Warp Weighted Loom Thoughts.

One of the remarks I've often read about shed size is: Ït's a shed, not a barn!"
Micki's shed is about 2 cm deep and it works well. One can always widen the shed with a weaving sword.

Another thing about vertical looms became quite apparent during last Forum: the top beam should be reachable whilst standing on the floor! The way the first centimetres were woven in Lorsch wasn't comfy nor smart.

My approach to teaching weaving on the wwloom has always centered on what I shall call (for lack of a better word) "seeding." I'm not teaching them to be better weavers; I'm teaching them to use a tool unlike any other tool they've worked with before. My goal is to sow the seeds of knowledge and send the students back home to perform their own experiments. I counted up a couple years ago, and just over 100 people have taken my classes in the 20 or so years I've been doing this. Several of them have built (or had built for them) their own looms afterwards and gone on to teach other people, and the craft advances at several levels simultaneously.

This approach has worked well for me in the US, where most of our history and museum weaving demonstrations focus on the Colonial (or later) treadle loom. In Europe, thanks to the many fine regional museums focusing on older history, you have more base level awareness of wwloom weaving, which gives you a more educated introductory student than what we usually have here. Attending a workshop and having my own loom to play with there is an unimaginable luxury! (Although one day I hope to get to Vesterheim to do that.)

I have taught wwloom weaving in short form and in long form. Short form is setting up the loom and teaching tabby. But I have more experience teaching the long form version. That's typically been a series of two two-hour classes on successive mornings at Pennsic, the big SCA event in western Pennsylvania.

Under a large canvas sunshade outdoors, we first assemble my Icelandic style loom. Then we work cooperatively (with frequent task switching) to weave the header band, lash it to the beam, and weight the two sheds of the warp. That's the first session.

In the second session, we pick out the four twill sheds and knit the heddles, then readjust the weighting. (I teach the method outlined by Hoffmann, i.e., "now the middle heddle is wrong." That requires that you set the weights in three rows.) Then I weave a few repeats of twill to show them how it's done, and each person steps up to weave a repeat. Getting that far usually takes the whole two hours.
Anyone who wants to stay afterwards and continue to play more on the loom is always encouraged to do so. I leave the loom set up in the sunshade for the rest of the event, which is usually another whole week. I weave a little more on it now and then, and when we are in camp it is available for any visitor to play with it who wants to. It's kind of like an attractive nuisance. :-)

The short form class can just manage to be taught in two hours if the loom is already assembled. In those cases, I usually give a short orientation to the loom parts and how they work at the beginning. But always my goal is to get as many hands as possible on every stage of the process, so each person can come away with at least the seeds of knowledge for how to do all the tasks required.

I hope this is helpful.

Again, this is an issue where the overt goals of my workshops may differ from yours.

My workshops are very much introductory, a get-em-on-the-field kind of expectation. And when I teach the twill method, I'm specifically aiming at teaching it on my repro Icelandic/Greenland loom, which is the one for which we have the richest oral tradition of how the wwloom was used historically. My thinking was that the Icelandic loom is the one that produced the most yards of wwloom cloth in the Middle Ages, and they must have had a very highly developed method in place. Hoffmann's and Guðjonsson's work gave me a place to stand and try to relearn that method.

The year my husband built the loom (in the field, using period hand tools and methods), I had big expectations. To my great surprise, I had been able to secure a 2# cone of fine singles wool. My goal was to lead a group to create a roughly period width and thread count textile with the loom. I aimed at something around two feet in width, maybe a little wider. But I found out the hard way that the warp I'd chosen was both underspun and too hairy. We succeeded in getting about an inch woven, but most of it was me doing the work while my bemused attendees sat on benches and listened to me cuss.

The next year I tried using a fine 2-ply commercial Shetland for the warp. That worked well at about 25 epi, a good "medium" Viking Age sett, but again the warp was so wide we spent most of our efforts in setup and barely got through one repeat apiece of weaving.

Then I changed to a third, more workable technique that has survived into all my subsequent classes. I reluctantly decided that teaching for authentic sett and size can wait until after people understand the skills. Instead, I decided to make a narrow sample (I call it a "teaching") warp and use large yarn. The goal was to give people the manual and visual training to help them learn to use the loom. Proficiency at period textiles could come after the basic skills were firm.

For years I used the same two cones of rug wool for warp and weft, one light purple and one dark purple. (Every year I'd switch them off, just to keep myself entertained.) After I ran out of those, I used two large skeins of worsted weight knitting wool that was tightly plied and not stretchy. They came in black and white, which celebrated the structure even more than the two-tone purple yarns.
Having the yarn two different colors gives people an additional hook on which to hang the concepts of warp and weft. Even experienced treadle weavers can get confused when confronted with their first warped wwloom!

I found that my loomweights (based on Jorvík ones, and they weigh within a few grams of the mode of the weights from there) worked really well with 12 strands apiece of this rug yarn. Accordingly, I make a warp that is based on groups of 12. That way it divides up well for both the initial two-shed weighting and the subsequent three-course weighting. I've done teaching warps on this principle that have been as small as 48 ends (which works out somewhere around 10-15cm in width depending on the header band) and as large as 72 ends (I forget how wide that one was).

With respect to technique, I make sure we had as many hands working at once as possible. When weaving the header band, I sit one weaver in a chair by the Oseberg tablet loom. Another person is charged with holding the two balls of warp and presenting the correct one to the weaver for each weft. A third person conveys the loop of warp down to a third post (often another Oseberg loom, of which we had several in that camp). A fourth drops the loop over the post and keeps them in order. That fourth person is rewarded for the boring stationary job by getting to be the one who pops the warp loops off the post, establishes the initial tabby shed, and ties the slip not in each hank of warp. This division of labor makes the weaving of the header band a party, especially when we play musical posts by having people swap off tasks. Even with the fun and chaos, this assembly line approach makes the weaving of the header band very fast compared to every other method I've tried.

There are very few parts of the workshop that only I do: lashing the band to a stick which is in turn lashed to the beam is the only one that comes to mind right now. (Oh, and putting together the loom.)
In most other cases, I show people how to, say, chain a warp and attach a weight to it, or pick out the first twill shed, or knit the first rod's worth of heddles, or do the first weaving. But mostly I am crowdsourcing the labor for my pedagogical purpose.

So, like I say, my teaching goals may differ significantly from yours. But they reflect the hard choices I had to make given my student pool. You will get to make choices based on your student pool, not mine.

I don't know if this is set up so that she will see it, but I have a question for Carolyn Priest-Dorman. When you weave that header band do you put any kind of pattern into it, or is it as simple as keep turning all the cards the same way?