a diary for an interest-based nervous system

Tag: youcanweave

You Can Weave: Meet Frankie, the Frankenloom
I got a loom! Now I can weave! Right?

Not so fast.

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 do today), 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.

You Can Weave – archives
- January 2025 (3)
2025-01-24
You Can Weave: It Looms
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.

You Can Weave – archives
- January 2025 (3)
2025-01-19
You Can Weave
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 has regional 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!

You Can Weave – archives
- January 2025 (3)
2025-01-13