This blog post covers a couple of days.
I am up to threading the yarn through the heddles. I have 4 shafts, and I’m just putting the yarn thru in order: 1,2,3,4. (I think this is called a straight draw, but don’t quote me.) I tie a knot with each group of 12; here I have 24 threaded.
On shaft 1, I ran out of heddles. I thought I had more than enough, so I’d saved 2 at the beginning and skipped some of the bent ones. In retrospect, a mistake, but a very minor one — I got to practice Chandler’s lesson on making string heddles, and they seem to work fine.
Here I have all 120 ends threaded:
Now, I tie each of the groups onto the “apron rod” — I discovered that it’s an old paint stirrer! It seems to work, although it would be short if I were using the whole 14″ width of the loom, so I’ll replace it at some point.
I used a lark’s head knot (would you look at that — Chandler’s book is making me sound like I actually know something!) to tie the yarn on. Since my warp is shorter than I wanted it, I decided to use this method.
Here, Adidas is helping me wind the warp onto the back beam. As I wind, he is making sure there are no tangles in the front.
Then, I attached the yarn to the front apron rod. It took a bit of concentration but wasn’t as hard as it seemed from the description in the book. I tried to get the tension as even as I could.
When that was done, I lifted each shaft in turn, till I got to #3:
Oops, a mis-threaded heddle.
Not too hard to fix (from the front). Found 2 more errors, and fixed them too. See, in the 5th group from the right, there are 3 threads in a row that go “under.”
The warping is now done — hooray! I used paper to start and to even out the warp threads — I should have done more than 3 passes, but I was anxious to get a few picks in before I went to bed. And, this is a sampler, after all. So I indulged myself:
By the next blog post, you should see weaving!
