Look what happened in my new studio today! This pile of hardware
held together a bunch of wood and metal to become this loom.
I went from here:
to here:
In a few hours. I
should mention that I had a lot of help from Emily. I have put this loom
together alone, but for the life of me I don’t know how I did it. You need
about 40 hands to hold all those parts together and still get in the bolts.
The process wasn’t the easiest. The first time I took this
loom apart to move it from my grandparents house to my place in Velarde, NM, I
took a lot of photos. Those photos still exist somewhere in a hard drive that
is undoubtedly buried somewhere in the boxes of stuff not yet unpacked in Santa
Fe. So today I was flying by the seat of my pants to put this baby back
together. I did really well with just about everything (and sometimes I was
just going by where the wood had darkened where it was exposed to the sunshine
to fit pieces together) until I got to the lamm system. Countermarche looms are
a little more complicated than jack looms and my memory failed me when it came
to hooking up the upper and lower lamms. There are a lot of cables and this is
only a 4 harness loom.
I was faced with the myriads of little parts that make up
the rollers over which the cables run from the top lamms.
I just couldn’t work out exactly which way the upper lamm assembly
had to go in to make the whole roller/cable thingy work. I don’t have internet
access yet and didn’t have my computer anyway, so I started digging in the
boxes of books scattered about the studio. I did find the loom manual finally
though unfortunately it was almost entirely text-based (being from the 1980s when my grandfather bought this loom). I sorted out which
cables went where, and at long last the Harrisville is back in working order.
I can’t wait to start warping it.