BTW...

I no longer have 30 clay weights as Tristan found them and thought they made a most marvelous crash when they hit the concrete. He had broke two and was on number three by the time I was able to stop him.

-But that is all ok because I still need to make more anyway...

So...I know it's been a while.

Between Christmas, Gulf Wars prep, and event stewarding, my loom got bumped to the back burner. Hopefully in the next month or so I will be warping it! I have read, and read, and read...I get the concept - once I was able to visualize in my head the way that it's suppose to work - and life has slowed as much as it will - I'm itching to get started.

The first thing I'm going to do is a test warp. I'm going to use commercial thread and I'm just going to tie on the warp and not card weave it into a band. Since the test warp is simply to get the mechanics of the loom down I see no need to make it any harder than it needs to be. I will probably end up with something big enough that I can make something for my son :)

I now have about 30 clay weights!

(Sword beaters)

I should have all the weights finished this week. I'll post a pictures.

The next things that I need to make are a pin beater and a sword beater. The pin beater is kind of like a tooth pick for the loom. It looks like one too. The sword beater looks like a sword and is used to beat the weft up. The pin beater will fit in my hand and the sword beater will end up sword size.

The pictures that I have included are made of bone because like the looms - most things that were made of wood have decomposed. Luckily we have some that were made of bone so we know what they looked like.

(Pin Beater)

Here are two example of loom weights of baked clay and steatite from the National Museum of Scotland.

The novelty wears off...

When I decided to make 50 clay donuts - I don't think my brain really grasped the idea of 50 clay donuts. After the first 8-10 donuts, the novelty wears off. Trust me on this one :)
The weights seem to lose a uniform amount of weight from air drying. I start will a 8oz donut and end with a 5oz donut. This seems like a reasonable weight to work with. After working with the clay a bit, 1lb weights would have been too heavy. These at just shy of a 1/4 lb seem much more the thing, especially for the thread counts that I would like to eventually aim to get.

Will they explode?

In passing I asked my co-worker, who happens to be the art teacher where I work, what she thought of my plan to fire my weights and...she thought that they might explode. I'm sure I sounded most stunned and a little dense when I answered "you mean, like, poof, kaboom?"
I sure hope that isn't what will happen :)

Not a potter...really

The school year is finally off and running... so I was able to get working on my loom weights. Research tells me that loom weights were made in a variety of ways from a variety of different materials. Everything from clay to soap stone. A large majority of weights were made of clay, so that's what I have decided to use for my own. I am going to make 50 8oz weights...or so. The process of firing the weights will decrease their weight, but they are all going to start out at roughly 8oz. I based this amount on various recovered period weights and the weights being used by weavers today. The firing process should be interesting since I'll be doing it in my backyard, but for now, I have decided to see how much weight is lost through air drying.

This is a photo of the twenty-five pound block of clay that has a similar texture to clay found in the British Isles.

I used a cord and started cutting up the big block into lots of little blocks.

The lone block below weighs 9oz and is serving as my test weight.

I formed the clay block into a donut shape. There were many different shapes, from donuts to pyramids to triangles, but the donut shape is pretty common for loom weights and is easy for me to form. The one triangle weight I saw was a pretty smart idea really. If the hole in one corner broke, the weaver could just use another corner. This was not a common weight type though, so I'm going to stick with my donuts

In larger communities, there is speculation that potters probably made the weights and exchanged them with the weavers, but in smaller communities the weavers likely made their own weights.

So now I will wait and see how much is lost in the drying process. This should give me a good idea of how much will be lost in the firing process. I'll need to make 49 more donuts in the next few days...

I am focusing on making functional weights and not stressing about exactly copying extant examples.