Yesterday I did indeed dedicate a good amount of time to getting a project onto the new to me floor loom so I could give it a spin. We took the dogs out to the dog park midday, but the remainder of the day I had for the loom. This was planned. I wanted to do the work, but I didn’t want to overdo it. I wanted to enjoy myself.

I had actually gotten my warp started on the warping board Saturday night. I finished up Sunday morning and took the entire thing to the basement. I just wanted a very plain weave, and to add interest, I figured I’d use handspun yarn. This is yarn I made with little bumps created from the plying process. I figured they would show up in an interesting manner.

The warp is cotton I’ve had in my stash for ages.

I had to do a little troubleshooting as I don’t think the loom came with every single appropriate part. Mr. Ink and I will need to go to the hardware store later and see if we can figure that out. But I improvised something using a piece from my table loom, it’ll work for this project. As you can see, I screwed up the warp a bit as I was putting it through the reed. There were a large number of stray warp threads. It didn’t matter too much to me though, I just took them out.

I slowly worked through this process and thankfully did not make any mistakes other than the stray warp threads that ultimately didn’t matter. So then I get to start the fun part, actually weaving.

It’s definitely not perfect! I am learning how far is appropriate to advance the loom when needed, I am learning tension, etc. But it’s looking pretty cool! We have quite a lot planned for today, so I won’t get a ton of time to devote to this. But I am hoping that after I finish this blog post I can go down and get a bit more done while enjoying my morning coffee.

It’s a good first start! I am pleased. It’s easy to be hypercritical over something I don’t really know how to do yet, but if I step back, I realize all of that is part of the learning process and I should be pleased I am giving it a try in the first place.