Apparently, in spite of good intentions, blogging will occur only once every three months. I'm really going to have to work on that.
I recently had to research and write a 5,000 word essay on a topic for my thesis that I had not really looked at: the historiography (what has been said in the past and why they thought that) of the warp weighted loom. It was really interesting, but also a lot of pressure, because it was a backup plan to getting my PhD. My panel didn't go very well, but they gave me another six weeks to do the new essay to see if I could be up to snuff. I rather suspect the problem there is the differences in expectations between the American and the British systems. We haven't been communicating well on the topic, because they didn't think to tell me (it's the way it has always been done) and I didn't know to ask (here are my expectations, does that match with yours). Anyway, the essay is written and in, but we are still waiting for one of the advisers to weigh in with her opinion.
So...as part of the research, I was reading through Marta Hoffmann's book on the warp weighted loom, which is currently the only text that is more than a couple of pages long. In one of her chapters, she was writing about the looms found in Norwegian museums, and discovered that most of them were sold by a man named Eilert Sundt, an antiquities dealer. He would go to the farmhouses around the areas where the looms had been used by somebody's grandmother, buy them and then sell them to museums as antiques. Most of the looms at the time were around a hundred years old, and nobody knew how to use them. Also they had been taken apart and piled in the attic or barn for storage, so the set up was unknown though the reconstruction of the loom itself is not difficult. None of them had a warp on them either, so neither the warping style of the looms nor the fabrics they had been used for were known.
Sundt came up with a solution to make the looms more salable. Hoffmann reports that he had a local floor loom weaver weave up a foot or so of a textile that seemed likely, then moved it from a floor loom to the warp weighted loom. This creates the problem of not only are the pieces not traditional or possibly even typical fabrics, the set up everyone is looking to for warping the looms is back engineered from floor loom techniques.
Personally, I don't really have a problem with this. You have to start somewhere. But it bothers me that modern weavers are not aware of this little difficulty. Also, my prickly adviser got on my case for suggesting the single line of loom weights solution is a back engineered solution from a floor loom weaver's perspective. That's fair enough. But so are the other solutions, so where is mine wrong where others weren't? I'm not trying to suggest that mine is the only way to do things. I figure weaving is like any other craft. People will find ways to do the work dependent on culture, desired outcome, physiology, and experimentation.
Anyway, its something to think about.
