Facts About Weaving Loom Types

By Christa Kowalczyk

The earliest art of hand weaving along with hand spinning remains a popular craft. There are different types of weaving looms and these include handloom, frame loom and back strap loom.

A loom is a mechanism or tool used for weaving yarn and thread into textiles. Looms vary in a wide assortment of sizes. They come in huge free standing hand looms, tiny hand-held frames, to vast automatic mechanical tools. A loom can as well pertain to an electric line construction like that of a wiring loom. The main task of looms is to clutch the twist threads under pressure to enable the progress of interweaving of the woof strands. The loom’s system and exact form can differ to some extent; however it still performs the basic application.

There are many kinds of weaving looms to choose from, depending on what you plan to weave. When planning on buying a weaving loom, consider several things. These include how large a piece do you intend to weave; how much experience do you have with weaving looms; how much space is there for your looms; and how much time are you willing to spend on it.

Some looms are fairly small and simply mastered by their users. They can even be used by young children. Larger looms tend to be more complex but still have more detailed options for better usage. The size of the loom is the one to determine the width of whatever weave material you’re going to select. The length is more controlled in the table looms.

Different Types of Looms

Hand Looms

The first and original loom was vertically twist-weighted types, where threads are hung from a wooden piece or branch or affixed to the floor or ground. The weft threads are manually shoved into position or pushed through a rod that also becomes the shuttle. Raising and lowering each warp thread one by one is needed in the beginning. It is done by inserting a piece of rod to create a shack, the gap between warp threads in order for the woof to easily traverse the whole warp right away.

Ground Looms

Horizontal ground looms permit the warp threads to be chained between a couple of rows of dowels. The weaver needs to bend forward to perform the task easily. Thus, pit looms with warp chained over a ditch are invented to let the weaver have his or her legs positioned below and leveled with the loom.

Back strap Looms

They are well recognized for their portability. The one end of this loom type is secured around the waist of the weaver and the other end is attached around a fixed thing like door, stake, or tree. Pressure applied can be customized by just bending back.

Frame Looms

Frame looms almost have the similar mechanisms that ground looms hold. The loom was made of rods and panels fastened at the right angles to construct a form similar to a box to make it more handy and manageable. This type of loom is being utilized even until now due to its economy and portability.

Rigid heddle Looms

These are the crisscross manifold loom types. The back strap looms and frame looms fall under this type. This one normally features one harness, with its heddles attached in the harness. The yarn or thread goes in an alternate manner all the way through a heddle and in the gap between the heddles. In this way, lifting the harness also lifts half of the threads and letting down the harness also drops the same threads. Strands leading through the gaps between the heddles stay in position.

Foot-treadle Floor Looms

Nowadays, hand weavers are likely to employ looms having no less than 4 harnesses. With every harness featuring a set of heddles wherein wool can be strung, and by lifting the harnesses in diverse arrangements, a multiplicity of designs are created. Looms having a couple of harnesses similar to these are applied for knitting tabby, the unvarying weave textiles.

Haute Lisse and Basse Lisse Looms

These are generally employed for knitting conventional tapestry. Haute lisse has the yarn or thread hung straight up between 2 spools. The basse lisse loom has the warp thread stretched out horizontally between spools.

Shuttle Looms

It is the key component of the loom along with the warp beam, shuttle, harnesses, heddles, reed, and take up roll. In the loom, yarn processing includes detaching, battening, alternative, and taking-up operations.

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Source: isnare.com

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