Choosing and using a boat shuttle

For the Table Loom without a race? Yes, for the table loom without a race! The race can be hacked by attaching in a non permanent way (so no damage to your loom!) a lease stick held under the warp by the short helping hands, or some rubber bands; some examples are here and here, and here is my own hack:

The makeshift race skirts the warp from below

Boat shuttles come in many variation:

1. Bottom. The bottom can be open, closed or have rollers; a closed bottom one glides easier but is heavier, which may be an issue with table loom warps which aren’t as tightly tensioned as floor loom ones. Open bottoms allow the user to control the thread. Something worth bearing in mind is that overfilling the bobbin will make it stick out of the shuttle bottom profile, making it catch the warp threads.
2. Feeding. The yarn may come out of the shuttle (i.e. “feed”) from the end or from the middle; end feeding shuttles tension the yarn. Also, there are shuttles with two bobbins; these are particularly useful when the weft goes with two ends held together.
3. Size. The bigger, the heavier. Longer and slimmer will glide more easily, travel longer and are more likely to go straight; obvioulsy though, for a given width, the longer the shuttle, the more it will weigh. Wider shuttles will carry more yarn; wider shuttles it may fall off the makeshift race, and/or catch the warp. Shuttles taller than 1″/2.5cm may be problematic for the Table loom, since the shed is not as tall as for a floor loom.
4. Shape. A pointier shuttle will travel more easily. A shuttle with an asymmetric “bulge” on one side provides more room to the bobbin/quill to move and feed the yarn (if it is a side-feeding shuttle)
5. Material. traditional ones are in wood, but I have seen quite a few plastic ones. Material will affect gliding ability as well as weight.
6. Bobbin or quill? The yarn must be wound around either a bobbin or quill, which must be a couple of cm shorter than the shuttle box (i.e. intterior of the boat shuttle) with the spindle that will host the bobbin/quill; this is because you’ve got to leave room to the quill for moving to the left or to the right, depending on which side it is thrown from, otherwise it will drag the yarn. Quills are quieter, and apparently don’t pull the yarn as much as bobbins (and pulling may create tension issues at the selvedges); they are smaller than bobbins, so will fit smaller shuttles (and smaller sheds). You can make your own paper quills; Bluster Bay Woodwork has a very clear tutorial on how to make paper quills. They have to be winded pretty tightly (must feel firm in the hand when squeezing the wound quill) in cigar shape, leaving both ends clear of any yarn, and here is a video on how to wind a paper quill:

If you do not have a bobbin winder but can locate a drill, then you can fashion it as an electric bobbin winder (if it can get low speeds).

Another video on winding bobbins which I found really useful is here:

All this stuff on quills is as in the end I bought some Toika closed bottom shuttles as my (first?). They are very light (only 86g/3oz) and have a low profile, which will suit the table loom.

My first shuttles!

The results in the videos are all quite polished – my reality was actually rather more rough! I opted for the drill solution, and as paper quill I cut a rectangle out of a discarded letter and rolled it around the smallest drill bit I had.

Tools of the trade!

To wind you have to start the yarn inside the paper fold, then trap it inside:

Then start your drill, guiding the yarn up and down, and making sure you leave about 1cm free on your paper quill at both ends. Then pull out the yarn cigar, and insert into the boat shuttle. I found it easier to use with the bobbin unwinding from below, it made it easier to re-roll, but it may work differently for you.

For posterity, here is my very first wound home made paper quill:

Throwing the shuttle isn’t at all hard – for this pointed ones, grab them from below as you would a paper plane, and throw them through the shed along the race, with your other hand ready to catch it on the other side. It only took me a few tries to not feel awkward anymore: it is much quicker than a stick shuttle!

The content of this post is an imperfect and highly condensed summary of the sources below (in addition to the links already posted):

Bluster Bay Woodwork

Glimakra

Handwoven Magazine 1

Handwoven Magazine 2

Louet

Shacht 1

Shacht 2

The Woolery 1

The Woolery 2 – video

Warping a table loom back to front without a raddle

The advantage of this method is that you do not need any additional equipment other than what comes as standard with your loom, at least in the case of Ashford, where raddles are optional add ons.

The starting point is a chained warp, still uncut on both ends just in case, where the “tail” (i.e. unchained part) of the chain is away from the threading cross.

This is the end that would normally go on the raddle, but that will be rough sleyed through the reed instead. To do so, the reed is temporarily removed from the front beater, and used to space the warp threads while beaming. Once this is done, the reed is taken off the warp (how? keep reading to find out), and used as normal.

As standard warping sequence to be modified I will consider the one in Ashford’s videos:

Ashford: winding a warp on a warp frame

Ashford: beam your warp on a table loom

Ashford: thread your warp and lash on

The sequence below will differ at two points: the rough sleying of the reed and transferring the cross from the front to the back of the reed, so that you can take the reed off the warp and put it back on the front beater, where it belongs.

1. take the reed off
2. if your chain is “locked”, unlock it;
3. starting from the end, pull the loops through the raddle, with roughly the same number of loops per dent as you will have when you will actually establish sett, and slip the lease stick through the loops, securing them. It won’t be possible to replicate any sett requiring an odd number of threads, since now everything is looped. You could cut the threads, but this will mean a bit more more loom waste (the knots, as you will have to tied the ends, rather than exploiting the loops) and risk disaster (you will have to manage those cut ends so that they aren’t pulled back by the chain through the reed dents). So easier to go as close as possible to your actual sett, but keeping loops intact. For instance, if the sett requires three warp threads per dent, you can alternate a dent with 1 loop and a dent with 2 loops. For more on rough sleying, you can check Laura Fry’s blog.
4. Once all the loop ends have been sleyed, the least stick with the loops on gets installed the lease stick on the back apron rod.
5. beam as normal (crank and yank method): the reed will “comb” the warp and keep it spaced as a raddle would. Keep going until you get to the cross. The picture below shows the “combing” (the reed is behind the castle – heddles have been moved to the sides, one hand keeps the chain in tension at the front of the loom while the other winds the back beam. The tension and the reed’s weight keep it vertical).
6. now it is the time to remove the reed without destroying the cross. To transfer the cross behind the reed, you turn the lease stick closest to the reed on edge and slide another stick in the opening on the other side of the reed. You take the stick out that you had on edge and bring the second stick up to the reed, turn it on edge, and slide another stick inside the opening on the other side of the reed. The lease sticks are now in the cross on the side of the reed where you need them for threading.

(here with pictures of the process, scroll to the end). I did not have enough hands to take pictures while transferring the cross, but here is what the back of my loom looked like after transferring the cross:

And that’s it – now the front loops can be cut, and threading through the heddles can begin.

Of course things can go wrong, and did go wrong for me – after beaming I found that my threading cross had somehow been thrown in disarray!

Messed up threading cross

But here having the reed sleyed did come very handy: I pulled all the threads out of the cross, but since they were still in the reed slots, I could (patiently!) take them in the order they came out of the reed (also the order in which they were beamed), and put them through the cross again in the right order.

Cross back in order!