Top to bottom: Boat shuttle, stick shuttle, netting shuttle, yarn butterflies, bobbin
With the warp all set to go, you now can turn your attention to packaging up the weft so it’s easy to slip into and out of the shed.
You have several choices of how to “throw” your yarn through the warp shed. These include yarn butterflies and stick and boat shuttles. Your choice depends on the tools you have at hand, but also on the yarns you are using for the warp and weft.
The simplest way to package yarn is without any shuttle at all, but instead to create a butterfly-shaped bundle that spools the yarn easily from one end. This method is best used when you have relatively short amounts of weft and/or many different wefts, and it’s especially useful for tapestry weaving, where a single row might involve weaving 30 or more different-colored wefts. As mentioned earlier, weft packaged this way isn’t protected as well as when it’s used with a shuttle, and it may therefore become abraded more when you weave with it. This is a problem especially with long wefts, and it may even fall apart on you as the cumulative damage from being pushed back and forth through the shed finally rips it apart. (An alternative to a yarn butterfly is a netting shuttle; see photo below.)
Top to bottom: Boat shuttle, stick shuttle, netting shuttle, yarn butterflies, bobbin
The most basic form of a shuttle is the stick shuttle. Essentially it’s a flat stick with notches cut out of each end. Most often these are made of wood, but you can create them out of any relatively stiff medium, even cardboard.
Most rigid-heddle looms come with one or two stick shuttles, for two reasons: the stick shuttles are inexpensive for the manufacturer to produce, and they’re thin enough to fit nicely through the narrow sheds that rigid-heddle looms tend to produce. When I first started weaving, I moved quickly from stick shuttles to boat shuttles and felt that I’d “outgrown” stick shuttles. Now that I’m a more experienced weaver, I’ve realized that stick shuttles have a lot going for them. They take more skill to weave with efficiently, but they can hold three times as much yarn as a boat shuttle of the same size. That means fewer joins in your finished cloth. There are downsides to stick shuttles: they are slow, and, because the yarn rides on the outside of the shuttle, it’s subject to more abrasion than shuttles where the yarn rides on the inside.
Stick shuttle and netting shuttle
The obvious way to wind weft onto a stick shuttle is to wind it around the center. This isn’t wrong, but because the yarn increases the thickness of the shuttle, it’s harder to fit through the shed. Here’s a better way.
Creating your own weaving tools is economical and rewarding, and a stick shuttle is one of the easiest to fabricate at home. Download and print the template and trace it onto a rigid material such as wood or cardboard. Then use a jigsaw (for wood) or scissors (for cardboard) to carefully cut out the shuttle. Trim or sand off any rough edges that might catch the yarn. That’s all there is to it!
In shaft looms, boat shuttles are ubiquitous. Their speed of spooling off the weft yarn matches the pace of a shaft loom, but there’s no reason you can’t use their speed to increase the pace on your rigid-heddle loom as well. The fact that it can’t hold as much yarn as a stick shuttle of the same size isn’t a problem when you are weaving with finer yarns, such as 8/2 and 10/2 cottons, but for bulky yarns it could mean a lot more joins in your fabric. Whether you’re willing to have more joins in exchange for speed is up to you.
Boat shuttles come in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes. They all have two features in common: a vaguely canoe-like shape (hence the name) and a removable bobbin or quill that holds the weft and can be quickly exchanged to refill the shuttle. The way a boat shuttle works is that you wind the weft onto the bobbin, using a technique that ensures it unwinds without tangling, and feed it through the eye in the front of the shuttle. As you throw the shuttle back and forth (without turning it) the yarn unspools smoothly, which makes for faster weaving.
Boat shuttles designed for shaft looms are tall (one inch or greater) and can be too thick to comfortably fit in the smaller shed of a rigid-heddle loom. Modern shuttle makers have realized this and are now coming out with mini-shuttles less than an inch high. Damask shuttles (designed for weaving in the very narrow sheds created by draw looms) also work well.
Boat shuttles
Boat shuttles hold bobbins, which carry the yarn. These bobbins have flanges on each end to keep the yarn from falling off the edge and getting tangled around the central shaft of the boat shuttle. (Bobbins without these flanges are called quills and are wound a bit differently, and are not covered here.) If you’re going to be using a boat shuttle on a regular basis, you’ll want a bobbin winder. You can wind bobbins by hand, but it’s a tedious process. You can buy hand-cranked or electric bobbin winders, or you can devise your own by inserting a dowel in a drill. If you’re improvising your own bobbin winder, be sure to mount the drill to a table or press (for safety) and use a slow speed setting. Take care to wind your bobbins carefully, so that there are no “mushy” spots in it. A well-wound bobbin will help you maintain an even selvedge when you’re weaving.
Look down at the warp you’ve just tied on. You’ll see that the knots are pulling the warp threads into bundles where they attach to the front bar. If you started weaving without spreading the warp out, there’d be holes in your cloth. Many weaving books have you close that gap by weaving with a heavy thread, or weaving in strips of plastic garbage bags or even lengths of toilet paper. But there’s a simpler way, a neat little trick that I learned from my first weaving teacher, Judith MacKenzie, a master spinner and author of The Intentional Spinner. In addition to being fast and saving you from needing a header weft, this method spreads the warp in a shorter distance, resulting in less loom waste. This method is not how you weave the rest of the cloth; it’s just a step that you do once or twice at the beginning to spread the warp.
