Saturday, February 5, 2011

Trapeze Demo in New Jersey

Margriet Carrico recently gave her NJ Jockey Hollow Guild a demo of how she uses the Trapeze. I thought their comments and the photos Sally Ogren took might be of interest, especially to Trapeze skeptics. Here are some pictures from the event. The warp is 20/2.



Clamping the Trapeze to the Baby Wolf [This is easily done alone, but a helping hand is hard to refuse]

Spanking the tensioned warp to even out tension



Picking out a snarl. [More tension and more spanking, or just 'strumming' near the lease sticks, usually solves such. I would have moved the lease sticks up where I could reach them without bending over. km]



Warp going onto the beam smoothly
Comments:
"The Demo of the trapeze was last night and everyone had a few moments where the lights went on. As you can tell from Sally's comments the comfort of the height seemed to impress most of the members... I needed to do samples for the Cross Country Weavers so...I killed 2 birds with one stone... all in all it went well and I told the members that I have not put on a warp without (the Trapeze) in 5 years. I hope they will use this method because itmakes weaving so much more pleasurable
Sally says: "By bringing the trapeze in and letting us "play" with it, I was struck byhow nice it was NOT to be stooped over the warp all the time. You reallydon't get that from reading a book, you have to experience it. [the message throughout the book is good body mechanics. 30 years of arthritis has taught me a lot. km] "Most of the process is at a very comfortable height. The last photo particularly reminded me of that. Even on a fiddly warp, it wasn't so bad to separate the groups at the lease sticks because they were at a comfortable height. Can you image what a pain that would have been to mess with those fine strings if they were at standard loom height?"