TLM

TLM. The Loom Monkey. Every home should have one. It does help if you have the body and flexibilty of a praying mantis and the helpful nature of Polyanna. What on earth will I do when he disappears off to uni in the autumn? Not only did he help me dismantle the beast, from where it had been residing since 1979, and bring it back to be adopted by me, but he had a determination that we would have it re-assembled today. That determination may well have sprung from a fear that we would forget anything we thought we ever knew about how it was all put together.

 

So, with the aid of my labels, that had things like “breast beam left” written on them and TLM’s labels that sported such legends as “arrow 10” (sorry haven’t got time to work out out to make the blog print special characters) and photos taken with my digital camera and TLM’s phone, we had what we thought was a fairly good idea of what went where.

 

We managed the pedals and lamms. TLM eventually sussed the brake, wind-on mechanism, pawls, springs and all. But when we got to the shafts and heddles (and possibly the healds, if we could actually work out which bit they were) we couldn’t decide whether or not we had them upside down, inside out, back to front or all of the above.

 

I put out a desperate plea to my “grown-up” virtual weaving friends but they were obviously all tied up in their warps and like Superman II, who was on TV this afternoon, they have given up helping newbie weavers in distress to be with the girl loom of their dreams.

 

Watch this space, or should that be “watch this shed”?