The West Surrey Guild of Spinners, Weavers and Dyers

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The Guild's Warp-weighted Loom

How the Loom Works

The parts of the loom can be seen on the photographs of the loom at the Surrey Heath Archaeology Centre, Bagshot.

The loom at Surrey Heath Archaeology Centre, Bagshot.  National Archaeology Week, July 2007	Side view of the Bagshot loom, showing how the heddles were made with a continuous length of yarn.

The loom is almost upright, with a beam at the top, and weaving progresses from the beam downwards.  The beam is supported by a pair of sloping posts, which lean against a wall.  The warp is attached to the beam and the cloth is wound on to the beam when not enough space is left to weave.  The posts are joined low down by a horizontal shed rod.

For plain or tabby weave – over and under one in both directions – every other warp thread hangs down vertically from the beam. The alternate warp threads hang forwards, over the shed rod.  Each half of the warp is divided into bunches to which loom weights are tied, to hold the threads under tension.

This makes a space – known as a shed – to pass the weft through.  As it is created by the structure of the loom, it is known as the natural shed.  Two sheds are needed for plain weave. The second, the counter-shed, is made by pulling the back warp threads forwards through the front ones. This is done with the heddle rod, to which each back warp thread is attached by a loop known as a heddle.

The side view of the Bagshot loom shows how the heddles have been made around a gauge stick, which was about to be removed.

While the counter-shed is open, the heddle rod rests in a pair of forked or notched brackets which project from the posts. When it is taken out of these supports, the weights swing back and it rests against the posts.

In order to keep the warp threads evenly spaced out, a spacing chain is crocheted across each layer of warp threads, just above the loom weights.

To weave, the two sheds are opened alternately. With each row of weaving, the weft is passed through the open shed and roughly positioned with the fingers or a comb or other tool. The shed is changed and the weft is beaten upwards with the sword beater. The next row of weft is passed through and these steps are repeated.

Progress

2004

In 2004 members of the Guild took part in an Archaeology and History Day at the Rural Life Centre, Tilford, an open-air museum near Farnham. The event was part of the Surrey Archaeological Society's 150th anniversary programme. It featured displays by local history societies and special interest groups, a 'surgery' held by the county Finds Liaison Officer to advise people on objects they had found, demonstrations of Stone Age skills and more recent crafts, artefacts and machinery. Members of the West Surrey Guild agreed to give demonstrations of spinning, weaving and indigo dyeing. For this occasion, we clearly needed a warp-weighted loom, of the type used from the Neolithic period onwards and up to Saxon times in England (and into the 20th century in parts of Scandinavia). So I approached Tony Reid, a Shere farmer who has been running a farm museum in the village for many years and has a wide interest in textiles. It turned out that we both had copies already of Marta Hoffmann's classic book, The Warp Weighted Loom, first published in Oslo in 1966 and reprinted in 1974.

Considering the materials and skills Tony and I had between us, we agreed on a free-standing frame about 6ft 6ins high made with rustic sticks lashed together with string. We used purchased handrail for the beam and the shed rod, a broom handle for the heddle rod and forked sticks from a hedge for the heddle rod supports. Tony lashed it all together and drilled holes through the beam for sewing on the warp.

We decided on a linen warp, to lessen the risk of broken threads (although these are not as difficult to replace on this type of loom as I'd assumed) and I made a warp 4 feet wide with a plain tablet-woven linen starting border, using 12 tablets. The weft of the braid is extended on one side to become the warp of the main loom.

We were given some old lead sheeting for weights and my husband Alan cut them into 64 half-pound pieces and rolled them. I made 32 cloth bags to put them in – a pound for every 12 warp ends. The sett was 8 ends per inch. The weft was to be wool and we used my handspun yarn, Navajo 3-plied to get the necessary thickness. I tried at first to make heddles from a continuous length of yarn but found it too awkward on the rustic frame so we made individual ones.

The loom was ready for the event at Tilford on 22 August 2004 and shortly afterwards Tony set it up again at a medieval fair at Shere. It was a major job to dismantle it and lash it together again every time it had to be moved so we were delighted to hear about a craftsman-made warp-weighted loom, easy to put up and dismantle, which needed a good home.

The Rustic loom in Tony Reid's garden	Tony re-assembling the loom at the Rural Life Centre, 21st August 2004
Members of the West Surrey Guild weaving, 22nd August 2004

The New Loom

The new loom had belonged to Ro Bailey, a tapestry weaver, who had refurbished the reproduction Saxon loom in the archaeology museum in God's House Tower, Southampton, and had written a paper about it in the Journal for Weavers Spinners & Dyers in June 1992. She had been working on a project with Dr Michael Ryder, a specialist in the history of fibres and textiles, and the loom had been commissioned for this work. Sadly Ro Bailey had died and her husband Brian was looking for somewhere to place the loom. Alan and I went to see him at his home in Farnham. He had established that his wife's colleague would be happy for it to go to someone who would make good use of it. He offered it to me and I accepted it on behalf of the Guild.

We took the new loom to the Guild Members' Forum – our 'Show and Tell' meeting – on 6 December. We tied our beam, with the warp attached, to the beam to the new loom and our heddle rod to the new one (because ours did not fit the supports) and carried on weaving.

In her article in the Journal, Ro Bailey identified two questions about the warp-weighted loom: First, why did it last so long historically – what was so good about it? She lists its many advantages in her article and one major disadvantage, that weaving on it takes a long time. Second, how can good quality cloth – and the achievements of antiquity are very impressive – be made on such a loom. That was now a challenge for us!

2005-6

Progress was slow on our first piece because we had nowhere to work on the loom regularly. We showed it in a public demonstration of spinning and weaving in Guildford's historic Wanborough Great Barn in the summer of 2005. We realised that we would have to put it up at home if we were going to do any serious weaving, so we then set it up in our sitting room, against the only wall in the house that wasn't occupied by windows or book shelves, which meant blocking the door into the hall. But it looked great! I completed the weaving and finished the piece with a tablet-woven border, taking the warp ends through the shed of the tablet weaving and plaiting them in small groups to form a fringe. Then I fulled the piece lightly.

	We judged it a reasonable success but we had failed to overcome the problem of waisting. At least, we kept the width of the cloth fairly constant but only at the expense of pulling the warp threads farther apart at the sides and causing bunching in other places. We had to put in wedges of extra weft to keep the width as even as we did.
Weaving on the new loom in Warnborough Great Barn, near Guildford, 2nd July 2005

Help

Fortunately, one is not alone in one's endeavours. There are a number of warp-weighted loom projects going on and examples of other peoples' projects to see in various museums and reconstructed ancient sites. In particular, there is an electronic discussion group called WWLoom, which we have found very helpful: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WWLoom/

2006: Our second piece

A Spin and Weave exhibition was being planned, jointly by the Hampshire and Surrey Guilds, to be held at Bedales Galley near Petersfield in September 2006, and Tony and I were invited to display the loom. We agreed and set about making a new warp.

I made a patterned tablet-woven starting border in three colours of plied handspun wool. The weft of the border, which became the warp of the loom, was dark brown 2-ply handspun goat hair that I bought from Handweavers' Studio, very much a one-off that I thought would be nice and strong. I put in a few vertical stripes of natural-dyed handspun 2-ply. The weft was handspun 2-ply wool in natural brown. This time I succeeded in making the heddles with a continuous length of yarn.

Selvages

Inspired by reports of ancient textiles with tablet-woven borders on three sides, we decided to have tablet-woven selvages. Not to be too ambitious, we used only three tablets on each side and turned them always in the same direction to make it easier to talk to visitors without making mistakes. As the tablets are individually weighted, the counter-twisting that occurs is easy to undo. The tablets are supported on slings attached to the ends of the beam. I find this method very effective and indeed easier than getting a good selvage without tablets.

2007

We wove very little on the loom between the Bedales exhibition in 2006 and the next Spin and Weave exhibition at Guildford House Gallery in November-December 2007. This was partly because I spent some time making fired clay loom weights, both Anglo-Saxon doughnuts and Iron Age triangular shapes. Also Tony and I undertook to set up a rather forlorn warp-weighted loom that had been found in store at the Surrey Heath Archaeology Centre at Bagshot. Doing this enabled us to try out some advice we had received about avoiding waisting. One tip was to splay out the warp more widely at the bottom than at the starting border. Another was to graduate the weights to have progressively more tension towards the sides. These measures appear to be working well with the Bagshot loom.

The Guild's loom at Guildford House Gallery, December 2007.  The first piece of cloth we made is draped over the table on the left

We demonstrated the Guild's loom regularly during the exhibition at Guildford House Gallery. We wove several inches and began to find that some adjustments are still needed to the distribution of weight. This will be reported on in due course, as will progress with weaving twill, which has been started on a miniature version of the loom.

The Bagshot loom in an Iron Age display at Surrey Heath Museum, Camberley, October 2007

2008

After the exhibition in Guildford House the Guild's loom remained dismantled. The warp was rolled up on the beam, and the bundle was placed on top of some bookshelves, where it lay for most of 2008 while serious steps were taken to provide a wall for it. This has now been done and weaving will shortly be resumed.

I successfully produced a small length of very coarse broken lozenge twill, a pattern that was very popular with Anglo-Saxon weavers, on the miniature loom. One of the things that interests me about weaving twill on this loom is that the recorded method, which comes from living memory in Iceland, indicates that each shed was opened with a single heddle rod. This seems awkward to a modern weaver who is used to raising multiple shafts on a horizontal loom in order to make patterned weaves. I found it very difficult to set up and was interested to read that multiple heddle rods had been proposed, and that there was evidence in the form of heddle brackets with two notches, that this method had been used on the warp-weighted loom. However, the evidence was relatively late and it could be that this method was only used once people had become familiar with the horizontal loom. It is probably significant that broken lozenge twill was so popular – this is what can be produced with two warp threads on each heddle rod. So I am persevering.

The highlight of 2008 was a visit to the experimental archaeological centre at Lejre in Denmark during the textile week in August, when researchers from many countries go to carry out experiments there. Some very impressive weaving was being done on the warp-weighted loom by delegates from Estonia, who were studying very rich textiles recovered from a medieval excavation. The most useful exhibit from my point of view was however the weaving of replica Viking sails at the Ship Museum at Roskilde. The weaver, Anna Norgard, was finishing sewing a sail she had woven in 2/1 twill, ready for use on a replica ship in September, and was already weaving another in 2/2 twill, both based on finds of medieval sails in Norway. She had set up the loom with two warp threads per heddle rod and was taking great care to have an even distribution of weight across the warp and to check the width against a plumb-line.

Glenys Crocker, January 2009