This week saw a major breakthrough in the use of my new loom. A blog post by Katie over at Creative Threads finally clued me in that my countermarch loom has castle pins which holds the shafts in place when you’re tying up the loom. I had no idea that two small pieces of metal could make my life so much easier. Thank you Katie!



On my loom now is a very simple 10/2 white thread warped at 20 EPI in a plain weave. While this is very boring to look at, it is a true test of my weaving skills, as there are no patterns or pretty colors to distract from my weaving technique, when this is finished, I hope to have a handwoven apron.

In the first few inches, we can already see that I need to work on the evenness of my beating and the tensioning of selvages. The only thing that makes this different from a completely plain weave piece is that I have packed the salvages to 30 EPI. After I have finished the yard or so for the apron, I hope to start practicing with a more exciting technique, which is an attempt at taquette weaving.  More to come.

After about 18 inches of weaving, I’ve had another break through. I was getting frustrated because my salvages were loopy and uneven. 

Not horrible, but since this project was about improving my technique, I thought I’d look for an answer, and Jane Stafford had the answer (because of course she did. I’m going to have to invest in some of her courses eventually).

I had learned somewhere to beat with a closed or bubble shed. I don’t know where I picked it up, but I didn’t like beating an open shed because it always seemed to gap a bit.

See how that leading thread is farther from the other threads by a hair? I assumed that would stay in the cloth and beating it hard enough to be even put more stress on the loom than I liked. But since this is a learning piece, I decided to trust the process, and beat it at the normal strength. This is the result:

No loops, a straight salvage, (mostly), and an even beat. now to adjust my muscle memory…