WWJD: What Would Jim (Ahrens) Do?

    Once upon a time, about 80 years ago, a guy named Jim Ahrens took up weaving as a hobby. Ahrens was someone who liked to work with his hands--he was a cabinet maker--and had those wonderfully wild engineering skills that allow some people to not only look at a problem and ask, "Why is this happening?" but then sit down and come up with an elegant solution. With a background in mechanical engineering and machine design, it's not surprising that weaving appealed to him: the process is a delightful blend of art and engineering, and you get to play with some pretty interesting machinery and tools.
    I don't know the entire history--Jim Ahrens passed on nearly 20 years ago--but I suspect that he, like many weavers, was mostly self-taught. That has some disadvantages--the learning curve can be steep--but one of the big advantages is that you aren't hamstrung by traditions. You can look at a problem, or a piece of cloth, and engineer/reverse-engineer a solution. For example, it's a pain to climb under a loom to change the tie-up, and the bigger the loom, and the more complex the draft, the more work it is to change the tie-up. Ahrens looked at the design of looms and thought, why not move the tie-up system to the side of the loom, so you can simply change the tie-up while standing (or sitting) next to the loom. Ahrens Looms are known for their patented side tie-up systems.
    Ahrens also studied how looms and weavers interacted in earlier times. Master weavers turned out miles of complex cloths, but many of their secrets disappeared as handweaving was mechanized during the Industrial Revolution. By the start of World War Two, handweaving looms were limited to four or eight shafts and, in the United States, usually either counterbalance or jack looms. (Bexel was making their "Cranbrook" countermarche rug loom, but they were very rare.) As the story goes, Ahren's wife Dorothy brought home a beautiful piece of linen she wanted replicate, and once they determined that it took 36 shafts to recreate the pattern, Ahrens added 4 additional shafts for the selvedges, then built his first mechanical dobby handweaving loom. That first dobby led to others; and a partnership with Jon Violette to form AVL Looms in the 1970s; and on down to Bertie.The "A" in AVL, and in A-Series is for Ahrens.

The Ahrens Dobby, at the start of restoration.
(Picture from Peggy Osterkamp's Weaving
Blog, August 16, 2019)

    Jim Ahrens' big 40-shaft dobby is owned by weaver/ teacher/author Peggy Osterkamp, and has just been restored to working order by Peggy and her apprentice (and talented weaver in her own right) Vera Totos. The loom is a beast: the 40 shafts controlled by the dobby head are fronted by an additional 4 counterbalanced shafts that weave the ground cloth, making it possibly the only mechanical (no electricity required) 44-shaft loom in the world. However, the familial relationship between that old loom and Bertie are quite evident: Bertie doesn't have 4 counterbalance shafts full of flat steel heddles, and the Ahrens Dobby doesn't have a computerized dobby head, but both work on the same general principles.
    So, if the two looms are similar, how does that affect setting up the heddles on Bertie? I looked at the photographs Peggy and Vera posted, and created a spreadsheet of shaft and heddle usage on the last dozen projects, including every one woven on Bertie. What I found:

• I like to weave designs on a plainweave background
• I weave a lot of tied-weaves, from Huck Lace to Summer-and-Winter to Batemans

That means I tend to put a lot of ends on a few shafts, while the rest are spread out to make the design. Those shafts should probably be in front, rather like the ground shafts on the Ahrens Dobby. I like my selvedges on separate shafts from the rest of the warp, but I don't want the shed geometry to be considerably different from the shed geometry of the ground, so the selvedge shafts should also be at the front. That leaves the rest of the shafts--30 to 36--free for design purposes.

For a lot more information on Jim Ahrens and his looms, check out Peggy Osterkamp's Weaving Blog and the Ahrens Looms website.