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.
Robbie–this looks lovely! Had you thought of fishing weights? Google “fishing weights” and look at the images. They all have some sort of eye on them to hook onto the line, and they come in every weight under the sun (and sea). It would be a super easy option, plus it would be a uniform look on a loom that traditionally went hand-in-hand with a fishing culture! Just a thought… Anne
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Have you thought of filling a Campells soup can with concrete with spring in middle? You could paint all the cans when complete. Mel
Hi Mel, I am planning on inserting the springs into cement in a plastic cup. The experiment went well – photos later this week!
Why not use rock like they used in the olden days? You could put them in pouches (sewn cloth/knitted/crochet/…) and hang them on the hook things you have. Love your loom BTW
Hello Brynhildur! Someday I will have perfect, beautiful stones hanging from my warp-weighted loom. For now, traveling to gather the stones would take time and money; there aren’t large stones around Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I live, and the best place to go is the shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota. The good news is that I already have volunteers to travel to Duluth for stone picking. Maybe next summer. For now, I took an afternoon to create weights, and wrote about that here. https://robbielafleur.com/2016/11/18/warp-weighted-loom-weights/