loom mainly has the job of using multiple shafts to raise and lower x-axis strands of yarn on a z-axis, so that y-axis strands of yarn can be passed back and forth through it on the perpendicular, at user-defined intervals, to create an interlocking weave that becomes fabric. The x-axis strands must be held with tension, and they need to advance from the back to the front of the loom on rollers, so you can control your materials, and gather up your product.
How well your loom performs each of those functions has a bearing on the physical and aesthetic quality of the fabric produced. But it’s not the only factor. You, your ideas, skills, and consistency, are part of the equation. This relationship between person and machine is one I already know, from playing musical instruments, and operating an espresso machine. I’m comfortable with it.
My loom appears to have the most important bits. Maybe not in an ergonomic configuration, possibly not calibrated precisely, but fine for learning. My attention to the loom will become a third factor in what I’m able to make.
Now let’s take a look at the nonstandard features of this loom:
It doesn’t have levers to help raise and lower the shafts. It has four holes, and makeshift hooks. The previous owner appears to have been using yellow yarn to control the shafts. It seems like yarn would brake frequently and be fussy to use here.
The shafts also don’t have tracks to sit in. They just kind of dangle and bump into each other.
There’s no back beam. It has a big turny thing instead (technical term), which doesn’t seem to match any tutorials I can find so far. I think I can work with it, but the Big Turny Thing ™ also doesn’t have a brake. I’ll need to improvise something for tension.
Penelope loves to walk through the loom. I’m sure this will be fine and never create any problems whatsoever.
The rods in front and back appear to be made of wooden dowling. I expect this means it will bend more than a metal rod, creating uneven tension, in places. And the front rod is attached to the front roller at uneven intervals.
It’s tempting to try to fix everything, but I don’t want to do that, before I understand how the machine works. I also read more than once, that many weavers fall so deeply into the hole of fixing or perfecting their looms, that the loom becomes the project and no weaving gets done.
This sounds exactly like something I would do, so I resolve not to do it. To brake the back roller (Big Turny Thing), I’ll experiment with various cords, bungees and wooden stakes until I find something that works. I’ll focus on improving the shaft control mechanism.
I work out a hack where I replace the yellow yarn with stronger-yet-terrible nylon cord from the dollar store, and loops of zip tie, so I can more easily hook and unhook the cords when I raise and lower the shafts.
This single fix takes me a couple of hours to orchestrate, after trying a few kinds of knot that don’t work. I ultimately have to melt the nylon a bit to get it to bind to itself and stop unwinding.
By the time I’m done, I’m equal parts tired, fed up, sweaty, and extremely satisfied with myself. I admire my work, and decide to name my loom Frankie. Frankie the Frankenloom.
Now all I need is yarn. And a shuttle. I order them, and wait.
As I mentioned in my introductory post, You Can Weave has no advice on choosing a loom. It just says, quite suddenly on page 24, “Carry the warp to the loom carefully.”
Step 1: I need a loom.
There are many different types of looms. The one pictured in the book is a table loom. Table looms have the advantage of functioning like a big floor loom, but they take up less space, and are less expensive. They have multiple shafts for raising and lowering the yarns, which allows for weaving different patterns. Because they’re smaller, the fabric they produce is not as wide as the product of a floor loom.
When I say a table loom is less expensive, I don’t mean it’s not expensive. A brand new, 16-inch wide, 4-shaft table loom will run you somewhere between $700 and $1200 CAD with tax. At this price, you can count on a nice wooden device with well-functioning modern mechanics. At that width, you’ll be all set to weave things like scarves, kitchen towels, and placemats.
$700 is a hefty price for my current mood of “can I weave tho?” I balk.
Time to look at secondhand listings– which I prefer anyway. Why bring more new Stuff into the world when good old things are right there?
A perusal of the local offerings reveal that if you can find one, a secondhand table loom of mysterious quality and origin might run you about $400 CAD. It might be wider or narrower, have two or four or eight cards, be missing bits or not, and be of almost any age. They seem to sell fast, but if you can find one that suits you, you will be paying around $400 for whatever it is.
I’m feeling the urgency of this project, and don’t really understand much about looms yet, so I’m not terribly picky. After messaging a few people and striking out a couple of times, I manage to secure a 24″ loom with no brand name, that the seller assures me was ancient and falling apart, so she remounted most of it on a heavy plywood frame. She’s selling it because she doesn’t have room to keep it. Newer table looms fold away for storage. This one is permanently the size and shape that it is.
I have the benefit of:
not relying on on modern instructions and expectations, but on the hand-drawn 1970s loom of You Can Weave
Like most people in my family, believing without evidence that I can alter or fix anything
The Frankenloom I’m looking at is similar enough to the drawings. I decide it will be Fine.
I happen to be borrowing my mom’s car for the holidays, so I take advantage, to drive up to Ahuntsic, to a community bike repair clinic where, among the bike parts and tools, in a workshop only faintly smelling of metal, grease, and rubber, I meet the seller, Quaterine, and her grandmother’s loom. She points out many things about it– how it works, what it’s missing, how I could improve it, that it needs an oiling from time to time to keep the extremely old, dry wood cooperative. I understand almost nothing of what she tells me, as I do not yet Can Weave.
Truth be known, I’m a hands-on learner, so I usually need to do a thing to really understand it. There are many pertinent questions I should probably ask, but since i haven’t done the thing yet, I don’t know how to. Quaterine tells me the 24-inch loom is cool because you can juuust get wide enough fabric out of it to make a t-shirt, skirt, or some dresses. I’m excited, and convinced enough that she has really worked with this thing, and that I will, somehow, be able to Can Weave on it, as well.
I trade her the story of my own grandmother’s weaving, and promise to send her photos from the book. She decides to let me have the loom for an even $300, and helps me carry it down the snowy half block to the car. As we walk we laugh about how as cyclists, neither of us is in the habit of thinking about parking. It’s a miracle I found a good spot in the snow. This whole morning feels like a miracle. I’m having a great time.
I get the loom home and lug it upstairs and into my office.
Cool. Now what? I have no idea how this thing works. The instructions in You Can Weave do not exactly match the construction of this loom. Some things are different, some things are missing, and I’m not knowledgeable enough yet to tell the difference. I don’t even know what kind of yarn I need, or where to get it.
I accept that I’ll probably need to deviate from the plan of just relying on the book, and bust out all the tutorials and videos The Internet has to offer. I begin to search. I wonder what Bessie would have thought of The Internet? As the president of the weaver’s guild, she probably would have used it to connect with weavers around Nova Scotia. If she was managing a weaving shop today, she would have needed a social media strategy. I imagine an Instagram feed where my toddler father shows up every few posts, cranking the handle of the loom, yards of Nova Scotia tartan spilling into Stories and Reels and videos, the influencer weirdness of today melding with the so-what-child-labour weirdness of yesteryear.
The loom, looms back at me. I have my work cut out.
When my father was in town for Christmas, he brought me a copy of YOU CAN WEAVE: A Simple and Basic Guide to Weaving, which my grandmother, Bessie R. Murray, wrote with Mary Ellouise Black, in 1974.
Weaver House calls the co-authors “two of Canada’s foremost professional weavers in the 1950-70’s.” My grandmother, Bessie was the president of the Halifax Weaver’s Guild (precursor to Atlantic Spinners and Handweavers), and is best known for creating the official Nova Scotia Tartan, which she apparently debuted in a display about sheep rearing at the 1953 Truro Exposition. She ran a busy weaving shop, and there are still Nova Scotian weavers around today, who remember her, as well as “the little boy who opened the door at the shop.” That would be my father, who was just a toddler at the time– the youngest of her five children.
Got this scarf from Tartan Gal at the Dartmouth Market when I was there in October
You can read more about the tartan at the hub for Canadian Tartans, which is helpful, because outside of Nova Scotia, I bet that not many people are even aware that Canada hasregional tartans.
Back to the book. YOU CAN WEAVE was published on New Year’s day, 1974, by McLelland Stewart. I would love to know more about why such an auspicious and inconvenient publication date was chosen. Did they think “let’s get it out there on a day when nothing is open and pre-launch promo will also be nearly impossible!” Did they forget that January 1 is New Year’s? Did they explicitly want it out after Christmas, even though it’s for children? Was there a big weaving to-do on the 5th? Did pub dates just not matter in 1974? I will have to investigate.
Bessie died when I was about five years old, so I never got to know her very well. My memories of her are mainly anchored around toys she made me and my brother– a dollhouse, a doll, and two sets of incredibly detailed doll-and-finger-puppet sets modeled after the Beatrix Potter books, Mrs. Tittlemouse, and Jemima Puddleduck.
For someone who created such an enduring icon, there isn’t an overwhelming amount written about her, or catalogued in archives either– though Dalhousie University apparently has a box of her correspondence from 1976-79 on file, and it’s intriguing to think I could read her own writing from around the time I was born.
And I do have this book, so let’s start there.
It’s dedicated to Natalie and Sheri Black, and to my cousins, Louise, Stephanie, Margo, Holly and Heidi. I can only speculate as to why my other cousins are not mentioned, so for now I assume it comes down to gender and birthdate.
The book opens with an Instructions page, which explains the book is designed for children and easy to follow. This, frankly, shocks me, because we had a copy of this book in the house growing up, and even as an early reader with a passion for making things, I must have passed it over a hundred times, never guessing it was intended for me.
The rest of the book is hand-illustrated, and printed in Bessie’s trademark handwriting. Its easy-to-followness hinges on a UX choice to print pertinent portions of the illustrations and their related text in red. (Pretty cool use of a 2-colour-process layout, actually.)
The jury is out on whether it’s actually easy to follow. This was a long time before the age of YouTube tutorials. Notably, the book has no advice on choosing a loom. It just says, quite suddenly on page 24, “Carry the warp to the loom carefully.” Presumably, you already have a loom, otherwise, why would you buy YOU CAN WEAVE? It’s an instructional protocol from a past time.
My initial reaction to many of the images and subsequent walls of red-painted text– math-laden pages on which nearly every term is apparently worthy of red, is panic.
There are so many things to measure, count, double check, tie and untie carefully. Warps and wefts, and pegs and clamps, and shuttles… Long before page 24, I am already starting to think it’s a miracle any of us wear clothes, let alone have the kind of additional internal resources that would avail us of things like the placemats and napkins that make up the early projects of YOU CAN WEAVE.
Something about the way my grandmother instructs weaving reminds me of the time my father told us (aged six and nine) that he was going to teach us to write codes to each other in binary because it’s easy. I absolutely can not ever remember exactly how binary works. COULD I WEAVE though? Could I?
When I was a teenager, painting and sewing and learning music, determined to figure out how to make everything I wanted to, our dear family friend, Katie Hastings, used to lovingly make fun of me. She’d come over for coffee with my mom, and perhaps ask me for advice on how to add an elastic to a skirt, or attach a ruffle, and if I didn’t know the answer– which was most of the time– I’d think it over and tell her about a book I’d seen at the library that might show the process. And then she’d hug me but laugh her head off. “A book, of course a book. It’s always a book.” I’d ask her why that was funny, and she’d say something like “because you think other people, can just figure any old thing out from a book!”
Well, it looks like I’ve met my match. It is called YOU CAN WEAVE, and my own grandmother wrote it.
I’m going to get myself a table loom.
I’m going to WEAVE. Possibly.
Maybe in the process, I can come to understand something about myself and my family better. Why are we like this?
Please stay tuned for whatever tangled mess I am about to make.
P.S. There are two copies of YOU CAN WEAVE currently for sale online, from a bookseller in Dartmouth, N.S., so you could actually get a copy for yourself if your inner crafty 70s child is interested!
A couple of years ago at a tourist gift shop in Slovenia, we bought these marvellously weird placemats that have a picture of a cow in the alps, on the most perfect weather day ever, with some hand drawn floral art, and then, inexplicably, a gopher photoshopped into the foreground.
I don’t think Slovenia is especially known for its gophers? They do have an adorably invasive critter that’s like a tiny beaver without the big tail, but as implied— not native to Slovenia, and not what this was.
Anyway, when we got them home and out of the packaging (the mats, not the wee beavers) we discovered it was just placemat. Singular. Both pieces were stitched together, back-to-back. Why? I don’t get it. I separated them, and then let them languish in my mending pile…
Until yesterday! Using what I think is probably a sturdy poly-cotton blend, from some old curtains I thrifted, I finally gave the mats a proper backing. One became two again, and now we can eat breakfast as it was always intended: off the face of a photoshopped alpine gopher, while a cow supervises, unmoved. (Unmooed?)
When we moved into this flat, where we would each have our own office, I got the larger one on the grounds that I would also use it for a sewing room… and then I promptly didn’t sew anything for two years due to work crunch, and then burnout and then having an adopted cat living there during her adaptation, etc… etc… etc… You get the picture. One can simply never sew, the same way one never uses the cookbooks.
A year or so went by, and Rodrigue noticed a Facebook group about Projectors for Sewing. (Note: I only use FB for groups… apologies when I don’t see what you post there.)
This was cool for two reasons. One: dealing with paper patterns is the worst, most tedious part of sewing, IMO. Printing, taping, cutting out… potentially hours of work before even getting to fabric, every time you want to make something? Yuck. Two: It further distanced me from the time I would actually have to sew something by putting a lengthy tech and home improvement challenge between me and the activity I ostensibly craved doing most.
As shown in the featured image above, a mini projector is mounted in the ceiling, and projects pattern pieces directly onto the fabric!
Following advice from the group, I:
discovered we already had one of the group’s preferred tables, as friends had given it to us when they moved. I yoinked it into my office.
researched projectors and settled on a Yoton Y3, which was affordable and had the right throw distance to my table.
found an hdmi dongle that lets me mirror either my laptop, or any of my mobile devices
went on a long deep dive looking for very large cutting mats and finally settled on Ultimat, which lets you link together multiple small ones to form nonstandard sizes.
Mounted the projector in the ceiling and hid all my cables, except that one bulky connection, which I’ll need to hide under some art, once I find the right objet
Downloaded Pattern Projector, software which is developed and maintained on a voluntary donation basis by the group organizer, Courtney Pattison
Easily calibrated the software to my projector and table
Discovered the rad, adaptable, inclusive Apostrophe Patterns, which has a range of basics that you can enter your own measurements into, to generate a custom fit pattern for your own body, super easily
And then it actually happened! Seconds after completing my setup, I was actually sewing!
I was of course missing a million things (like elastic… it’s always waistband elastic), and my primary project is stalled.
But finally having the space in order unlocked some tailoring and mending projects that had been lying around, attracting moths for some time. I fixed a couple of shopping bags and hacked an old, icky jumpsuit into some serviceable PJ bottoms (see cat sitting on them, above)– all in the space of an afternoon and a morning.
Although there were many steps involved and many bits and bobs to sort out and acquire, this was a relatively affordable venture. The whole thing, including subscribing to Courtney’s coffee, probably cost about $300 CAD, with all taxes and shipping (spread out over a year). With the time, hassle, paper and tape waste it will save, I think it will more than pay off– especially if it helps me sew through my existing fabric stash, and keep using reclaimed and secondhand fabrics.
It feels good to finally get back to excitedly sewing!
