When I first get it home, the 1980s Kessenich floor loom is rusty and dusty, strung with ancient charcoal gray cotton from someone else’s long-ago abandoned project. I borrow a friend’s husband and a friend to help me maneuver it out of the apartment of its previous owner, a sweet local woman who just hasn’t had time to use it, and into my own. We place it under the windows that get the best afternoon light.

Up to this point, my typical style of weaving has been tapestry weaving, which uses comparatively simple and compact frame looms. Floor loom weaving is a completely different craft. Because so much of the process occurs in the planning and warping stage of weaving, it requires commitment to a pattern and design. It requires making decisions up front and trusting the pattern. As an indecisive person, this challenges me. With tapestry I can change course more easily, and almost always do. With a floor loom project, I am pretty locked in once I start to wind the warp.

While my tapestry weaving feels and looks like “art” (whatever that actually means), the act of weaving on a floor loom feels ancient, connected to tradition. It feels primal and maternal and necessary in a way that tapestry doesn’t. I like the variety in what they offer: with tapestry, a sense of entering the unknown, of discovery. With handweaving on a floor loom, a sense of being grounded in myself and in the tradition of millennia of women sat at looms just like this, weaving cloth.

The Kessenich has its quirks, some of which I am still discovering as I begin my fourth project on it. The reed was rusted and peeling, requiring a good scrubbing with dish soap and water. Even after some elbow grease, I could probably use a new one. The chains that attach the foot pedals to the bars (do they have a name?) that lever up the shafts are janky and rarely stay hooked the way they need to. The fourth shaft is sticky, requiring me to pause the flow of weaving to smack it down and close the shed.

Instead of taking time to try to fix the loom, I get it working well enough and just live with the quirks. I am too impatient to spend hours lubricating the mysterious insides of the loom, or taking it apart to get all the dust off and understand it better.

I wove my second set of towels last week, which was my first time coming up with my own design. I experimented with various twill patterns, striping designs, and weft thicknesses. I got frustrated when there seemed to be an issue with my tension, causing a sort of wave in the row of weft. No matter how I tried to fiddle with the tension on that left side–hanging little weights off the back of the warp to tighten it, then switching gears and intentionally leaving the warp a little looser–that bump would not go away.

By the last towel, I was certain none of the project would turn out because of this bump, so I wove the last one with a “f*** it” attitude. I just wanted to get it done. I didn’t adjust the tension or overthink the selvedges, which as a tapestry weaver I have a tendency to do. I just wove, listening to music, dancing a little. Unsurprisingly, as soon as I stopped trying to control it, the little bump dissipated as I wove. The rows evened out. The sides were straight. When I released the tension and wound the yardage off the loom, the towels were beautiful.

I don’t think I need to spell out the metaphor here.

This post was originally published on What is Woven In, my newsletter about art, creativity, and life in the far rural north. Subscribe for free at https://whatiswovenin.substack.com/.

Lessons from the Floor Loom