New Heddles

I started weaving on the big Shannock yesterday and felt so good. I feel so much better weaving than knitting or crocheting. I worked up my new cartoon for the celestial piece that my heart and brain are lobbying to create next and started to weave.

I continued to feel good even though I discovered that the 10 epi sett was not going to work with my yarn. Oh, well...I just need to make some new heddles. When I bought the loom the previous artist had used 10 epi for her work and she gave me all her heddles. I also got the stuff to make heddles at other sizes. I figured before making some - why not try 10 epi and see if it would work with my yarn. Well it will work if I only want to use singles. However, since the Lynda Brothers workshop I took a couple of weeks ago I am now hooked on using at least doubles to acheive additional dimensions in my work.

So 10 epi was too small. I normally use 7 1/2 on my baby Shannock. The 7 1/2 was a bit tight when using doubles in the workshop and would have been impossible with triples so I finally decided 6 epi would be just right.

I decided to make the 6 epi heddles this evening and it turned out to be quite easy. The toughest part was the glue gun. I have little experience with guns...including glue guns. I pulled my husband aside and said 'come - - help me buy a gun'. We went to the local hardware store which had a nice selection. Picked out a mini gun in a lovely red along with some glue sticks and was ready to roll.

In the picture there is an empty heddle bar - a piece of wood about two feet long with a hole in the center. I marked them up to show 3 ends per inch. Since there are two heddle bars on my loom - each gets marked up at half the desired epi. Also, in the picture is a heddle bar holder with a heddle bar already in it and string wrapped around covering each of the 3 epi marks. The heddle bar holder ensures each loop is the same size. The next step involved glueing the strings onto the bar so they would not shift during use. The entire process should have taken perhaps ten minutes but we had to make another trip to the hardware store to pick up some glue sticks that would fit the glue gun. The hardware was closed - but the second store had what we needed. Tough to use a gun when the bullets are too big.

I turned out to be a quick learner with the glue gun...perhaps next I'll try a 45. From this picture you can see that the two new 6 epi heddle bars have loops of different materials. The instructions said to use 'string'. I looked around to see what I had in my stash - there was nothing called 'string'. Decided I would try two different things to see how they would work. One is sugar & cream - - the other is 3-2 pearl cotton. Seems to me that they should work.

Tomorrow I will install and try them out. Should be another wonderful day...weaving.