Towels 3 & 4

Towels 3 and 4 are woven. Here's #3 from the side and the front:





After weaving #3 pulling the fly shuttle cord with my right hand (and with the sore finger in a splint) I found that my right thumb was beginning to hurt. See, that's what happens when you baby one part of your body - it just puts strain on another part!

Since reversing the right-hand and left-hand tasks with the fly shuttle and the beater wasn't feasible with a splint on the right, I decided to weave towel #4 with a hand shuttle, to see if that was easier on the hand. So far, it does seem to help. Slower, but the hand movements are allocated evenly to both hands, which is less stress in the long run.

I originally got the fly shuttle thinking it would be more ergonomic, and am now finding that's not necessarily true - at least, not with long hours at the loom over many years. An alternative is to do what Laura Fry did, and add an air assist for the shuttle. However, if I'm thinking of moving to another loom, it doesn't make sense to put a whole lot of $$$ into this one.

So here's towel #4, side view and front view:



It's interesting to see that sometimes the green squiggle looks like it's behind the blue streak, and sometimes like it's in front of the blue streak. The magic of interleaved threadings!



That's my trusty Bluster Bay end-delivery shuttle, a life (or hand) saver at the moment.

The film canister is weighting a warp thread. While weaving towel #4, I came to a knot, and swapped out that end. At the cutting line between #4 and #5 (which is using a different weft color, of which you can see just the hem area, beyond the cutting line), I swapped the original warp end back in, using the same canister to weight it off the front that I used to weight the substitute end off the back while weaving with the substitute.