Only Four Treadle Holes on an Eight-Shaft Bergman Loom

When I first got my 8-shaft Bergman loom, it puzzled me that there were only four holes (with cord loops) through each treadle.  Shouldn’t there be a treadle hole/loop for every shaft, like the big Scandinavian countermarches?

In fact no, there is no need to have a treadle hole for every shaft on such a compact loom.  When you are ready to tie up your treadles, thread a single tie-up cord through each lamm hole specified by your draft.  Let the cords hang in their proper places–upper lamm cords in front of corresponding lower lamms.   For a full 8-shaft tie-up you will have 8 cord ends dangling in a row over each treadle.  Take two adjacent cords and tie them to the appropriate treadle loop with a snitch knot, like this:

A snitch knot is easy to adjust as you fine-tune your sheds, and easy to undo when you are finished weaving.  It is actually a time saver over other methods.

If you have Texsolv cords, a snitch knot won’t work.  You will still take two tie-up cords through each treadle loop, but you will loop and secure each tie-up cord separately, with an arrow peg.

I cover a few other things about treadle tie-up on a Bergman Loom at the end of an earlier post:

https://trapunto.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/bergman-tie-up-tips/#comments

Good luck, Deborah!

Lessons From My Early Warps

Just what I needed this morning: an injection of weaverly enthusiasm from fellow Bergman loom owner Deborah in the UK!  This is her first blog entry since her hip operation in August, and I was blown away to see that she’s already made CLOTH!  It took me right back to the very first piece of CLOTH I made on my very own loom.  Just remembering, I got excited butterflies in my stomach and a peculiar urge to take yarn and dining room chairs outside. . .

Another UK blog I’ve been enjoying is Weave4Fun, which I found through Jane the Shuttle Pilot.  This delightful weaver’s sense of humor and a-typical profile give him a great perspective.  His enthusiasm is infectious, too.

Anyway, both of these blogs, not to mention that of good queen Spinninglizzy, Renaissance woman extraordinaire (who has lovingly spruced up two looms, made a place for her Bergman, and is now preparing to spin her own tie-up cord), has been making me think about where I would be with my weaving right now if I hadn’t started this, you know, thing.  With the words.  On the internet.

It’s solipsistic to write about blogging.  So I’ll put it off and respond to some of the interesting things that have been coming up for Deborah as she weaves her first warp.

Interestingly, Deborah’s Bergman is in about the same age bracket as mine and she mentions a lot of the same things I noticed in my first efforts.  Like Deborah, my loom came with a rusty reed.  I started out using only four of the shafts.  I had to make a lot of adjustments, and I had trouble figuring out exactly how those adjustments were affecting my sheds.  I’d run chasing after one problem, and then another would pop up.  And yes: some treadles were just bugaboos!  No matter how much I tweaked things, it was as if one particular treadle was laboring under a curse of messy-sheddedness.  I now have a little better idea how to improve things, but it’s still a problem.  On my recent scarf warp it was the dreaded treadle 9.  I wonder: does anyone else have an unlucky treadle?

I de-rusted my 15 dent reed by running folded up bits of fine sandpaper through every dent, then polishing off the rust dust with bits of flannel, likewise poked through every dent.  I think there might have been some super-fine steel wool involved as well.  It took a long time but it was effective. That was before I’d heard about using Naval Jelly (a rust-removing cleaner), which is what I am going to try next time it needs it.  Or emery boards.  I really liked using emery boards to clean out the slots on my rigid heddle loom.  You can buy a big package quite cheaply.

Moral: Stainless steel was invented for a reason.

Deborah found Leigh’s excellent information on adjusting countermarche sheds.  I came across those entries myself a few months ago.  I’ve been meaning to go back to them.

http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com/2007/07/warping-glimakra-adjusting-shed.html

You can see from Leigh’s pictures why it is more important to get the bottom threads even.  Since your shuttle rests on the bottom threads as you throw it, it’s more likely that it will slide under a sticking-up bottom thread, than that it will catch down a low-hanging top thread.

The sensible way Leigh fixes her sheds–making a list of which shafts are causing the sticking-up threads, and tightening the cords that run from the lamms controlling those shafts to the treadles–doesn’t work quite so well with a Bergman, because there is so little margin for adjustment on the smaller loom.  I remember seeming to move from over-correction to over-correction.  One buttonhole of Texsolv can be (usually is) too much.  I talked about this at length in an earlier post.  These days I can get my sheds to be tolerable if not perfect.

There’s not much more I can add except: make the most of your lamms.  Especially on a Bergman where they are truncated.  Lamms are levers.  You get more leverage (and the capacity to open larger sheds) the farther out your treadles are tied to them: that is to say, if you are using 8 treadles, leave treadles 1 and 2 idle, and tie up treadles 3-10.  And when you need fewer than 8 treadles?  Books will tell you to weave on the exact middle treadles, but I think you can fudge a little.  You don’t want to twist to reach your leg across the center line of your body, but it’s actually okay–for example–to work just two treadles with your left foot, and four with your right.  The nice thing is you can rearrange your tie-up according to your treadling plan so that you’re not overworking either leg too heinously.

Be aware that the reduced leverage on treadles 1 and 2 can really mess you up if you overuse them.  You’ll be tempted to tie them up for tabby (as I did on my recent scarf warp) because with plain weave the smaller sheds produced by treadles 1 and 2 don’t matter so much.  I’ll never do that again!  My left leg had to work so hard on the tabby that I strained my left SI joint.

This isn’t to say treadles 9 and 10 are the best, because they are the farthest from the hinge.  In my experience, although they make for the least effortful lifting and biggest possible sheds, they’re somewhat more finicky to adjust.

Moral: A treadle on the right is worth two on the left.

Now, this will sound bizarre, but another thing that can improve your sheds is to weave on more shafts.  I don’t know why; I think it is partially a matter of distribution of weight/effort.  But a lot of the fits I had with sheds and balance when I was weaving on four shafts just melted away when I started weaving on six and upwards.  One of those Bergman things?

Moral:  More is more.

“Where’s that treadle?  Why is it so skinny?”  I still glance at my feet for the tough ones until really I get in the swing: then I can tell just from looking at the web whether I’ve opened the right shed, which makes me bold enough to trust my muscle memory.  Based on when she was born I would guess Mrs Bergman had dainty feet that had been crammed into narrow boots most of her life.  Bergman treadles are narrow and close.  I treadle in socks, but I plan on getting some leather ballet slippers to stave off plantar fasciitis.  I’ve heard from a couple of weavers who like Acorn house slippers.

Moral: Do not judge a loom until you have treadled a mile in your moccasins.

Deborah has Ann Dixon’s 4-shaft pattern book, which I hear is very good.  She’d also like to find a good book of eight shaft patterns.  Visit her with your recommendations.  Mine would be the Praktisk Vävbok.  The diagrams are so clear, the Swedish text isn’t really a barrier.  I also own Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns.  While it’s more diverse (and has some gems) I’m not fond of it; I find the format awkward and unattractive.  Many of the patterns require more than 10 treadles.  Worse, the texts introducing the weave structures are unnecessarily complicated.  I end up understanding less after reading them.  Sharon Alderman’s Mastering Weave Structures is fantastic, if you’d like to comprehend what you’re weaving and maybe start designing your own drafts for as many shafts as you wish.  Though it’s not intended as a pattern book it has quite a few patterns in it.

Moral: A good eight-shaft pattern book is hard to find.

 

mysterious

Yarn Samples and a Book

A while ago I made a little resolution that I will always plan and wind the warp for my next project while my current project is still on the loom.  Once my warp is wound, it feels like the job of warping is half done–an illusion, I know.  I play a lot of little tricks like that on myself.  It’s surprising I haven’t gotten wise to them!

I may not be half done when I’ve wound the warp, but with the reeling and beaming problems I’ve had in the past, those are the parts of warping that intimidate me.  Like an omelet: that moment when you decide it’s time to turn it over or it will burn, and it all comes apart if you haven’t got the heat and the pan and the filling right (I tend to overfill).  Once you’ve turned it over, successfully or unsuccessfully, setting the table and serving it up is easy.  So far I actually like threading and sleying.  They take longer but there’s no stress involved.  Winding and beaming are easier to face if I don’t have to face them both at the same time.

That said, I only just finished the second scarf on my navy merino scarf warp, but I have been spending a lot of time planning my next project.  First a sample warp, for which I have the thread, but then I get to buy some!

So, I finally placed an order to Vävstuga, something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.

There is something so neat and potential-filled about sample cards.  When I took them out of the package, these gave me the same feeling as the oil pastel sticks lined up in a box of Cray-Pas when I was a kid.  Unfortunately, when I tried to start using them to compare colors, I realized that they were not very functional.  In tight rows you can’t use the samples as swatches.  Not only to the colors confuse each other through juxtaposition, 3 square centimeters simply isn’t enough color for my eyes to make sense of.  They are okay for matching.  If I can find a piece of clothing or a book jacket with the color that interests me, I can hold it up to the cards and find the nearest color; but since the match isn’t exact, I can’t dependably take that piece of clothing and hold it against another thread sample to see if it goes.

I’m not quite at the point of cutting the cards into strips and making a cardboard window to separate the colors.

Vävstuga’s regular Bockens sample book had been backordered a long time with no guarantee as to when more would arrive, which is why I bought the separate sample cards.  Does anyone know if the proper Bockens sample book gives you more yarn in a more useful configuration?

The other thing in my package:

I had been thinking of buying The Praktisk Vävbok for a long time.  Seeing it advertised over and over again in my 80’s copies of Väv must have pushed me over.  It is a nicely made book, a clean facsimile (all in Swedish) of one published in 1899.  I enjoy the homey assumption that weavers want to use their cloth for everyday home sewing.  The drafts are named to purpose like “Children’s Clothing,” or “Upholstery,” or “English Hand-towel Material.”  Another good thing about the book is that most of the patterns are for 8 shafts, probably because it is an old book which assumes that you are using a counterbalance–there are smaller sections for fewer shafts, but none for more than 8.  This focus is uncommon in Scandinavian weaving books.  Usually more space is given over to either 4-shaft patterns or 10-and-upwards.

Which brings me to my problem.  Most of the patterns are traditional 8-shaft plain and fancy twills.  I already have the same or similar patterns scattered through my other Scandinavian weaving books or in Edward Worst.  They are are all very Swedish looking–small all-over patterns familiar from old table linens.  It’s nice seeing them in one place, laid out compactly with a spot black-and-white photograph of the cloth right next to the draft, but for a reference book I would really want something more exhaustive with better photos, like Helene Bress’ The Weaving Book, which I have been missing ever since I left it behind at the public library where we used to live (and which I probably shouldn’t even mention here, for fear of driving the price up even further!).

Still, I like the fact that The Praktisk Vävbook features the 8-shaft versions of these twills.  It’s not too big, pleasant to hold, and it has the further advantage of not making my nose stuff up and my my throat and eyes itch.  I got most of my old Scandinavian weaving books as a lot on ebay, from a weaver’s estate.  They had been sitting in a shed or something for a long time and grown musty.  Which is bad enough.  But the real problem was that the over-zealous ebay dealer though it would be a good idea to mask the mustiness by putting them in a sealed container with a chemical air freshener for several days (I know this because I asked her).  I aired them in the sun repeatedly, but the reek is tenacious.

And now a little cord update:  I looked into the smaller size of Texsolv tie-up cord Susan told me about after the Texsolv post, but according to the nice people at Woolhouse Tools, the smaller cord is a really, really small gauge, and not strong enough for lamm or treadle tie-up.  The buttonholes have the same 12 mm spacing as the regular cord, which won’t help with fine adjustments.  The Woolhouse people suggested I loop the cord back through itself to adjust in smaller increments.  I know what they’re talking about, but I don’t think it can help with a Bergman loom because of the way the cords go to cup hooks rather than through holes in the lamms.  I will fiddle with the cords and the pegs some more when I do my next tie-up.  There may be some configuration of Texsolv and peg I haven’t thought of.

This would be a lot easier with a trained monkey.  Smaller fingers.  Fits under the loom.

Bergman Tie-Up Tips

I’ve been outpaced.  One of the ladies who has come to my blog for information about setting up her Bergman loom is already at the stage of crawling around under her loom (for 2 days!) trying to figure out the tie-up.  This is no joke with a Bergman!  There is is a bracing cross-bar with a sharp edge (on mine at least) about six inches off the floor, between the back of the loom and the lamms. You have to sit parallel to it, twist sideways, and lean over it when you’re doing anything with lamms.  And you can’t sit up straight under your warp.  So: duck, twist, reach!  My heart and back muscles go out to you, Deborah.

The good news is that you won’t have to spend as much time down there in the future, once you’ve got an idea of pretty much where everything should hang, and have adjusted the default length of your tie-up cords accordingly.  A really short footstool (mine is about 8 inches tall) and/or an arrangement of firm cushions helps too.  (The other good news is that if you are under 5 feet tall this may be just the loom for you.)

Deborah’s Bergman loom has a very interesting history, and she has a very interesting history.  Fortunately for us she’s started a blog, here.  She’s been up against a lot, since her loom was shipped from overseas years ago and was in the “Can this bundle of sticks possibly be a working loom?” category for quite a while.  It’s missing a back beam, so she’s tied a temporary one on in order to do her tie-up, which seems to me the essence of weaverliness!

Deborah asked some questions in the comments section of my post, Warping My Bergman with Mrs. S-G.  In the course of this general overview I’ll try to answer them.

 

Important Points On Bergman Tie-Up

First important point:  You need a real warp on your loom.  At least 4 inches wide.  Wider, if you want to be able to evaluate your sheds, because it’s impossible to assess bad sheds when you can just hand your shuttle from one side of your warp to the other.  That’s why I did the warping post first.  You can try out your cord and your knots and learn the mechanics of your loom without a warp, but you need a tensionable warp to get a feel for how your lamms and shafts are going to behave when they’re hooked up to your treadles, how that affects your sheds, and to start making adjustments.  My first Bergman warp was a 4-shaft twill band.

Second important point:  Not all Bergman looms are the same.  Mine is one of the early ones, from the 30’s.  Later the Bergmans made a change in the placement of the lamms to improve the function of their looms.  The document “Getting Acquainted With Your Bergman Loom,” which I’m adding as a separate page (look to the side and you’ll find it), pertains to the tie-up of the later-style looms, as it dates from 1969.

I know this because I tried following these instructions exactly, but they didn’t work because my loom doesn’t have the same measurements as the looms the instructions were written for.  I’ve made a diagram to show you the lamm slant that has worked best for me after trial and error.  If your lamms are set the same distance from the floor and the same distance apart as mine, you will find this a good starting place.

Third important point:  Don’t be afraid to fiddle with your tie-up.  As you start weaving see how things go and make adjustments.  If you are using a traditional cord tie-up, this means that the cords suspending the shafts, lower lamm wires, and upper lamms will be loops, therefore doubled.  You can make fine adjustments by giving the knotted end of loop an extra twist around the cup hook on either end of the jack.  In most places these doubled cords will be attached to the loom with a simple Lark’s Head knot, which will also admit a little adjustment by twisting.

 
Replacing Wires With Cord

In my Bergman Beginners post I strongly recommend using the original wires that came with your loom, if you have them, because the Bergman loom was designed to work best with wires.  The wires suspend the lower lamms from the inner jacks.  You can sand them or treat them with a rust remover if necessary.  They don’t need to be perfectly straight.  If you must replace them with cord, you will want to do something like this:

Originally, I had tried it without the rings like this:

Just a Texsolv loop over a single slack cord connecting the inner jacks.  It didn’t work at all!  For some reason (partly because Texsolv is bumpy), it was necessary that the cord replacing the wire NOT have the possibility of back and forth play indicated by the arrows, in order to have each of the pair of jacks do their fair share in evenly lifting and lowering.

The rings should be strong, because a lot of pressure will be put on them.  Mine are plastic rings from the drapery section of the fabric store, meant for Roman blinds.  I chose the smaller size (just shy of 1/2″) because I could picture the larger size stretching out into ovals.  These have worked fine so far.

The only thing you need to remember when you are replacing the inner-jack-to-lower-lamm wires with cord, is that the cord has to be thin enough to slip between the shafts without causing them to pack together and produce friction.

 

Shaft, Lamm, and Treadle Height

Your shafts will always hang with the center of the eyes of the heddles at the same height as the top of your breast beam.  If you’ve suspended them at this height, and they still hang too low, the only correction you can make is to get (or tie) shorter heddles.  Mine are 9.5 inches long, and I kind of wish I’d tried out some that were even shorter.

Most of the time my loom works best when the top of the tips of the upper lams are 23 1/4 inches off the floor.

In theory, the lower lamms are are suspended parallel to the floor.  In practice, mine tilt down a hair.

The top of the tips my treadles are 6 1/4 inches off the floor, which means I can’t use a piece of lumber to keep the height and tension even when I’m tying the lamm-to-treadle cords, as described in the “Getting Acquainted With Your Bergman Loom” instructions.  It’s a good trick if you’re treadles work okay for you when they’re that low.  I’ve learned to eye-ball mine instead.

The big, big, thing about all this is that ALL your shafts, ALL your upper lamms, ALL your lower lamms, and all your treadles are exactly the same height.  I haven’t been able to achieve this military precision with Texsolv, as I described earlier in the Texsolv post.  Maybe that’s why Athena hasn’t yet blessed me with perfect sheds.  I think the idea is that once you’ve achieved military precision, and your sheds still aren’t even, you can tell where you need to make adjustments.

It’s all about making adjustments!  For instance, I like to tie my left hand treadles up a little tighter getting gradually looser as I go to the right.  It’s too complicated to describe why I do this mechanically (It has to do with the way the lamms behave), but I discovered my preference as I wove.

 

A Further Note About Tying up Bergman Treadles

If your loom has 8 shafts, you may have noticed that your treadles only have 4 holes, for 4 treadle loops.  After you have put all the lamm-to-treadle cords through your lamms for your pattern, you will tie 2 adjacent cords onto each loop with a Snitch Knot.  It goes like this:

It’s hard to tie a snitch knot if your treadle loops are too short, so watch out for that if you are making them from scratch.

With Texsolv, you’ll make loops in the lamm-to-treadle cords and secure them with arrow pegs.  Unfortunately, these are a lot harder to adjust than the snitch knots.

 

If Shafts, Lamms, and Treadles Make Contact

I described this in the Texsolv post.  The only thing I can say is that if your loom is like mine, yes your upper and lower lamms will probably want to run into each other, and possibly the shafts and the upper lamms.  (The treadles and the lower lamms haven’t been a difficulty for me.)  Joanne Hall talks about how to correct for this at the end of her book, Tying Up the Countermarch Loom.  The only problem is that with a Bergman (the ones like mine at least) there simply isn’t much margin for correction, because it is short in the castle.  If you’re weaving a pattern that allows your upper and lower lamms to shuffle between each other a little without sticking, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  But if you have to reach out and unstick them with every 4th change of shed–as I did with my first big project–Something Is Very Wrong.  You shouldn’t have to lose your rhythm, monkeying with your lamms!  Treadling smoothly helps.

You will figure out what works best as you start weaving.  Your sheds will never be spacious, but that’s okay if you can get them clear.  You will probably want to use old-fashioned Swedish shuttles with paper quills, the low profile kind.  That was the only kind my loom’s original owner, Mrs. S-G used, and they were Margaret Bergman’s regular type of shuttle as well.  Actually, I adore all the skinny old shuttles that came to me with my loom!  My very favorites are a pair of beautifully weighted maple ones that I’m sure were Mrs. S-G’s favorites too, since they are more worn than all the others, and she took the trouble to write her initials on them.  My treasures!  They are only a little over 3/4″ tall.

Bergman Beginners

I am really surprised how many interesting weavers and proto-weavers have been showing up in the comments section looking for information, especially after my Warping My Bergman With Mrs. S-G post of a few weeks ago.  It looks like I should be running an informational website rather than keeping a weblog!  I want to make a disclaimer, though.  I am not any kind of a Bergman guru; just someone who owns and loves a Bergman loom and has figured out (more or less) how to make it work.  I’m not keyed in to the off-line Bergman weaver underground (and I do hope there is one!  Drop by and reassure me if you’re a member!) because I don’t live in the lower Puget Sound area.  Seattle, especially, has a large and active weaving guild.  These looms are built to last.  If a local breed of loom is readily available generally in good shape, I think there will always be some local weavers weaving on it.  Perhaps you can sniff them out!

I learned how little information about the Bergman loom exists on the web two years ago.  I believe that is changing.  Just in the last month several ladies who want to put unused, stored, or recently-acquired Bergman Looms back in commission have visited my blog.  Hooray for loom rescue!  One of these lovely ladies, SpinningLizzy, will be chronicling the process of getting her own Bergman set up to weave.  Right now she’s making some gorgeous towels on her rigid heddle loom.  She is a new-weaver powerhouse!  You should all pay a visit to her blog and admire Beauty:

http://spinninglizzy.wordpress.com/

It’s difficult to respond to your questions in the comments section, since I don’t know where you’re coming from.  I want to ask: Do you know how a countermarche mechanism works?  Is this your first loom?  Have you ever woven before?  Have you ever woven on a countermarche loom?  Have you ever done the tie-up on a countermarche loom from scratch?  I think maybe some of the confusion (and intimidation) around setting up a Bergman loom is a result of the general mystification of countermarche mechanics among weavers.

My own wonderful Scary Weaving Teacher, who has been doing complex weaves for decades, had a hands-thrown-up, cautiously-backing-off attitude toward countermarches.  When I told her I’d bought a countermarche, the first thing she said to me was, “I can’t help you with that.”

I wish I had diagrams of my loom so I could show you exactly what’s goes on with a Bergman, because Deborah in the UK is right, photos are not enough.  There are a few differences between a Bergman and a normal Scandinavian countermarche.  But those will mostly just affect the size of your sheds and how smoothly your weaving goes.  Worry about them later.  Or rather, don’t worry!–check back at my blog because I plan to talk about these things over time.

The first thing is simply to learn the basics of how your loom works, set it up, and start weaving.  For this, the similarities between a Bergman and a Glimåkra are more important than the differences.  The Glimåkra is the behemoth of countermarches and the make for which there is the most information available in English.  Don’t wade through the whole morass of unrelated weaving books at the public library (though that’s fun too), trying to find out how to weave on your obscure 70-year-old countermarche!  You’ll just get bogged down.  Do some pointed research.

Here are the first two resources I would recommend to every Bergman rescuer and new countermarche weaver:

Your first stop should be Joanne Hall’s website: Elkhorn Mountain Weaving, http://www.glimakrausa.com/.  This Glimåkra dealer has written the definitive English instruction book for tying up a countermarche.  Her diagrams are extremely clear.  She has scanned some pages from her book onto her website, but the scans are fuzzy.  I can’t stress enough how glad you will be if you buy the book rather than trying to make do with what’s online.  Yes, it’s only 34 pages long, it’s spiral-bound, it’s expensive.  But it has a glossary, a sleying chart, knots, and invaluable sections on how to how to evaluate and adjust for tie-up related problems that may occur when you are weaving.  And you can take it with you under the loom.  I find myself opening it up pretty much every time I warp.

Vävstuga, http://vavstuga.com/, is another great resource.  Vävstuga also carries Joanne Hall’s book mentioned above.  Becky Ashenden, the co-owner, is the North American maven of Swedish weaving.  She carries a lot of Swedish weaving classics, all for sale in the books section.  One of these has been looking particularly interesting to me, because it seems to be a complete survey of how to weave on a countermarche for beginners: The Swedish Weaving Book: project planning, loom dressing, and finishing.  I can’t vouch for it since I haven’t read it, but Ms. Ashenden thought it was valuable enough to translate it from the Swedish and publish it herself.  It’s exactly the sort of book I wish I’d had at hand when I started puzzling out my loom.

Finally, I’d like to mention a bugaboo of most new Bergman owners: those scary wires.  They make your loom look older and creakier than it is.  Probably they are bent and sticking out in all directions.

Those wires are just the Bergman equivalent of the cords that suspend the lower lamms from the inner ends of the jacks, found on all countermarches.  Margaret Bergman designed her loom with wires instead of cords to cut down on space between the shafts.  If the wires are rusty, take them off the loom clean them up with some Naval Jelly.  Run them through your hands to straighten them out as much as you can.  When you your loom is tied-up and ready to weave, the weight of the lower lamms and treadles will straighten them out the rest of the way.

It’s always delightful to hear from a Bergman beginner!  Keep stopping by!

Some Countermarche Nitty-Gritty: Size, Sheds, and Texsolv

I received some interesting responses when I posted about my problems winding warps with a warping mill and beaming them on.  Jane, solo warper and owner of international looms, had raddle advice: slit paper towel tubes.  And I was all like, duh! and yet, wow!  One of the things I love about weaving is the way household objects start becoming weaving tools; Jane uses Home Depot painter’s paper to separate her warp.  Cally offered hope of a well-trained husband.  Katherine, a sectional warper, likewise recommends skilled beaming help.  A bit later I found out Charleen has a vertical reel that works fine for her, now that she has learned to overcome her dizziness (though she does wind in quite small bouts).  Dizziness is one thing that has never been a problem for me while warping!  I wonder if this is a hidden advantage of the horizontal reels.  The lengths of warp slide past your eyes up-and-down, rather than side-to-side like scenery whizzing past a moving car.

I also got an out-of-the-blue comment from a seasoned Bergman Loom owner.  One of my hopes for this blog has been that new Bergman owners will find it and be spared some of the trouble I had with mine in the beginning, but I was surprised to hear from a veteran.

The lady was kind enough enough to measure her loom and send pictures.  I asked her to do this because I have long suspected that my incurably narrow sheds are due to my loom being shorter in the castle and/or breast beam than later Bergman looms.  There are not many pictures of Bergman looms on the internet–none full-figure–but I do have an magazine article from the 1940’s with a grainy photo of half a dozen set up in a library meeting room for a guild exposition.  It was very hard to see, but I pored over it, and it seemed to me the castles were taller than mine.

This lady’s loom was made in the 1970’s, shortly before the Bergmans closed up shop.  Her castle and breast beam are nearly the same height as mine (in fact my breast beam is 1/2 inch taller), but my upper and lower lamms are set 2” closer together.

Bingo!  When the upper and lower banks of lamms on a countermarche are attached to the loom too close together, your sheds are small.  Why?  Well, when you push on the treadle, the rising lower lamms and the falling upper lamms quickly crash into each other.  At that point, you can’t push the treadle any farther, so that’s as big as your shed gets.  Ditto the sinking shafts and the rising upper lamms: crash!  The best you can do is to adjust the cord lengths for all the moving parts for maximum non-crashing movement.

This is why Glimåkra looms are so hugely tall (aside from needing somewhere to hang the beater).  The more vertical space in which your shafts and lamms and treadles have free play, the bigger your sheds can be.

. . . as I understand it after crawling around my loom for months, trying to maximize my sheds.  Not that I have ever woven on a full size Scandinavian countermarche.  I’ve just thought a whole lot about loom design.  There is no better education in simple mechanics than pinpointing the shortcomings of your own machine. 

The Bergman loom was designed low and compact in order to be quite strong, yet fold easily when warped.  This has wonderful advantages.  You don’t have to take it apart to get it through a doorway, just fold in the wings.  But there are sacrifices you will make with a smaller loom.  If the height of your countermarche loom affects the size of your sheds, the depth of the loom affects their quality.  A Bergman loom may be decently deep for a countermarche, but not for a Scandinavian-style countermarche.

Deeper looms allow for more inches of stretched warp from back beam to breast beam.  This means (how do I describe this; it’s all so visual!) more total elasticity, therefore less stress on your threads while weaving.  For instance, pull on an 80” inch piece of string, then a 20” piece of string: there is more “give” in the 80” piece.  Now picture each of these two pieces of string stretched across a brick and tacked to the floor at both ends.  The 80” inch string approaches the floor from the top of the brick at a gently inclined angle, whereas the 20” string is very sharply inclined.  On a short looms the sharp incline of the warp from the lowered shafts to the fell line contributes to bad sheds.  This is because the thread angle produced by each separate lowered shaft will be quite different from its neighbor’s.  The steep angle magnifies all the discrepancies.  Your shuttle will try to sneak under the high threads when it’s supposed to glide over them.  Here’s an old picture I borrowed for a good cause.  Thank you, Ulla Cyrus.

You can get good sheds with a Bergman (I’m taking this on good faith from Mrs. S-G), but it will take a lot of fiddling.

My Texsolv tie-up is a problem in this department.  A person can only fiddle with Texsolv so much, because it only allows adjustments in 1 cm increments.  I would really appreciate being able make finer adjustments than that.  I decided to make a fresh start with the Texsolv because my loom’s tie-up had been Frankensteined.  The cords it came with were ancient, all lengths, several thicknesses–none of which fit through the holes in the lamms.   I wrapped the ends with masking tape and worried them through for my first warp, but it was hellish.  The rest of the cords were clearly on their last legs, er, strands.  The heddles were so many sizes, I couldn’t even guess which size was correct.  I think someone had simply grabbed a bunch of assorted heddles and cords belonging to various looms from what remained of Mrs. S-G’s weaving school supplies.

You wouldn’t think so, but restringing the loom with Texsolv was a huge job, as well as expensive.   My advice?  If you don’t have to go the Texolv route, don’t–at least not until you have woven 3 or 4 warps.  Unfortunately Bergmans take less kindly to Texsolv cords than most looms.  As well as the difficulty making fine adjustments, the usual benefits of Texsolv aren’t available to Bergman owners.  Because there are only 6 holes in the treadles of an 8-shaft Bergman loom, you must must make old-fashioned treadle loops.  This means no going-through-the-treadle-hole-anchoring-underneath.  No cool Vävstuga knitting needle tie-up.  Just a messy loop-through-a-loop secured with an arrow peg.

Another inconvenience: the holes in Bergman lamms are small.  Unless you take a drill to them (Please don’t!), it will be a real pain to get a Texsolv cord through.  You will spend a lot of time with a candle, melting and shaping the ends of all 80 tie up cords to severe 1” points.

That said, my Texsolv tie-up is a big improvement over the one my loom came with.  I even replaced the wires that went from the inner jacks to the lower lamms.  None of the several lengths of wire that came with the loom were the right length–more Frankensteining.  Since Texsolv is slippery, this seems to work okay, although it adds a little bulk between the shafts.

If I had it to do over again I might look harder for some linen tie-up cord.  Did you know dense, non-stretchy cord is really hard to find?  Some sources I consulted recommended linen drapery cord–the kind that goes around the pulleys on fancy fitted drapes, or that you use to string roman blinds.  In the 21st century?  Pff, doesn’t exist for normal mortals!  Though I suppose a person could try asking a seamstress or an upholsterer who sews custom drapes.  Pretty much all non-stretchy cord is synthetic now, and you really need the friction of a natural-fiber cord to make the treadle tie-up knots and Bergman twist-around-a-cuphook adjustments hold properly.  I recently discovered that Earth Guild carries seine twine.**  I bought some and it is very sturdy but not thick enough enough for the treadle tie-up.  I wonder if there are any linen carpet warps heavy enough and highly twisted enough to work for that?

I would still buy Texsolv heddles, though.  The string heddles were a pleasure to thread, and easier on my eyes than shiny Texsolv, but really needed to be replaced.  Personally, I knew I was not going to make a heddle block and tie 900 new string heddles, so Texsolv was just dandy!

Let me wind up with a testament to the power of the Internet. While I was composing this I heard from a brand new weaver who just yesterday bought a lovely older Bergman like mine.  It’s really exhilarating to have something to offer!  I had been wondering if there is any point in talking countermarche shop at such length (Like dreams, eccentric looms are always most interesting to their owners.), but now I think I will go ahead make this the first in a series of related posts, with excursions back to my current project and whatnot.  A sort of Rough Guide to Bergman Weaverland.  Maybe it will even entertain some armchair travelers.

 

**Sorry, I meant to say Earth Guild carries hawser twine.  “Seine twine” was stuck in my head because the old books say to use linen seine twine for heddles.  It seems to be a marine product. I see Camilla Valley Farm sells it in cotton and cotton/poly for tapestry and rug warps.  It looks a little lighter-weight than my hawser twine.