Hi, I'm selling some of my handspun yarns as well as handwoven tapes over on ebay. I'll be adding auctions as the week goes by.

So, I was back on ebay last week and happened to find a loom that I never thought I would find. I wasn't even trying to find it, it just was there.

Holy Crap that's a big picture!
Click for another view.

It is made of oak and needed some cleaning up and a visit to the friendly neighborhood loom fixer man. A quick and dirty refinishing with lemon oil and wax made it look a lot better. I will fix up the finish better in the Spring.

The reed that came with it is all rusty and needs cleaning or tossing. It awaits judge and jury in the basement. And the heddles--some are rusty and some are good. (They give me the heebie-jeebies to touch so I am putting off going through them.)

New loom in my room....

Have a happy Thanksgiving y'all.

Brioche stitch, what can I say about brioche stitch. It is sort of magical! I've seen other knitters rave about brioche stitch and I never got it until I started working on this:

Brioche stitch at rest.

Brioche stretched.

Well, actually, I didn't get brioche stitch and all its mysterious mysteries until about 3 inches into the knitting. It was then that I stopped to give my work a close looksee. I was so excited by how it was turning out that I showed it to an unsuspecting non-knitter sitting on the couch next to me. I knew he would be totally unmoved by brioche and its awesomness but I was not thinking clearly at that point and my excitement being so great and my knitting friends being a long plane or car ride away, I had no other choice.

"Hey. Look!" I said, "Lookit this!"

He turned his head about 7 degrees and checked out the knitting with his perpherial vision and said, "Yeah. That's cool."

"Cool?! It's freaking really cool! It's BREE-oche stitch you know....brioche is hard you know."

"Uh-huh, cool."

"Dork!"

"Dork."

So, after that, I went back to my knitting, unperturbed by the nonknitter's disinterest.

Pattern is from Melanie Falick's Weekend Knitting

I have a friend, Eric , who weaves and fixes up antique looms and generally broken looms. He also builds looms from scratch and he does beautiful work. A few weeks ago he made this fantastic tapeloom for my birthday:

Click for another view.
He even warped it up!

I love having a tapeloom. It is like having my handspindle around under my nose so that I can just spin on it a whenever I have a few minutes, and then before I know it I have yards and yards of yarn.

Right now, I am still working on learning to weave tape with this sort of loom so that I can weave good tape whenever I have a few minutes to spare. (I will hurry up with a chore to increase the spare moments too I like it so much.)

I had been weaving tape on a typical loom with the warp constantly tensioned, but with this loom, one grasps the end of the tape just woven and tension it that way. When I am not working, I can just throw the stuff I have woven into the box part of the loom. I can also carry around scissors and extra thread in there too. If there is one thing I really appreciate it is practicality joined to beauty.

I take this loom outside on the porch and weave in the sunshine and listen to people stomping through the leaves on the sidewalk. The loom lets me roam and I love that. And a person can never have too much handwoven tape!

A little weaving:

I had a time warping up the loom for this. It is about 70 threads or so. I forget. Blocked it from my memory. Somehow, I keep skipping integral steps in the warping process and end up with this tangled mess. And that makes me crazy. Cray-zee!
Anyway, I just make up this warping thing as I go and eventually end up with threads wound onto the appropriate beams and I ratchet up the tension to hide the bad warping job I did. Now, it's not like I didn't read a few books on the subject and watch a video 5 times. I just keep trying to take a shortcut somewhere.

Yesterday, though, as I was winding on to the back beam, I accidentally pulled out a main warp thread. It came right out in my hand and I actually ......um.... So, have I lost all you knitters?

I think I lost myself too!