Boo! Hiss!
May 18, 2010
It’s not possible to weave 22/2 cottolin on my table loom. Even when the warp is at maximum tension, the floor of the shed is too loose. A thrown boat shuttle drops through it every time.
So what am I going to do with my towel warp?
Poke a stick at it.
I tried several old stick shuttles meant for rags. This is the lighter stick shuttle that came came with my rigid heddle loom. It worked better than the rag shuttles, which isn’t to say it works well. Every pick is like threading the eye of a needle.
This will be an exercise in patience.
Dorothy told me she doesn’t do linen warps on her table loom because it’s too short to handle them. I thought the cotton in this yarn would give it enough stretch to work. That was silly. Of course the least stretchy fiber in a mixed yarn will be the one that has its way. The stretch in my part linen warp for the checked peach runner was all thanks to the plying, not the cotton.
The Straight of the Goods 
May 18, 2010 at 6:20 pm
If it’s a matter of making it easier to throw a boat shuttle, would it help to rig some sort of shuttle race for it?
I purchased some Bluster Bay poke shuttles for situations like this (all the weft is hidden within slim, smooth wood), although I’ve not had the opportunity to test how well they work yet.
May 19, 2010 at 2:47 am
aww! Such nice colours too. Can you take the warp off the loom carefully to re-use one day on the Bergman?
By the way, we have lost our stray cat now, she got a mortal injury and with her not being tame, we couldn’t get her to the vet. I remembered the little stray cat you had a while. Life is mean to strays. No happy endings.
June 4, 2010 at 1:15 pm
I’m so sorry about your stray. What you said about no happy endings really struck me. There’s one every day when we walk to the post office. The poor thing needs deworming (and probably a lot of other vet care) so badly. We have fantasies of cat napping her, but we are pretty sure she belongs to the people who live in the trailer, and it wouldn’t be fair to the cat we already have. She sleeps on the hood of their convertible rabbit, and always seems to be hanging around there They are kind of chaotic and I don’t think they let her inside.
May 19, 2010 at 6:23 am
I know what I would be saying. @#$%^&*!!!!
May 19, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Maybe a Swedish style shuttle would work better, even though you’d have to fill it more frequently???
June 4, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Thanks everybody. Sadly, the problem is not that the shed is too narrow or tricky to navigate (what I call my boat shuttles are actually all old swedish shuttles with nice high noses), but being unable to tension the warp on such a shallow (front to back) loom. The shuttle would go through the shed just fine if I could get the warp any tighter. As it is, It is too loose to support any kind of shuttle except a stick. Think spaghetti! And no room for a shuttle race, even if I wanted one.
I plugged away with the stick shuttle for 7 inches or so of sampling before I stopped having time to weave. It was slow, but not as bad as I thought. I can stand it for a short warp.