Here are some suggestions for places and ways to tie up the far end of your backstrap loom in your house….
1. Here my loom is tied around the leg of my electric piano.
2. The loom bar can be suspended from a door knob. Note that this doesn’t work well for narrow warps and that the loom bar should be only a little longer than the width of the warp otherwise it will tend to slip from side to side and be very unstable.
3. This is my favorite way – tied to the bottom of my bed. I sit on a cushion on the floor. The warp is angled up only slightly and I find this very comfortable. I can also brace my feet against some planks that are under the bed.
4. Hooks can be placed in the side of a heavy piece of furniture and you can then slot your loom bar into those. As you go advancing and rolling up your warp, you will need to add some rope to the loom bar so that you maintain your distance from the piece of furniture (or you will end up with your knees under your chin!).
A suspended loom bar works best on wide warps. It is also important to have notches in the ends of the loom bar so that the cords that hold the bar to the fixed point will not slide into the center.
The loom bar can be lashed to a vertical post but, depending on what the post is made from, the bar can slip down. A special kind of lashing which Barry Brown explained to us in the Backstrap Group on Ravelry will stop this from happening.
You can see instructions for this lashing thanks to Barry who provided the link and the Girl Scouts here.
If all else fails…..use a toe or foot for narrow pieces…
…and both feet for wide ones!
I have tried it and am not a big fan but for many weavers in Asia this is the norm. They tend to weave this way using circular warping.
Please drop me a line if you have come up with any ways of your own!
Hi Leverne!
What a wonderful website for us to learn from!!! I’m a beginner but I just love studying your pictures and trying to figure things out. Thank you very much for all your help. Keep it coming!!
Hi and welcome Lynda. Hope to see some of your projects soon.
I love to use our cats’ big solid scratching post to tie to, while sitting in my Ikea Poäng rocking chair. I have to keep Mikki from chewing up the warp anyway, no matter where I sit.
How far away does the anchor point need to be from the creator? I am pretty much living in a recliner due to pain and this seemed like one of the few ways I could weave but my options for anchoring while recliner are gooseneck tablet holders and while they hold tablets I’m wondering if the back strap would require too much tension.
I usually like to have a minimum of about 10 inches of working space on my warp….space in which I can comfortably operate the heddles and shed rod etc. This can be a much smaller distance if it’s a narrow warp for a small item like a band or lanyard. But I often weave until I’m just a few inches away from the anchor point and struggling to operate the warp just because the item I want to make requires those extra inches or I didn’t want to waste material if that warp material happens to be particularly precious. I have no idea what gooseneck tablet holders are so can’t help you with that.