The Harrisville Rug Loom returns!

Look what happened in my new studio today! This pile of hardware

 held together a bunch of wood and metal to become this loom.

I went from here:

to here:

In a few hours.  I should mention that I had a lot of help from Emily. I have put this loom together alone, but for the life of me I don’t know how I did it. You need about 40 hands to hold all those parts together and still get in the bolts.

The process wasn’t the easiest. The first time I took this loom apart to move it from my grandparents house to my place in Velarde, NM, I took a lot of photos. Those photos still exist somewhere in a hard drive that is undoubtedly buried somewhere in the boxes of stuff not yet unpacked in Santa Fe. So today I was flying by the seat of my pants to put this baby back together. I did really well with just about everything (and sometimes I was just going by where the wood had darkened where it was exposed to the sunshine to fit pieces together) until I got to the lamm system. Countermarche looms are a little more complicated than jack looms and my memory failed me when it came to hooking up the upper and lower lamms. There are a lot of cables and this is only a 4 harness loom.

I was faced with the myriads of little parts that make up the rollers over which the cables run from the top lamms.

I just couldn’t work out exactly which way the upper lamm assembly had to go in to make the whole roller/cable thingy work. I don’t have internet access yet and didn’t have my computer anyway, so I started digging in the boxes of books scattered about the studio. I did find the loom manual finally though unfortunately it was almost entirely text-based (being from the 1980s when my grandfather bought this loom). I sorted out which cables went where, and at long last the Harrisville is back in working order.

I can’t wait to start warping it.