My Favorite Loom...

Not normally a fickle human, I laugh when someone asks me which loom is my favorite. 

At 56" wide and my first Macomber (built 1976), The Beast holds a very special place in my heart. He does everything each of the other three looms does and more. In my mind, if I had to keep just one, it would be him. 

Here is The Beast back before we moved the studio upstairs:

At the moment, he has a ten yard warp for some gorgeous Bohemian tea towels for a lovely bride-to-be. Her wedding is not until the first of the year, so these have been languishing a bit. 

Lil' Miss is 32" wide and was the second Macomber acquisition. She is dated 1968. She has the best shed of any of them, although I have not been able to figure out why. They are all set up the same way, and I have adjusted and tinkered with each of them to determine how to improve the shed on the others. It remains a mystery. Lil' Miss is fun and easy to use. I save her for what I consider to be long warps of twenty or more yards. She is a little workhorse. 

This is a shot of her when I only had two floor looms and both fit in a front room downstairs. 

She is sporting a twenty-five-plus-yard warp for more modern type tea towels for two different brides-to-be.

I have some surprises in mind for these with color and pattern...

Meg is the sweet, petite 24" loom who is my designated tea towel loom. She is the most mature and was built in 1960 for a textile company in New York City. She may be the most traveled, as I bought her from a lady in Turlock, California and drove her back to Texas a couple of years ago. On her, I alternate between point twill and rose path drafts to maximize her width because I prefer generously sized towels. My standard tea towels are woven 24" wide and 36" long before washing and hemming. She is the easiest of all to weave. On her, I am the most efficient weaver when using her with yard-long towels falling off every 20 to 30 minutes. While she is limited in the type of projects, due to her size, I anticipate she will be the one I use the most as I age. She is so easy on the joints.

Meg is a lot darker than the other looms, even though they are all made from maple. Back when she was built, Macomber offered wood stain. She was stained walnut. However, when I bought her, the heel rest was missing. There is a stark contrast between the new one and the rest of her. 

She has a fun hand dyed warp on her. 

The newest to me and youngest of my fleet is the 40" Evangeline I picked up in Louisiana last fall. She was produced in 1980. While the other three all have a plain beam and a sectional beam, this one came with a sectional beam only. As that is how I prefer to beam a warp, I saw no need to add a second plain beam to her, although, it is certainly an option. When this loom crossed my screen, I knew I did not "need" another one; however, it was in a reasonable driving distance, only a couple of hours from where my mother lives in Louisiana. Although, my mother lives almost six hours from me. As she was well priced and getting her provided a good excuse to drive over and visit with my mom, it was a no brainer. 

Here is a bare bones Evangeline, stripped down for refurbishing. 

To my surprise, Evangeline has filled a nice niche in my stable. 

Prior to her arrival, any project over 32" was reserved for The Beast, including sarong fabric, bath towels, baby wraps, blankets, throws, etc. 

As all four looms are now 8-shaft and I refuse to move heddles, tea towels using a 4-shaft design were also relegated to The Beast because on the 24" and 32" looms, the unused heddles on shafts five through eight crowded the warp. 

This meant, I often had a backlog of projects waiting to go on him, more so than on any other loom.

Well, Evangeline can handle any of the tea towel projects, either four or eight shaft, I can throw at her, as well as baby wraps, sarongs, and some bath towels (depending on the draft). 

This is welcoming news, as the studio is bursting now with all four looms and a plethora of weaving accessories filling it to the brim. 

I dislike clutter. 

Dust does not seem to bother me, but the chaos that represents clutter manifests itself as anxiety.

When I pulled this project from Evangeline in mid-February, I knew she would be decommissioned for a bit as we upgraded and cleaned her up. 

When we did the same to Meg last year, there was still plenty of room to move around the studio, and my sense of calm and well-being was not disrupted as she lay in pieces.

Unfortunately, with less space to breathe, much less move around, I discovered with Evangeline in disarray, I did not want to be in the studio at all, even when I tried to ignore the mess and weave on any of the other looms.

Thus, there was a halt in weaving for a couple of months.

The silver lining to the lapse in weaving was I managed to completely draft the second novel (152,940 words) in the Bandera series, as well as write about 60,000 words of the third and final one. 

Yeah, I embraced the muse and ran with her for over two solid months. 

Most days, I worked at the day job from 6:30 am to 3:00 pm, then took a brief break before sitting down to write from 4:00 pm until 10:00 or 11:00 pm during the week. My weekends found me writing from 5:30 am until, at least, 11:00 pm. There were a few nights where I woke before one in the morning and could not return to sleep. So, I got up and wrote until dawn, slept for an hour or two, then got up and hit it again. 

While I am not quite to the halfway point in the third one, it is going well, but I needed a break. 

When I asked the sweet husband to help me get Evangeline back together, he not only added the two new harnesses to her, but he removed all of the rusted parts and cleaned them for me, including all the pins on the sectional beam. 

He did a fantastic job!

In fact, a sweet friend reminded me on Monday how lucky I am to have such a loving and supportive husband. 

I truly am. 

I know he would much rather have been doing other things, but he took the time and made the effort to clean up those loom parts and put everything back together to keep me happy. 

It worked!

With Evangeline back together and the studio all nice and tidy again (notice, I did not say clean... it needs a thorough dusting), I was able to joyfully sit down and knock out a ten-yard warp on Meg before immediately dressing her for the next one. 

The only thing left to do on Evangeline was to restring her sectional beam. 

To do so, I set up a jig with a raddle. 

According to the instructions supplied by Macomber when I ordered the restringing kit, the strings needed to be equidistant from the beam and a certain length. 

They supplied the U-shaped staples to secure the waxed string, but the kiln-dried maple is so hard. I drilled small starter holes to make it easier. 

As soon as this was done, I immediately beamed a six-yard warp for Huck towels using 10/2 mercerized cotton. 

The draft is a variation of #678 "Houndstooth" Huck from the Strickler book. The reason I say "variation" is because I fiddled with it a bit so I would be able to carry the different color weft threads up the side of the fabric, rather than cutting the threads every time I changed shuttles. 

As an aside, when I opened up Amazon for the link for this book, it showed I last purchased it on December 25, 2014, which means it was a Christmas gift to myself. 

Someone in the Strickler in Color group on Facebook posted photos of her towels using this draft last year, and I immediately added it to the queue on May 20, 2020. I even ordered the thread for it. 

I am delighted to have finally gotten around to weaving it, although I have several sets of bridal shower gifts to weave before I can fully commit to moving these off the loom. 

However, all four looms are dressed and sporting fantastic warps!

What pleases me the most about these looms is being able to have several different projects going at one time. Some require more concentration when weaving than others, and it is nice to be able to match a project to my mood and mental bandwidth without having to force myself to work on something I may not have to proper disposition to address at that moment. 

Options are a good thing.

Lastly, the answer to the question of which loom is my favorite: It happens to be whichever Macomber I am weaving on at the moment!