Weaving on my Greg Meyer "Oonagh" loom

I don't have the spare time I once did to enjoy crafts and blogging, but I am getting my work/life balance organised so I have "a life" again after 2 years of all work, and re-organising aspects of the work to spend less time on business administration and more on editorial work.

The Oonagh loom I bought from Greg Meyer at Wonderwool Wales is part of finding craft time. It only takes up a third of my table and is small enough to pick up and carry around, so I can weave but still have the table available when I need it for paperwork.

It's warped, and I'm weaving again and what is more I've worked out I can blog as well, so long as I keep it short. So, this is a 15 minute post.

Pictures next:

I'm using these cotton yarns together as weft on a bright green linen warp.

All 12 shafts are in use with 3-1 and 1-3 twill taking 8 and plain weave borders on 4. I know I could have set this up on less shafts, but I wanted to use all of them - I haven't had a 12 shaft loom to play with before.

Weaving and spinning

My sister pointed out that I haven't blogged for a while, days have slipped past here and I hadn't realised how they were turning to weeks, so here's a bit of an update on a couple of projects.

I finished the scarf that I was weaving with a handspun madder warp and have enjoyed wearing it the past couple of weeks. Here it is pictured with one of the scarves I wove last year. They both had similar Noro Sock Yarn warps, both 2.5m long on the loom and 8 inches wide, however, the scarf with the handspun warp is narrower because there are less interactions between warp and weft in the weave pattern and because the weft yarn shrank.

Both are lovely to wear, the wider scarf I wear folded, the narrow one wraps around like a stiff, warm collar. Longer tassels looked right on the narrower scarf, and I have been interested to notice that they swing about gracefully when I wear the scarf (unless it is tightly tucked in my button coat for extra warmth - still very wintery here!).

The Ashford Traveller wheel has been in use most evenings as I spin my natural dyed wool into yarns, pictured here in one of those useful baskets I wove last month.


The Traveller got to misbehaving again, lots of creaks and groans. I have removed the cardboard shim I used to fix a loose leg and replaced it with a slip of plastic cut from a milk carton, which should not compress so easily. Having done that, I realised all the legs were now loose so have done the same to them all! It is spinning beautifully again now. I hope to get some good tips on wheel care at an event organised by Wingham Wool Work at the start of next month when Richard Ashford will be visiting along with David Herring from the UK importers for talks, demos, art yarn lessons and wheel care. Richard Ashford is due to be at an event hosted by Wingham Wool on 1st and 2nd April, with The Threshing Barn on 3rd April, and possibly also Twist Fibre Craft studio on 30th March if enough people are interested, so if you do want to go along phone the appropriate shop now and book.

Getting back now to the weaving of my scarf, it occured to me that maybe not everyone knows about this handy little gadget which I bought from Handweavers Studio.


It is a balloon spring and fits on the shaft of my bobbin winder enabling me to wind my plastic Leclerc shuttle bobbins easily. The bobbin winder shaft is narrow and fits the cheap cardboard bobbins perfectly, but everything else needs wedging on somehow.


The Leclerc shuttles are lovely to hold and use.


I have got to know more new weavers recently, and more people taking up weaving for the first time, so thought it might be handy to include the odd weaving technique tip nowadays. This is what I do with the yarn end when I empty a shuttle bobbin. It slips into the same shed as the last pick, I take it across 1-2" and leave an end poling out of the cloth. The new yarn is started in reverse fashion, I lay a short end into the next shed, wrap it around the selvedge, then weave as normal. On the floor loom when working on wide warps with a heavy shuttle I find it necessary to hold the little end of the new thread while throwing the shuttle to stop it from pulling out.

When the new and old ends are several inches into the cloth I snip them off close to the fabric so that it is hard to see where they were.

Editing this post 09/03/09 to bring in this helpful comment from Alison:
Your tip is excellent, but can I suggest that you don't snip until the
fabric is fulled/washed/finished. I was taught to mend, finish, then
snip and trim fringes, in that order. If you don't overlap sufficiently
and snip first the over lap can be compromised. There's a better chance
of all being well if you finish first then snip. Thanks Alison!

While taking these photos I also thought you might like to see the swinging beater I have now fitted to my table loom. Very useful, as I can beat with the reed parallel to the cloth over a wider range.


For those of you who've missed this - The 2010 Challenge for weavers is started via Meg's blog and Kaz has already posted about it. I'm not participating due to other pressures on my time but am working on a blog post reviewing books on design.

Another blog post I'd like to call to the attention of all weavers is this wonderful post demonstrating how to tie a Weaver's Knot. Many thanks to Alison for mentioning it a few weeks back, it is a revelation as I have struggled to follow diagrams in books and been much puzzled as to how it became so well used in spite of being difficult to tie. Now I know there's a simple trick to getting it right.

Chocolate scarf

At the weekend I wove the next of my sequence of scarves on a Noro Kureyon Sock yarn warp. I am very, very pleased with the result. The weft yarn is Araucania Yarn, hand dyed, from Chile. I took the photo of the scarf in progress so you can see the colours in the warp which are cool shades of brown and grey and how the warm brown shades in the weft set it off. The weave pattern is a 4 shaft undulating twill from this book: However, the inspiration came from the undulating twills in the Janet Phillip's Sample Blanket which I wove last year. This blanket is not only a wonderful reference to look at when I am wondering what weave structure to use, but was also a tremendous learning experience as I discovered many new weave patterns. Here's the relevant section of the blanket: And here is my new scarf, off the loom and after washing vigourously in hot soapy water: The feel and drape of this weave is everything I hoped for, and I love the wavy lines. My selvedges are significant improved from the previous scarf, this I am sure is because I am getting used to winding on the warp carefully. I advanced the warp just one inch at a time, and I was only weaving a quarter - half inch before moving the stretcher. Last week I bought two more combinations of yarn because I don't want to stop weaving scarves just yet! One of my other on-going projects at the moment is spinning my way through a couple of coloured Ryeland fleece. Here's a bobbin full on the lazy kate of my Timbertops Leicester: Before spinning full bobbins I prepared a small skein to test out the behaviour of the yarn. I knitted swatches on three different needle sizes to see how it looks. This is the pillow slip full of wool yet to be spun: Isn't it pretty? The fleeces were supplied by Sandie Davison of Yorkshire Woollybacks. 

Selvedge puzzle solved.

When I wrote the green scarf woven on a Noro Kureyon Sock yarn warp, I mentioned that I was puzzled that the selvedges that looked so neat on the loom were a bit wiggly after the scarf was off the loom and washed.


I think I have solved the puzzle. It came to me at an odd moment, as answers often do. I suddenly recalled that all the time I was weaving this scarf I was learning more about letting of warp tension, winding the warp on and then taking up tension again. The tension system on the Leclerc Voyageur is provided by a steel cable wrapped around the back beam and tethered with a texsolv cord that runs to a release lever near the front of the loom. I'm only just getting a feel for how to best use this system.

I recall that sometimes I wove a few picks of weft, then decided the tension was slack and took it up a bit more. By this means I have woven different tensions into the cloth. On the loom it looks even, off the loom it becomes obvious that it is not. This hasn't happened on my Toika floor loom, I find tension much easier to manage on the Toika, but it's early days yet with my little Leclerc Voyageur, maybe I'll do better now I am aware of this.

Here she is... the new loom!

Are you ready? Here are the boxes:

part unwrapped:

and after a couple of hours unwrapping and putting bits together... it's a Leclerc Voyageur, 24" and 8 shafts. Note it was very well wrapped indeed - many thanks to Frank Herring & Sons of Dorset, they were very helpful in answering questions, delivery was prompt and their packing left nothing to chance. Of course I was rather tempted to buy the loom that has my name, the Leclerc "Dorothy"! But I wanted a folding loom for convenience of storing and occasional travel, and I like the shaft operation levers being in the middle (the Dorothy loom has them on the right hand side). See how she folds:

The literature says you can do this with the warp on, I haven't tried that yet. Of course as soon as I have a warp on I shall! This loom took a lot of choosing, and I am very grateful to friends in the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers who helped very much by telling me about their table looms and likes / dislikes. It's not easy to have to buy a loom without being able to see it. It did reassure me to discover that everyone with a modern folding table loom seems to be very happy with their loom. The options in the U.K. for new folding table looms are only Leclerc, Ashford and Louet (anything else would be a special import). If I'd wanted something more portable and just for samples I'd have gone for the Louet W30 which is only 12" / 30 cm wide but very nicely made and weighs a mere 12 lbs (5.5 kg) and a bargain at £250. Several owners of this loom got in touch to tell me how they love it. I'm sure the 40cm Louet Jane is also very good, but it's a bit bigger and heavier and costs significantly more, and the smallest Leclerc Voyageur (9 1/2") is also beautiful but 16lb in weight and costs nearly twice the price of the W30. If I'd not been interested in porting it about I'd have chosen one of the small folding 8 shaft looms, there's a Harris countermarch, or two jack looms - the Schacht Wolf pup or Leclerc Compact. I even gave some thought to one of the compact computer dobby looms, but they are not quite compact enough for me to find the space easily and I'm not sure I want a computerised loom. I get fed up with computers, they have dominated my working life. I wasn't sure about whether to get my loom with texsolv heddles or wire. I'm used to texsolv on my floor loom, so was biased towards the familar, but then I had a helpful chat to David Herring who said that the wire heddles move more easily along the shafts. I chose wire and I'm delighted. I'm including the next photo because I wanted to show the clever way the shafts are held in place by the heddle bars and they slide out of the bottom of the loom when you need to remove or add heddles to the shafts. The loom is lying on its side for this photo and you can see the little round feet it stands on.

I think I should add here that the loom comes with 600 heddles and I ordered an extra 300 in case I want to weave fine cotton or silk. I also ordered the second warp and back beam and a couple of extra shuttles.

I can't give you a full review of these shuttles yet. One came with the loom, and I ordered two extra. They are special shallow shuttles as the Voyageur has a small shed. The finish on them is the most beautiful and smooth of any of my shuttles, and with the curved ends they are good to hold. They are closed at the bottom so a reasonable weight and balance.