Search the Blog
Latest Comments
More from the Mini-Loom, Part 4: Shed Issues.
I already mentioned that the shed might need to be deeper than proper scaling would mean, as I need to fit my fingers through it. While I do have rather small hands, I found that a shed depth of 6 cm would be nice to handle - a rather deep shed for the small loom.
So my heddle length is also 6 cm... which means that to change the shed, I have 6 cm of way for the two layers to match, and then I need to go as much further as my artificial shed has to be deep. Which, in my case, is 4.5 cm. This means rather long holders for the heddle rod, though - 10.5 cm in length in the model.
For this, the hazelnut bush in the garden had to lose two branches, because the holders that were attached before were too short - the artificial shed only opened about 2 cm or so, and that is definitely too narrow for my fingers.
You can see the difference between the holders on the first image and the second one - the new ones are considerably longer.
So now the heddles are done and in proper length, the shed issues are solved, and the loom is ready for the next step: chaining the spacer cord into the bottom edge...
Comments 2
If you move the rod that holds the natural shed dowm a bit, the shed you pull will probably improve. It will decrease the natural shed a bit, but that one seems big enough anyway.
When I weave a Moebius my first heddle rod has heddles of at least 15 cm, the second one has shorter heddles.
By the way, one of my looms used to have a 2 cm shed, but since I always inserted a smal weaving sword first and placed that on its side, it was not that much of a problem.
I'm quite happy with the size of both sheds at the moment - the artificial one is just large enough to not be a bother, and not to need anything extra stuck in to open it some more (which is something I'd rather avoid for the purposes of this demo loom, since it might confuse people into believing the large ones had huge paddles to open the sheds...)