TC-2: Convergence/ Long Beach, CA

Again a long time has passed without postings.. However, we have not been idle!

We decided to bring 4 TC2s to Convergence at Long Beach,CA (www.weavespindye.org), this July, and these looms needed to be warped, threaded and woven on first! We actually had a total of 36 modules to thread, which is not done in a hurry!!! I got a whole team of colleagues & friends to help: First came the Danish Stine for 4 days. She made several warps and started to thread one loom. Then came Katja Huhmarkangas from Finland for a week; She threaded a couple of looms in no time, and overlapped with Aino-Maria (also from Finland), who stayed for 4 days. Aino-Maria spent her vacation to come! In addition to these weavers, I got help from 2 girls in Tronrud Engineering, plus an engineering student working here for the summer!
Because of trouble with the yarn order, I also got a friend to bring in suitable warp materials (thank you, Anne!) and others who helped tracking down people with equipment I needed to borrow!

In addition to the people who came to assist in preparing the looms, we had Stacey Harvey-Brown (www.theloomroom.co.uk) from the UK for a couple of days: She tried out the TC2s and gave valuable feedback on their performance! Stacey had barely left before two Dutch weavers came to see the looms! A few days after that, two Indians came for the same reason!
It is very inspiring that people queue up to see the TC2 looms!

One of the looms we decided to prepare has 12 modules in the depth, i.e. 72 ens per cm or 180 epi. The warp has 2640 warp ends in total. The Threading of this loom was a learning experience!
Katja developed a list of things that helped getting the job done: Most important was an expired credit card (!) because of it's hard plastic. We also used a few soldering rods, a corrugated paper plate, 2 luggage rubber bands with hooks, one metal rod, a few strings etc....
A more detaled list may be issued later ;-)
Here is the threading almost done!