Of all my looms, the one I most urgently need to free up is the Katie Loom. I’d put a six metre warp on there for Kay’s class, intending to sample then weave eight napkins. Well, best laid plans and all that. I wound up doing a metre and a half of sampling and a half metre table runner, so I had four metres of warp left to weave.

I was intending to weave six napkins using the six summer and winter designs I’d come up with, but I had to put it aside while I chased a work deadline. As soon I was free, I printed off those designs and surveyed what I had, and decided three things: I should do something quicker than summer and winter, something all white (so the napkins can be bleached to get inevitable food stains out), and something that made a lighter fabric than the runner.

Lace made sense. I’ve done huck already, Swedish looks a bit complicated, Atwater-Bronson appeals but a Spot Bronson threading looked not too dissimilar to summer and winter. At least, it was made up of blocks of four threads and that might make rethreading the loom simpler. (It didn’t, but it was worth trying.)

I found a project in an old Interweave that, if I only did two rounds of the repeated bit of the pattern, used almost exactly the same number of warp threads I had. I just needed to add a few more, and since I already had eight supplemental threads added to the left side, they could just join those.

Rethreading went fairly well. The biggest hitch was that I ran out of heddles for shaft one and had to make a whole lot of string heddles – and I hate making large numbers of string heddles. I had some issues getting the supplemental threads weighted enough to match the tension of the rest, and there were some miss-threadings, but eventually I was able to get weaving.

I like it, and I think it’ll go fast.

In the meantime, this arrived:

My teaching/photography loom. It seems weird buying another of the same loom, but when I considered what I want to use it for, it made the most sense. I want to get the napkins done and maybe the honeycomb scarf finished before I start anything new, but at least I have the loom I need now.