You've made a lot of choices to reach this point, and you've decided on a shaft loom. Congratulations! But your quest hasn't ended yet. Shaft looms require additional decisions about the fabrics you want to weave:
- How wide do you want your cloth? You can always weave narrower than your loom's weaving width. But you can't weave wider (except for doubleweave cloth). Choose a weaving width that can accommodate your widest projects, while still fitting into your living space.
- What weave structures will you make? The more shafts (harnesses) on a loom, the more weave structures it can handle—and the longer it will take to warp your loom. You can weave many weave structures with 4 or 8 shafts, either from your own designs or from published designs. Once you get up to 12, 16, or 32 shafts, it may be more difficult to find published patterns. Often weavers who choose these looms design their own textiles.
Consider these fabric questions along with the other basic questions on our choosing a loom comparison chart.
- How much space do I have? Wider looms and/or looms with lots of shafts will need more space.
- What can I afford? Wider looms and/or looms with lots of shafts will be more expensive.
- What's my current skill level? Some looms can grow: you can add more shafts or other features as you advance.
Finally, think about ergonomics, as Nicky Crane explains, because weaving involves a lot of repetitive motion. If it's possible to try out different looms before you buy one, that's the best way to know that it suits your body, given the loom's height and general operation. Our three types of shaft looms differ in how they change sheds, which affects their ergonomics.
The family tree of shaft looms has a lot of branches. If you're already familiar with weaving terms and shaft looms, and you want to compare different looms, this page offers handy comparison tables and lists the equipment you'll need. Not ready to buy? Want all the nitty gritty details? Read on!
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Type 1: Table Looms
Table looms sold on this website are operated with the hands only: the weaver moves levers and the beater by hand. They are direct tie-up looms, with one lever attached to one shaft. The levers operate individually: you have to flip each lever up or down for each pick.
To weave plain weave on an 8 shaft loom, you'll make two picks over and over. For the first pick, flip the levers to raise shafts 1, 3, 5, 7 and make sure that shafts 2, 4, 6, 8 are down. For the second pick, lower the odd-numbered shafts and raise shafts 2, 4, 6, 8. In the video below, the weaver beats on a closed shed, lowering all shafts before moving the beater. You can also beat on an open shed.
Type 2: Floor Looms
Floor looms currently sold on this site use multiple treadles to raise or lower shafts. When you warp the loom, you can tie up more than one shaft to the same treadle. (You can also use a direct tie-up or skeleton tie-up on floor looms, where each treadle ties up to only one shaft. Some floor looms can only use direct or skeleton tie-ups, like Schacht's original Wolf Pup loom, discontinued in 2020.)
Weavers operate the treadles with their legs and move the beater with their hands. On current Louët and Schacht looms, there are always 2 or 4 more treadles than the total number of shafts, allowing for the largest possible number of shaft-to-treadle combinations. The wider the loom, and the more treadles you've tied up for a given project, the more you'll move from side to side across the loom as you weave.
Our floor looms fall into 3 more subgroups: rising shed jack looms, sinking shed jack looms, and parallel countermarche looms. These names describe how the shafts move when you press a treadle. They're important for understanding how to tie up the treadles from a weaving draft.
On jack looms, each shaft has one lamm suspended over all treadles. A tie-up connects the lamm to a treadle, and each treadle can connect to multiple lamms. For plain weave on an 8 shaft jack loom, you can tie up shafts 1, 3, 5, 7 to one treadle (A), and 2, 4, 6, 8 to another treadle (B). Then you alternate between treadle A and treadle B.
Schacht's Wolf looms and Standard Floor Loom are rising shed jack looms: press a treadle, and the connected shafts go up.
Louët's David 3 is also a jack loom, but the shafts go down when you press a treadle, making it a sinking shed jack loom. In this video, Jane Stafford weaves on the David 3.
Louët makes a unique type of countermarche loom, called a parallel countermarche loom. Their Spring, Delta, and discontinued Hollandia looms fit into this category.
On these looms, each shaft has two lamms, an upper and a lower. For each treadle, there are two tie-up cords, connecting to either the upper lamm or lower lamm of each shaft. When you press a treadle, all shafts rise if they're connected to the lower lamm or sink if they're connected to the upper lamm. For this reason, you can only press one treadle at a time.
You'd still need two treadles for plain weave, as you would on a jack loom. But on an 8 shaft parallel countermarche, all shafts would connect to treadle A and to treadle B. The difference lies in the lamms: shafts 1, 3, 5, 7 tie up to a lower lamm and 2, 4, 6, 8 to the upper lamm for treadle A, then the opposite for treadle B. In other words, all the shafts move for every pick. You can see this action in the following video from Jane Stafford. Because her pattern uses 4 shafts, she tied up only the shafts at the front.
If you're not sure how to choose between these floor loom subgroups, Nicky Crane goes into more depth here.
Type 3: Dobby Looms
Dobby looms change sheds with a mechanical or computer dobby system and a single treadle. Here the dobby system raises shafts and the treadle action simply tells the loom to move on to the next pick. Dobby looms can have many more shafts than floor looms, thanks to that single treadle.
A mechanical dobby loom has a box for program bars. Here you can see the dobby box on an Octado loom.
Program bars re-create the treadling sequence or lift plan of a weaving draft. Each pick in the sequence requires a program bar. Black pegs in the bar move designated shafts; the gray pegs connect all the program bars in a chain. The dobby knife resets all shafts between each pick.
Watch the Megado with mechanical dobby in action!
If your weaving draft has a sequence of 12 picks, you would make a chain of 12 bars and set pegs in each bar. For a sequence that reverses, such as a point twill, you can use the reversing disk on your loom to run the chain backwards. This entire process recalls the days of computer programming with punch cards. (In fact, mechanical dobbies were an important step in the development of computers, as The Science + Industry Museum explains.)
In the next videos, you can see the Octado and Megado looms, both with computer dobby systems. Here solenoids, instead of plastic pegs, operate the shafts. The first video shows shafts moving after each press of the treadle—a computer interface indicates which shafts to lift. The second video shows solenoid action from inside the castle, based on a WIF (weaving information file). The dobby knife comes down after each pick to reset all solenoids before the next pick.
How do you choose between dobby styles? Cost, your comfort with software, and weave structures are all factors.
- Mechanical dobbies are significantly less expensive than computer dobbies. They do not require any software, though you can design fabrics with software and then manually program the lift plan onto program bars. Simple weave structures work best on a mechanical dobby—you will need many program bars for a weave structure with tabby picks between each pattern pick. For very long treadling sequences, it may not be possible to add enough program bars to the chain.
- Computer dobbies do not have any limit on the number of picks in a treadling sequence. They can handle block weave, saving you time and effort. The Computer 2.0 Dobby for Megado looms includes basic design software, or you can use a third-party program to create and edit drafts. Some weaving design programs can also run the dobby directly.
A final word about dobby looms: Most weaving books and websites do not go into depth about warping, designing for, or weaving on them. An independent, adventurous mindset will add to your weaving happiness if you choose a dobby loom.