A New Lease on Life
One of the things that I love about traveling to teach workshops is seeing how other weavers around the country have set up their studios and made adaptations to their looms and the way that they warp them. I’ve learned so many useful things that I’ve incorporated into my own studio and practices that I might not have come across otherwise. I thought that I would share with you something that I’ve come up with for myself that I feel makes my weaving life easier and that you might be interested in trying too.
I am a pretty confirmed back-to-front warper and only warp from the front if there is a particularly compelling reason to for a particular project. I especially like it that once my warp is beamed onto the back and I sit down at the front to thread my heddles I have something really solid that I am pulling against. But it always bothered me that every time I set up a new warp I had to rig up a system for holding the lease sticks in place, or if I kept cords tied onto my loom to hold the lease sticks they kind of bobbed around in space, making for a moving target. It seemed to me that there should be some kind of permanent setup on a loom that would hold the sticks in place securely so that they would never need to be tied up again.
About twenty years ago I had an idea and asked a woodworker friend of mine if he could make it for me. I no longer have the loom that this was designed and built for, but I liked it so much that when I moved on from that loom to a new Louet Megado, I removed the mechanism from my old loom and had it adapted to my new one.
On each side of the loom behind the shafts are wooden supports with a pair of attached pegs that are about three inches high. I had two pairs of lease sticks made that have holes aligning with these pegs that span the full width of the loom. When I am working with a warp that is all wound and beamed together, the lease sticks pass through the cross in the warp and then drop down onto the pegs at the side of the loom.
Once the lease sticks are in place on the pegs nothing will cause them to come off until you are finished threading your heddles and are ready to lift them off of the pegs, so the lease sticks never need to be be tied and then untied.
I had a pair of blocks made that fit on top of the pair of pegs on either side of the loom. They are about an inch and a half high and have holes that pass all the way through the blocks -
If I am working with a doubleweave warp that requires that the two warps be wound separately or beamed separately, then these blocks drop down onto the pegs above the first pair of lease sticks -
And then the second pair of lease sticks passes through the cross on the second warp and drops down onto the pegs above the wooden blocks.
Voilà! You have a double-decker lease stick system that lives in place on the loom when you need it, never has to be tied up, and holds the warp or warps securely and at the right height for threading the heddles from the front of the loom.
My partner, Nelson, recently made a couple new pairs of lease sticks, drilled holes and added pegs to the side posts of my Gilmore floor loom so that I can use the same system when I am using that loom -
The blocks that I use on my Louet loom can also be moved over to my
Gilmore loom in case I need a second warp separately wound and weighted when working on that loom -
In my last blog post, Going Totally Tubular, I wrote about weaving a tubular warp in the Lunatic Fringe Tubular Spectrum. I wound the two warps separately and used my double-decker lease stick system on my Louet Megado loom. It was easy to see the two crosses and thread back and forth between the two sets of lease sticks alternating warp ends from the two crosses.
A system like this would be fairly easy to adapt to just about any type of loom and works great not just for doubleweave, but for supplementary warps, and any warp that requires different warp sections to be wound or tensioned separately.
For a task that has to be performed with each and every warp that you put on a loom it is well worth the initial investment of time and materials. And it just feels good to drop those lease sticks onto the pegs, knowing that your cross is secure and that your warp won’t be moving around on you while you are threading your heddles. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something like that as a standard feature in loom design…?