First was some maths to work out how far apart to space my yarns and therefore how many threads I needed in my warp to weave across 8 inches of fabric. (132 in this case, adding a couple extra either side to make a firm selvedge. Then it was an hour and a half to measure out the 7 metre long threads on the warping board.
Here's an oh-so-arty shot of my warp. Rather nice, I think.
After lunch I then started to dress the loom. I had about four hours and I hoped that would be enough to take the warp off the board and onto the loom, but of course because I've never done it before I needed to stop at each stage and check I wasn't going wrong.
I made a huge braid of the warp (sorry, no photos) then took a while to space the threads out evenly on the back of the loom. After that it took about an hour to wind the warp onto the back roller (have you any idea just how long 7 metres?) For those with the technical interest, I'm using linen blends (mainly linen and wool but some linen and silk) and they are fine, so I will be using a 16 ends per inch reed (eek!). After that I began threading the warp threads through the heddles -the little holes in metal bars that allow you to lift the threads up and down. By 5pm I had done half of them, but then needed to stop, tidy up my bench in the art studio and move my gear into the textile studio (BA students need the art studio tomorrow) and then needed to find out how to log on to the computer. So my loom is currently left like this:
Library familiarisation and research techniques tomorrow morning, then back to the loom in the afternoon!.
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