Let Us All Praise Jim Ahrens

helping weavers have fun since 1938

Last summer, my relatives gifted us a lightweight cordless vacuum to make our household cleanup chores easier. Its light weight does make it easy to operate, but it is quite fiddly whenever it is time to empty the canister. My brother in law discovered this when he was visiting, he did a round of vacuuming and asked me for help to open the canister. He watched with interest as I took the vacuum, pulled out a large trash can and cleared a large space on the floor to empty the canister, explaining that this was going to take awhile and would likely end with some contents of the canister spilled back onto the freshly vacuumed floor.

My brother in law, an engineer who works in the Detroit auto industry, got a good chuckle out of this. When I apologized for not being tech savvy enough to operate the canister more quickly, he smiled and gently cut me off, saying “no - if something doesn’t work well, it means it was too poorly engineered for people to be able to use easily. It is a design problem, not a problem with you.” I took those words to heart and was grateful for his perspective as we figured out how to unload the canister together. And no, we never did discover an easier way to open it.

This made me think about how often we might be shortchanging ourselves on a daily basis. Sometimes our own assumptions about what we can and cannot do may have less to do with us and more to do with good engineering and design. I don’t think like an engineer everyday, so it’s not something I had really considered before. (Belated kudos to all those engineers and designers who are busy making our lives easier. I appreciate you so much more, now that I am actively looking for and appreciating your handiwork!)

With that in mind, let me introduce you to a marvel of good engineering that has recently found a permanent place in my weaving life. After that conversation with my brother in law, I am more capable of appreciating all that it can do for me.

Thanks to a grant provided by the Craft Heritage Prize sponsored by the Kendra Scott Foundation and NEST, I was able to upgrade my weaving loom last October. I have always loved weaving complex designs, so upgrading from a four shaft floor loom to an eight shaft floor loom greatly expanded the possibilities for my future weaving projects.

Rather than purchase a new state of the art floor loom, I had an opportunity to buy one of the original Ahrens Home looms built by Jim Ahrens and patented in October 1952. It felt like just the right thing to do. I am only the third owner of this beautiful birdseye maple loom, which has spent most of its life on California’s central coast.

Here is how Jannie Taylor described this loom: “Ahrens 8-shaft floor loom with side tie-up. Before there was AVL, there was Ahrens & Violette Looms, before that Jim Ahrens was building looms in his workshop in Oakland. This is one of the original Ahrens Home Looms, purchased by Ena Marston in the early 1950s. She sold it to me in the early 2000s. It is a great loom and you never have to get under it to tie-up the shafts!”

Ena Marston, the loom’s original owner, was one of the first four female professors hired by Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo after World War II, having previously served as commander of a women’s auxiliary unit of the Marines. She taught English at Cal Poly for 24 years and after retirement delved into weaving, teaching and mentoring. She served as weaving editor of the Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot magazine still published by the Handweavers Guild of America.

Ena Marston passed her loom along to weaver Jannie Taylor, who has coached thousands of weavers as an instructor and mentor. I met Jannie a few years ago at a weaving conference when I volunteered to be her classroom assistant for a course in Loom Controlled Weave Structures. It was a round robin class, which meant that fifteen of us brought our own looms threaded with different weave structures that Jannie had chosen for us to represent a variety of possibilities for loom controlled weaves. We took turns weaving on each others’ looms, guided patiently by Jannie who had an uncanny ability to tune in to everyone’s needs and anticipate when a weaver was veering towards the danger zone. As I was intently focused on the weaving in front of me, I would suddenly be startled to see the warp threads of my loom gently bouncing and moving. Looking up, I would notice Jannie standing there on the other side of my loom with a gentle smile, plucking and untangling twisted warp threads before they could cause me a headache, or quietly imparting wisdom and answering questions.

Jannie carefully monitored the flow of our class and helped smooth out any student anxieties with well timed humorous lectures, show and tells and breaks. She brought fifty or more weaving samples to class along with magazines, out of print books and notebooks full of every imaginable reference on the class topic. Every day she wore a special handmade garment showcasing one of the weave structures we were learning in class. At the end of the course, we rolled yards of samples off of the fifteen looms and looked at them together for some last learning moments before we cut the samples apart to take home in well organized notebooks with our personal annotations about each weave structure. I learned so much, and the systematic approach Jannie used to guide us is something I have since adapted to my own at-home explorations of new weave structures and concepts.

My Ahrens Home Loom is a daily reminder of the talents that Jim Ahrens, Ena Marston and Jannie Taylor brought to the craft of weaving during their lifetimes. My loom and I are still getting to know each other, but every day it seems I discover a feature to appreciate anew, as a result of the thoughtful engineering and ingenuity that Jim Ahrens put into its construction so many decades ago.

Jim Ahrens studied the commercial looms being used in Europe and set to work designing a loom that incorporated all of these features but could be operated manually, undeterred by power outages. Jannie Taylor pointed me towards https://ahrenslooms.com, a website created by Peggy Osterkamp and Vera Totos to recount the entertaining history of the original Ahrens Home Loom and document its many innovative technical features. According to Osterkamp (who worked with Ahrens) and Totos, Ahrens wanted weavers to have fun and “strove to make better equipment that poses fewer limitations to the weaver’s imagination…a quieter, lighter, more weaver friendly loom to make complex patterns.”

The loom’s two beam structure (no breast beam or back beam) pivots easily for easy transport through doorways and allows the weaver to sit very close to the loom for warping without reaching over a beam. The warps attach to dowels that embed into grooves on the warp beam and cloth beam, allowing warp and cloth to be wound smoothly onto the beam without using aprons or separators. Lightweight shafts allow for less tiring treadling and a weaver can easily tie as many string heddles as needed to expand each shaft’s capacity. The loom’s pulley system is easy to maintain and allows side tie ups of the treadles to avoid having to crawl under the loom to make adjustments. An automatic tensioning system and adjustable warp height are much appreciated conveniences.

Jim Ahrens went on to co-found the AVL Loom company in Chico, California and led the way in developing many varieties of computerized looms sold in the marketplace today. These AVL looms, automated or not, share common design features with the original innovative 1950s Ahrens Home Loom I own.

Jannie Taylor had a long history with AVL as an instructor for students learning how to operate these technical devices and a consultant providing insights to AVL. Sadly, Jannie Taylor left us in 2025, honored by weavers around the world who continue to implement her teachings, watch her online instructional videos and weave complex structures.

Last October I told Jannie that her loom would be my lifetime loom and that I fully intend to throw a 100th birthday party for it in October 2052 to celebrate the anniversary of its 1952 U.S. patent. This loom efficiently does so many useful things that there will be a project on it most days from now on. Someday this loom will certainly be passed on to another weaver who can grow from it as I have.

I won’t be startled someday if I imagine that I feel warp strings being plucked as I am busy weaving. Jannie Taylor and Ena Marston will probably still be watching, curious about what is being woven on their loom. As Jannie’s husband was helping me load the loom into my car last fall, he said “I hope when you weave on this loom, sometimes you will think fondly of Jannie.” I do, and will, throughout the rest of my weaving journey. For now I am happy to take my time getting acquainted with my Ahrens Home Loom and appreciating the masterpiece of its engineering, knowing it has capably stood the test of time and has so much more fun to share with me.