Damask, long-eyed heddles, and my counterbalance loom

A year ago, I took a class on drawloom weaving at ETC.

With a drawloom, you weave two patterns simultaneously. The first is the "ground" weave structure: the overall texture of the cloth. This is typically a satin weave or a broken twill – something that doesn't have an obvious design and is warp-faced on one side of the cloth and weft-faced on the other. You create the secondary pattern – the design that you "draw" – by selectively switching from warp-faced to weft-faced weaving within each pick. If your warp and weft are different colors, the design pops. If they are the same color, the design is subtle and only distinguished by texture.

Here's an example from that class. The design (in blue) is weft-faced: the predominant thread runs horizontally. The ground (in white) is warp-faced, with a vertical thread.

I don't have a drawloom and, as I discovered in the class, I don't really have a desire to get one. However, I was captivated by a drawloom-esque sampler we did on a countermarche loom. The loom was set up for satin weave and we used long-eyed heddles, a weaving sword, and half-heddle sticks to simulate the pattern shafts on a drawloom.

And a month later, I got Edna, my Burchard Weavers counterbalance loom. Not a countermarche, but technically still able to make those drawloom-esque patterns with some modifications. I was able to successfully convert her with the help of two excellent resources:

Damask with Half-Heddles and a Weaving Sword, a video by Amy Blair with Joanne Hall
Weaving with Long Eyed Heddles, a book by Joanne Hall

The hardest part was converting her existing pulley system into a damask-style pulley. Here's the original configuration. Shafts 1/2 and 3/4 are counterbalanced, and each pair is balanced against the other.

For my draft, I needed to connect shafts 1/4 and 2/3, and have each pair be independent of one other.

After several iterations, I ended up with this setup. It looks janky but works just fine. I made a spacer for the two smaller pulleys and used that to connect shafts 1/4. It's removable and completely non-destructive – nothing screws in to the pulleys. Shafts 2/3 are connected with a small metal pulley that hangs from the spacer. The texsolv and clothesline keep everything supported and equalize the forces from the pulleys.

The remainder of the setup was simple: long-eyed heddles, some sturdy sticks to secure the half-heddles, and a scrap 2x4 to prop up the appropriate threads.

I used Joanne Hall's "Karl" pattern for the design. And of course, I had to dye my yarn with indigo. (Ever since ikat entered my life, I have a hard time weaving anything with plain yarn!!) For the warp, I used three different resist techniques taken from Ankaret Dean's book Ikat to Wear: a braid, overhand knots, and a rope twist. These create an organic, speckled design.

For the weft, I used three different colors: white, light blue, and dark blue. Each gives a very different character to the cloth, and the front and back of the cloth are inverses of each other.