So… I’ve successfully demonstrated proof of concept with my Inkle Loom efforts. On Friday, I had wood as raw materials, screws, dowels, and bolts. Monday, I put those parts together with some glue, some sweat, and some hard labor. Today, I have ribbon produced with the Inkle Loom that I built with those parts.
It’s not pretty. But I’ve produced about two feet of ribbon, and I have another couple of feet to go on this sized loom. Wow. What an undertaking this was.
And yet, to go in three days from no idea how to build a loom (well, I’ve cheated — I’ve built a loom before), to actually producing cloth or ribbon… That’s not bad, really.
It’s soft, and made of pearl cotton. I’m looking forward to producing some bands of really nice designs for the clothing that I’m making. Once I get a little better at the work, of course, and have a better sense of what the heck I’m doing.
I’ve learned a few things from this process. First of all, getting the heddles to sit right on the line is mission-critical. This work today would have been a lot easier if someone had shown me what to do, as opposed to me figuring it out for myself.
I’m not sure that any of this would have made sense without three or four YouTube videos, and even then it was pretty touch and go.
All the same — ribbon. I’ve built a tape loom, and while it looks nothing like the bird perched on the shoulder that I wrote about in the Orien fragments, it’s still considerably more exciting to get to this point than I would have imagined.
Go me.
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Looks like a poplar item.
I’d love to see the return of trim to clothing, but I think that runs against the grain of modernist society.
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Go YOU! :)))))