DIY – Shuttles

Good morning

Remember I said I needed to create some shuttles? I worked on one yesterday and I think it turned out great!

Please be advised, lol, I have no proper tools for cutting out shapes. I DO have a drill though, and a good imagination.

I began with a piece of poplar (1/4″ x 3″ x 4 feet). Poplar was a great choice. It’s a hardwood which is soft enough to work with easily and it is incredibly lightweight! Oh yes, and cheaper than the other hardwoods I saw by about a dollar a piece.

I cut the length I wanted – match this to what you plan to weave/the size of the loom. In my case, I cut the shuttle about 17 1/2″ long.

I then used a cardboard template (which I first drew and cut out) to mark the shapes on each end. I tapped small screw indents very close together along the line.

I drilled each hole with my smallest drill bit and then progressively drilled each hole bigger. Eventually it becomes easy to remove the shape – like perforated paper. I used a sharp kitchen knife to cut through the last bits when I was ready to remove the shape. I didn’t want the wood to splinter.

I used coarse sandpaper, wrapped around a film case and attached with a rubber band. LOL. Not fancy but very functional! If you want to sand a curve, use something curved – made sense to me.

The pencil worked well in all the smaller areas like the mouth of the open space.

I’ve read that inkle shuttles have a knife edge on one side so I sanded each side edge (1″ in from each end to prevent thinning the wood there) to a nice fine edge. Most of the edge was created from the top side but I turned the piece and created the last bit of the edge from the other side. It looked so nice that I decided to sand both long edges this way!

Today I get to try weaving!

~ by knitsnthings on May 5, 2009.