The return of the Navajo loom

With the coming of spring, my Navajo loom goes into hibernation; I suppose estivation is a better word. But it is now winter and time to dig it out. You can go back to previous posts to see where it was. The first job was to finish the diagonal stripes. This took some doing but I did it.
The stripes are done. The heddle stick has been removed. It no longer works. The shed stick is still in place. Now it is time to weave up to the top. We keep the shed stick (the white piece of round plastic) in place as long as possible. This allows us easily go left-to-right; it is all blunt needle work, but just push it through the shed. The opposite way is much harder. You have to go in front of the front warps and around the back warps. No shortcucts in a Navajo loom. In a modern loom, of course, you have cloth "beams" that allow you to weave forever. But a Navajo loom is fixed-length. We deal with it. Takes us five minutes or less left-to-right (the way I weave) and about ten minutes to go back.
You can see the loops of the needle as I go back. I have replaced the plastic shed stick by a thinner shed stick. This allows me to go a few centimeters higher. Anything to preserve at least one shed! We're getting there....
This afternoon, I replaced the thin shed stick by a steel rod. Not very Navajo, but effective. Thanks to Rachel Brown's book. We are about done. After this it's weave all the way to the top, two-by-two. Remove rod and weave under two warps, over two warps. End game for sure.

You could always leave fringes at the end. No true Dineh weaver would even think of this. I may not be Dineh, but I respect tradition. To the top we will go., cost what it may.

Placemat's progress

When we last saw the Navajo placemat, it looked something like this:
This was some time ago. I could consult my own posts, but I won't. So many windows on the screen, so much chance for confusion! In this image, I have done tapestry ovals, stripes, triangles, and more stripes. If we skip ahead a whole lot of weeks -- about three, I would say, we come to a more advanced stage:
As you can see, I have added a rhomboidal (double triangle) design in the center, more triangles, and some more stripes symmetrical with the bottom. If you look at color they are antisymetrical, but shapewise they are symmetrical. I am more or less making this up as I go; I made a sketch of what I wanted and then followed it -- up to a point. My objective was to master (1) dovetails, where horizontal colors overlap; and (2) lazy lines, where colors overlap at an angle. In the picture above, I am putting in a little tapestry oval in green in the unwoven warpage. This brings us to right now:

All the tapestry ovals are done, and I am doing the black fill above. The black will continue to the top. There are about 10cm left to go. Notice how the fill makes waves above the ovals. It will all have to be leveled out. We are now in what I call the end game phase of the weaving. The threads are converging to a point at the top, and it is very hard to make the heddle shed. In fact, it is impossible. So I have removed the heddle stick, and make the heddle shed with a batten (or baton). Time-consuming, but no alternative. The "stick shed" can still be made, by aid of a chinese chopstick which replaces the normal "stick." Soon the chopstick will go, and it will be blunt needle all the rest of the way. In and out. This is the Navajo way, and it is why their rugs cost so much. It is Labor Intensive (with capital letters).

I am very pleased with this placemat. It has lots of mistakes, but not so many as my first; I now know how to make dovetails and lazy lines. More when the mat is complete.

The return of the Navajo loom

Most of my troubles with the Navajo loom -- several posts ago -- were due to improper warping. The warp frame kept collapsing, turning from a square into a rhomboid. So it was time to do something about it, and as Darth Spader would say, behold warp frame 1.0:
Nothing very complicated. Some scrap 2x4 and four sticks. Two sticks go through holes drilled into the frame and are held by wedges; the other two sticks are screwed in. They will eventually get unscrewed. This frame is solid. I put marks at 5mm intervals so I can get the spacing correctly. Right now I am using a 5mm interval; eventually I will experiment with other spacings. So let's warp it up.
I am using thrift store yarn -- perhaps the waving gods know of its composition but I have no idea. The warp on a Navajo loom takes a lot of strain; but I couldn't break this yarn, try as I might. The warp, as I might of remarked before, is wound in a figure 8 around the horizontals. The two sticks "preserve the lease" -- keep your figure 8 in the middle of the frame. It is now time to do the warp spacers. This is a distinctive feature of Navajo weaving, and keeps the warp spacing constant. There are four twisted yarns, retwisted about the warp threads.
Now we sew the tension bars onto the warp frame bars with a big needle and some strong cord, going through the warp spacers We add double cords on each side, which are the traditional Navaho side selvedges (long edges, in plainspeak) and transfer the whole works over to the loom frame.
I have also tied the heddle stick, the crooked white stick that pulls out alternate threads to make a shed. There is no reason for it to be crooked, it's what I had on hand. We are ready to weave.
There are red and green blobs in a black background. These are supposed to be tapestry ovals, but hey, I'm learning. Unlike R.M. Meluch, who I cited elsewhere, I have no Navajo spirit weaver as a guide. I call them turtles. The sword-like object in the lower foreground is a batten (I prefer R.M.'s term baton, but as a matter of fact, "batten" is indeed derived from baton, so that's OK). You can also see a shuttle in the foreground. And a bottle of Chilean wine in the background. A great temptation when weaving, which is a constant battle with topology, gets difficult. So far I have resisted it. You can also see how the warp spacers are sewed to the tension bars.

More to come as this project evolves.