These pages will document my spinning and weaving explorations. I have had a spinning wheel for many years, and used it quite a bit for about a year. Then we moved, I went back to work, we moved again to a place with no room for a wheel. It was put in storage.
We moved again to a bigger place, I lost my job due to its moving to another state, and I went back to school.
I found and bought an antique barn/rug loom on ebay. A few months later we stopped at the Reuse Center (Ann Arbor has manditory recycling and there is a center that you can drop off items that are still usable but you don't want, such as building materials, appliances, etc.) and sitting just inside the main door was a lovely little four harness floor loom and bench. The price was too good to pass up, do I didn't and it followed me home.
I bought a few beginning weaving books since I hadn't done any weaving in 25-30 years, and that was on a really simple table loom. I found that my little loom was in need of a few parts and accessories to get it ready to weave. I discovered that ebay has a lot of this type of stuff. This left a bit of extra money...
I joined some weaving groups on yahoo groups. One of the ladies was offering alpaca fiber for sale, and she was only about 70 miles away. I went to pick up one bag of fiber, met the animals, and brought home three bags. I picked up some silk/merino blend fiber at a local spinner's flock fleece fair. Ebay offered cotton, linen, and flax fibers. Then there where some beautiful spinning wheels... I ended up bidding on and winning two. One a saxony type and one an upright double wheel. Both antiques.
Not long after this I found an ebay listing for an eight harness 45 inch weaving bed Kyra loom going for an very good price. I won it! Another multi-hour drive to fetch it as it was in Maryland and I am in SE Michigan. My husband's response was, "Road trip, let me check with my lists to see what is in the area." (Anything that let's him find wonderful, local food...) He got information for a small, popular, all-you-can-eat Maryland Blue Crab restuarant not far from where the loom was. We were all set to make the trip when the weather cooperated (I won the loom in late January, just in time for my birthday and it was a very snowy, icy winter). We set off in mid February. Most, but not all the loom fit in the car, so we packed in what we could and my husband made arrangements to stop off on his way home from a computer seminar that he would be attending at Virginia Tech in March. We went back to our motel for the night. The next day we got and went for crab. After a hard day of eating said crab, we found another motel just around the corner from the restuarant and checked in for the night. We headed home the next morning and took the scenic route through WV and took another day to get home. The pickup of the remaining parts went well in March and the whole loom was finally together in one place. Now to find space to set it up and use it!
Now that I have made the financial plunge with equipment and supplies, I have to put them to use.