Time to scramble!

Amazing Grace is arriving early! I got a phone call yesterday telling me that the loom was en route from Los Angeles to Oakland, and would likely be delivered to my doorstep by the end of the week. Yay!

Of course, that launched a mad scramble to prepare. Amazing Grace, while a delightful bundle of loom, is a big girl. Her crate measures 63″ x 64″ (that’s 161 x 163 cm for those of you in metric-land). Because it weighs 1200 pounds (540 kg), once the trucker sets it down, it’s not moving anywhere. So I had to clear room in the garage, pronto.

Here’s a photo of the garage beforehand:

And here’s the photo after my weaving buddy Alfred and I spent three hours muscling things around the garage:

There is now enough space to set down the pallet, and (I hope!) assemble Amazing Grace once she arrives.

By the way, if you’re wondering how two people managed to move a 600-pound loom, we did it with sheets of HDPE (high-density polyethylene). It’s slippery stuff, so we boosted each leg onto a slab of the slick plastic, then slid the loom along the slabs. When we ran out of room on the first slab, we put another slab in front of it, and slid the loom onto the new slab. It took awhile and considerable muscle from Alfred, but we managed to move the loom from one side of the garage to the other.

I am still trying to figure out a workable arrangement of looms. If you click on the “after” photo, you can see an outline marked on the floor in blue tape. That is where Grace will live. But you may also notice that there’s only about 2.5 feet between Grace and the water heater, and another 1.5-2 feet between Grace and Emmy (the 40-shaft AVL). That totals about 4 feet – 4.5 to be generous – to get past the looms along the sides. 4.5 feet is only enough space for two walkways, and since I can’t put a loom right up against the wall, it means that Grace and Emmy will have to be crammed next to each other, Emmy’s right side against Grace’s left. That is not really a workable configuration because I really need to be able to access both sides of whatever loom I’m using.

Now, I’m having both Emmy and Grace put onto casters so I can wheel them about, but I’m not sure I want to have to move a a 600 and an 1100-pound loom about on a regular basis, even on wheels.

I do have one other possible garage configuration, which looks like this:

This puts one loom perpendicular to the other one, and allows a little bit more space between looms. But not much more space. And I would have to move every single item in the garage (which has 720 square feet of shelving…ouch!) to try out this arrangement. So I think I will stick with the current arrangement and see if I can make it work. If not, Emmy may end up going to another home. But I hope I can make it all work!

Fortunately for me, the garage is separate from the house, so the cats (much to their chagrin) aren’t able to help with all this. But they are determined to help with everything else. Here is a lovely video of Mike attempting the “advanced” level of changing the sheets – with cats!

(and yes, there are two cats in that video…that mysterious lump on the left is Fritz!)