I started out my adventures in sprang with an old picture frame that I found in an op shop. but a few weeks ago it finally broke so much that it couldn't be saved by duct tape any longer. The whole frame got wobbly in the diagonal direction which made it quite hard to work with. I have thought about a more "historical" frame for a while, one that I would be able to bring to a medieval market and it wouldn't look too out of place. I still wanted a frame that was easy to carry and move around.
In the end I decided to follow this tutorial I found on youtube.
I kept overthinking what kind of sticks I would use, until I took a stroll to the park and realised there are so many sticks and branches still on the ground after the severe winter storm we had back in January.
I picked up two loose branches and carried them home.
Here are my materials - a saw, two long sticks and some cotton string. The old frame that I used is also in pieces on the table so that I could use the pieces as general measuring devices.
I first laid out the size of it to see if it felt good, and it dig. It's definitely taller than my old frame so it will allow me to make longer sprang pieces.
And here is the finished loom.
I decided to try the loom and to finally get my head and hands around what Carol James calles the double grid stitch. It's supposed to be an easy stitch, basically on every second row you pick up double threads, but I had alwasy gotten a lot of loose threads and what I call "church windows", where the treads created little frames where they crossed each other. Now I decided to finally understand what I did wrong, work it out, and also to make a test piece to see if I could be better at calculating the final size.
I made a warp of 124 loops (248 threads) that were 43 cm long. I then followed the instructions of Sally Pointer on how to make the grid, her video can be found here. By working slowly, and having to untangle everything after around 10 rows and starting over, I realised two things. On the rows where I work single threads it's easier if I consider the four threads that have ended up together as threads to be braided together rather than just counting 1 up, 1 down. When I worked them four at a time I could clearly see if they twisted or if I got out of sync. I also used saving sticks for all four rows, the double grid is a set of 4 rows creating the pattern. The sticks made it a lot easier to "see" how the threads were moving, and I made sure to mark the nr 1 row, that is the red thread on the stick in the image. A lot of my problems with the double grid, that I realised this time, come from threads twisting out of order, and that I couldn't remember which row in the four row pattern I was on. Marking that first row made it so much easier. The lower pieces of fabric are extra lifelines that I put on every fourth row to make sure I wouldn't have to go back too far if I realised a mistake that was more than 4 rows away, that happened the first time.
The loom worked really well, both with warping up and being easily movable, and it was a lot sturdier than my old frame. I am only thinking about replacing my metal knitting needles for the top and bottom, but we will see when I do that.
