Finally, Floor Loom is refurbished and put back together!
It has been little over a year since I picked up this 1980s 45 inch Leclerc Fanny Floor Loom and brought it home to live with me. The previous owner was not using it any longer for health reasons and generously decided to give it to me hoping that it would be brought back to life. That is exactly what happened! For those who followed from the very beginning of this journey saw and read what steps I took to remove the old varnish and revarnished using a hard wax oil. I did not keep track of the exact number of hours I dedicated to this project and truthfully, I am glad I didn’t because it would deter me from doing anything like this again. I found renewed appreciation for the company, Leclerc who make these looms because it takes a lot of work to get a loom looking beautifully and functioning well. It is not my first time setting up a loom but I did underestimate the time and man power it would take to put it together. This loom is much bigger than my other loom which is actually 27 inch loom therefore it is a lot heavier to lift and more cumbersome to put it together in small space. But with help of my dad and a few hours of following the step by step instruction of manual we were able to put it together in 3 hours.
The loom is all put together so what is left? I have to make sure the harness (the part of the loom) that holds the thread are at the proper level. I am finding it the most tedious part of the process because it involves rebalancing how the harness seat on the horizontal bar. It has been at certain height and leveled.
The next thing I must do is add more heddles to the harness so I can add more yarn/thread to make larger projects such as lap blankets. Each harness had approximately 50 heddles on each one and I need to have at least 150 heddles to make those large projects. Adding the heddles must be done precisely so that they are oriented properly so the thread/yarn is not twisted and possibly snap while weaving.
Lastly, I have to remove the rust of one the reeds which helps to spread the individual yarn thread properly while weaving. I plan to use Bar keeper friends that you can get your local hardware store and make a paste out of it with water and cover the bars within the reed with it. After some scrubbing with a fine steel wool pad and letting it sit for a few hours then it can be rinsed off. Why not just buy a new one? They are not inexpensive, and it would be good if I could save them from ending up in a land fill.
What is the first thing I plan to weave on this loom you may be wondering. I plan to weave a lap size blanket using an 8/8 cotton which is almost equivalent to worsted weight yarn, so it is relatively thick yarn and weaving it in a simple plain weave structure. It will give me the opportunity to make the last fine tune adjustments to the loom so the shed (the area which yarn travels across the warp thread) is large enough.
So far the floor weaving loom is working well. As you can see by the picture the warp is already put onto the loom and the yarn threads are in bundles waiting to be threaded into the heddles. I am so excited to show you the lap size blanket when it is completed please check out my Instagram feed for those pictures. Let me know what you think about my refinished loom in the comments below and thank you for following me on this journey.