I'm so glad I bought that 'Beginning Four Harness Loom' video. I would've had a heck of a time warping without it. I am able to watch the different steps, pause the video and preform them, then go back and watch the next step. The DVD has caused me a little bit of confusion, though. When the instructor says something to the effect of, "thread the warp in the same sequence as it went on the warping board", I took that literally. Meaning I thought it was important for that first thread on the board to be the first thread on the loom. But my warp would've been less twisted if I'd made the last on the board, the first on the loom. Also, in her video (and book) she reads her threading chart from left to right, but in my older books the chart is read right to left. For some reason I believed this was standard but apparently not? I'm still confused on this. Also in the video she ties the entire warp to the breast beam, in one bundle, before sleying the reed. This causes quite a bit of distortion to the lengths of threads as they are warped, In the future I will wind at least 2 separate warp bundles. All in all my warping process has gone smoothly. I managed to get one end per dent with no skips. As I was threading the heddles I would stop after every repeat of the draft and double check my threading order. I did make a mistake near the end of my threading but easily caught and corrected it. As long as I don't have any surprise crossed threads I should be good to go. Thus far my only warping emergency has been a broken warp thread. I think I manhandled it a bit too hard. To correct this I measured another warp thread and added it to that dent and heddle and will remove the snapped thread when I tie onto the cloth beam.
I wonder if it's true and I'll always remember my first.
Warp, that is.
The husbeast rigged this fancy set of hooks for hanging the
warping board. It stays put but is easily removed.
Reed sleyed, front view.
Back view. See the sley hook? You use it to pull
the threads through the reed dents (slots).
Now for the fun (?) part. Threading the heddles. My back was killing me after threading all 216 of them. I understand that some weavers grow to love the warping process. I don't know if I'll ever be one of them. But I appreciate that it's a very important and necessary step.
Heddles all threaded and double checked.
And here is my broken warp thread.
Next step? Beaming.
2 comments:
On reading the threading charts right to left versus left to right.. I haven't seen the video but the way I looked at it is when I'm looking at the draft with the threading across the top of the page, it's as if I'm looking at my loom. Bottom row on draft is shaft 1, first shaft you see when sitting at the loom shaft 1, and so on with the remaining rows and shafts. As long as that matches, it doesn't matter whether you start from the left or the right.
I think I get it. I don't know why I expected all weaving drafts to be written in the exact same format. After dealing with knitting patterns for years, I should know better.
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