Carole Wycliffe shares her experiences working on the 100" loom.

Carole Wycliffe shares her experiences working on the 100" loom.

July 19, 2021

© Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners

Shaelagh Cull (Jung-Ah Kim recording)

Carole Wycliffe

Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning

The 100 inch loom was not in very good shape. There were a lot of issues with it. We'd be weaving away and the break would go off and everything would go slack. And anytime when you're weaving, if there's an issue like that, it makes the weaving take a lot longer, because then you have to get up and deal with the loom. So that happened quite a bit. Threads were breaking because the tension was so uneven, it had a lot of things that needed fixing. And since then, Jackie Sylvester had contacts with the Ottawa Guild, and they also had 100 inch loom of the same kind, and they were upgrading their loom and so they had parts that they didn't need anymore. So Jackie got ahold of them and her, with the help of her husband, they did a lot of repairs on the loom. And so when, after she had it all fixed up, she wanted to do a small wool blanket project. And I guess I would just happened to be in the studio at the time, and she asked me if I'd be interested in being in this small group, we were just going to do lap blankets. So they weren't the whole 100 inches, they were only 60 inches, I think. So there were a few of us in that group that got together, and we did lap blankets. So that was the first time that I used wool on the 100 inch loom, and that, again, was an interesting project. And then from there, we then did a big warp of full 100 inch wool blankets. There were 10 people in that group, so it was a huge group, we put 20 blankets on the loom. So that was fun. I enjoyed that too, I did two blankets there. It's very different than putting a warp on another kind of loom, it has a sectional beam at the back and so when you put the warp on, they have a rack with spools on it depending on how many threads per inch that you're going to do and you have to wind on one inch at a time. So there could be maybe 24 spools, and they all go on one inch, and you attach them and you have to physically wind them on for each inch, hoping that they don't, you know, get twisted and things like that. And you also have to keep track of how many yards or meters that you're putting on for each inch, so that they're all exactly the same. We have a counting box, each thread has to go through the counter. And then it goes on to the back beam, they all get attached together, they get attached to the back beam and then we roll and then we count the number of times. We also have a counter and the counting clocks, but we also count out loud too, just to make sure we get enough on. And then what happens is sometimes somebody will come to the door and start chatting and we'll forget where we are, or we'll have a broken thread, or we'll have a knot to go through. Because all those things have to be dealt with. And now we're doing the catalogne project, that's been interesting to in a different way. Just mainly because the the prep that you have to do of cutting all the fabric which is only half an inch wide was painful. Not my favorite experience. But it was fun and I did enjoy it.