Kim uses top quality, sturdy card in her framing practice, and she cut the looms to the 6 inch by 9 inch size using this awesome material. Most of her scrap is double layered. My understanding is that custom framing has a lot of art involved. The needlework that Kim specializes in framing, requires careful and very thoughtful matching with particular layers of colour and texture in order to enhance the needlework. Mats are layered using a special acid free double sided tape.
I used contact cement to double layer mine, and happily avoided the card distortion completely. The small size of the cards made joining the layers really a pleasure. The nature of contact cement usage can make the moment of attachment very exciting as you have one chance to get it right.
The risers were cut from foam and cardboard sandwiches into 1by 6 inch strips.
The borders or margins of the cards are marked in pencil, 3/4 of and inch on the long side, 1/2 inch on the top and bottom.
Ordinary scissors or wire snips are no match for the mat board. Byron kindly notched the top and bottom (kitty corner) with a fine hack saw.
Due to the thickness of the cotton warp I changed the sett to 6 epi, marking the inches on the back of the card for clarity when warping/threading. Another coffee/weaving meeting with Kim and Meagan confirmed the design changes as a great improvement.
I clipped 2 bamboo skewers for each loom into 7 inch lengths and wove them alternately through the warp to help keep order while weaving.
On a floor loom these are called lease sticks. The sticks sit at the top of the loom, remaining in the warp during weaving.
Byron fashioned colourful "weaving needles". He drilled a stack of 6 at a time, discarding the top and bottom of the pile because the entry and exit of the drill bit caused them to be rough. I understand this is common practice when drilling a stack. The top and bottom sticks were pretty ragged after drilling so it makes perfect sense to protect the inner sticks.
White glue worked well to complete the looms. Both the mat board and the foam sandwiches are made of very high quality paper, and over such a small surface area resisted distortion. However it is important to bond the risers slowly, over about a 20 minute time period.
Specifically:
- put a ribbon of glue on the back of the riser
- wait 10 minutes
- place the strips on the mat board just covering the quarter inch mark
- wait another 10 minutes
- clamp the risers in place. I used plastic ruler and binder clip to broaden the pressure
- lay on a flat surface to dry for 24 hours
- I was able to do 3 at a time. (because I have 6 rulers and 6 clips)
on to the next batch...
Loom complete and ready to weave. More detail on actually warping coming in part 5
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