Things of interest

  • www.worldofwool.co.uk

Thursday 13 May 2010

Meet Gytha




Gytha is my loom. She waas made for me by a viking reenactor friend out of pine bought from a local timber merchant. Made to be a reasonable height for me to work on comfortably and compact enough to transport to events the uprights are 6' as is the cloth beam.


The heddle rod is a donated spindle tree trunk and the forks are two tree branches, of uncertain variety, collected in a local forest and thoroughly dried out.

The weights are sea pebbles each weighing approximately 22 ounces collected from beaches along the North Wales coast. Each weight is contained in its own flax (hand spun of course) string bag made using detached button whole stich worked over the weight to get a perfect fit.

There are also eight clay dohnut weights from a group experiment which entailed modelling the weights and baking them in a simple earth kiln in my back garden. Since we started with 24 I suppose we were lucky to end up with eight that were useable! These weights are much lighter than the stome ones but I do somethimes use them in the middle of the weaving just for effect and the purpose of demonstration.

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