After more than a year, I put up my beautiful warp-weighted loom.
Now for the weights. A gathering of Weavers Guild board members at my house last night served as an interested focus group with a range of ideas.
I showed them one possibility, a set of trampoline weights discarded by my neighbor. Each one, with a handy hook, weighs 6.6 ounces. A good warp-weighted loom weight is half a kilo, or 1.1 pounds.
So today I experimented by filling a couple of them with cement, a messy job done on the deck (next to the deck squirrel with light-up eyes) on a STUNNING warm day.
Unfortunately, the cement-filled weight is still only a little over 9 ounces. Hmmm… Someone last night suggested casting the weight within a mold, using the weight in the center. And since it was a creative group, there were additional ideas — you could paint them! Embed things! Make a mosaic!
Or, I could just hang two of the cement-filled weights together. That would make the total weight length about 12 inches (if I bend the hooks of the adjoining weights). I’ll have to count my weights to see if I have enough if each weight requires two springs.
Another fun idea mentioned last night was dipping the completed weights in the colored plastic/epoxy that is used on tool handles.
I’ll keep working on this, because now that many friends have seen the loom up, they will expect results.