The flea market find...AFTER!
Batten Handtree, Niddy-Noddy, Umbrella Swift, Squirrel Cage, Butterfly skein, Reeds & combs, Rya, Dobby, Leno, Huck, warp & weft, dents & stretchers & beaters. These curious terms & phrases comprise the language, techniques & tools of my people-dem--weirdo weavers. And all constituted the cutting edge of tech in the era they were coined. Complicated & odd lingo, likely deliberately made odder by people who learned it more from telling than from reading, like a convoluted & protracted secret handshake to a long ago lodge member. 
Sad little before
Yes, I'm from West Virginia. Yes, I grew up in an area that honored another newly (at the time) coined phrase--'Fine Craft.' Yes, it was the 70's, & the 80's.
Weaving still made me a weirdo. I wasn't the weirdest of the weaving weirdos, as I discovered in My weaving classes at Marshall University. That slot was reserved for the weaver who had grown up as the daughter of a circus elephant act. Her projects included weaving a sweater from...wait for it...Airdale hair saved when a friend's dog got his summer trim & which my friend hand spun into bulky yarn. Note: If at all possible, be as far from a dog-hair spinner as you can. Two issues here--airborne Airdale particles cause a wicked cough, & there is NOTHING redeeming about the scent of a wet Airdale sweater if said spinner gets caught in a shower. For her graduate project, our daughter of the elephant trainers chose to cut the candy pill strips--those chalkily delicious pastel sugar blobs adhered to what appeared to be adding machine tape--into long, narrow bands & weave them into...wait once more...EDIBLE UNDERWEAR.
So not the weirdest of the weirdos was I. Not by a long shot.
The studio...where the older floor loom was supposed to live.
I wanted to be a potter way before Demi & Patrick made that cool ('Ghosts'), but visions of muddy 'slip' water trailed through the house, coupled with amorphous blob miscreations that they'd have to display in their starkly modern home in the name of supporting my pursuits led my parents to steer me toward weaving over pottery. I had entered & won a couple of competitions with classic 70's, über textured weavings on driftwood. They won, no doubt because they were judged to be the grooviest. So I begged & wheedled until my parents succumbed & gave me a huge Leclerc (Canadian) table loom for my twelfth birthday. It was so big that it did not in fact, fit on a table & my Dad had to make legs for it.
From the day I turned twelve to July of 2015, every apartment or house I considered had to have a prominent & perfect space for my loom. Several times that involved a choice between a small dining table & the loom, & we ended up eating in the kitchen for the duration. I stuck with the Leclerc from 1974-1992 when we moved to this island & I decided that such a big life change warranted a change to a larger, better loom--a 48" wide, 8-harness Harrisville floor loom (see my post from 7/2/15 for more about that, plus pics). After 23 years of planning for, factoring in, & generally walking around that beast, in late June of last year I carefully disassembled & stowed the parts of my loom in the back of my closets. The pieces are still in there, beackoning me to do as I imagined & convert it into an upright tapestry loom that would take up much less floor space.
A 23-24 year old tapestry that was displayed in Government House at a STX Environmental Ass'n show, the first year I lived here
And then last Saturday my friend Phillip sent me a pic of a misbegotten table loom which, despite a good pedigree (Schacht is a respected name in my geekdom) had ended up a jumbled & unloved mess on the concrete floor of the Animal Shelter Flea Market. A couple of close up shots & I knew about how much coin & manual labor would be required to bring it back to life, so I gave Phillip a realistic counter offer to the posted price & the arguments to support the reduction, & within a few hours he delivered my project to my porch work table. A couple of days of disassembly, wire brushing/WD 40-ing stubborn rust, applying paraffin to chafing & seized parts , replacement of the rusted-beyond-recovery reed with a bamboo slatted one & cleaning & conditioning the wood with a homemade mix of 1 part white vinegar to 3 parts olive oil (Mu licked the loom & says it just needs salt), I reassembled it into what should be a working loom.
I made an inviting space for it in a sunny studio corner (where the original floor loom was destined before I realized it didn't fit through the studio door & it ended up idling in my living room for 7 years, eventually demanding $2k+ in metal parts replacement to be functional). In the recent upheaval, sorting & cleaning of my studio I even unearthed a bunch of fine cotton crochet thread I bought at a fabric store close out some time ago. Eventually it will be the first warp on this loom, but weavers know any project is 70% winding the warp & dressing the loom, 20% actual weaving, all preceded by 10% plotting/dreaming/scheming on graph paper.
I found a pad of graph paper just before I finished the studio rehab. There is definitely a reason the words 'dream' & 'weaver' hang out together.
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