Building a Miniature Junk loom
I planned to explore and weave the samples I had imagined by making a small loom with the old scrap available at home. I made a small and basic 2 shaft loom with scraps I gathered like, plastic bottles and containers, pipes, card board pieces, old fabrics, metal wire, a piece of wood, pins and some old assignment sheets.
The loom functions similar to the table top loom where the warp beam and the fabric beam can be rolled, unrolled and fix to a position that will help in tightening the yarns. The reed was made using metal pins on a rod and the heald shafts made using yarns on a card board has to be manually lifted and pulled apart for the weft to pass through. I used a gas cylinder and a chair to set the warp yarn and empty cylindrical bottles and containers as bobbins for the yarns. Initially, I started with a heald shaft with 30 heald eyes each and a reed with 30 dents. The fabrics were woven with the measurement of a book mark so that the samples could be put to use further.
The first set of samples were woven with a warp of eri silk with no mordant. The weft yarns were dyed in different natural colours and combinations of each were explored with motifs, horizontal stripes and manipulation of warp yarns in different patterns for the edges of the stoles. The second set of samples were woven with yarns with mordants and later dyed in different natural dyes to analyse the washing and colour fastness of the fabrics. The third set of samples were woven with warp yarns of different combinations of mordants on the sample, and dyed with natural dyes. This set of samples were to explore the variation in the sample shades and to analyse if the mordants bleed and merge. The fourth set of samples were woven with warp yarns dyed with the tiedye technique with three different dyes to explore new possibilities in natural dyeing and combination of colours.