Here’s a a close-up of the fabric being made. The 100% wool handspun had a tendency to stick to each other sometimes, so I had to be careful when lifting or lowering the reed, that the correct threads were moving.
Once I got the loom fully dressed and ready to weave, the weaving went well. I promise, I won’t be making them again, so no reason to re-live the humiliation. There were a few other rookie mistakes I made in the process of making the warp for this blanket, but that’s enough for now. And I also learned that when your loom starts to tilt and move towards the warping peg, threatening the length of future warp threads, duct tape won’t hold it in place.
I also learned the hard way that the clamps they provide you with in the kit serve a function. It holds the tension that is created when you are pulling the yarns through the reed and wrapping them around a warping peg on the other side of the room. Except for the fact that it didn’t have any solid heavy tables that I learned, serve an important function when making the warp. So I set myself up on the landing – it’s a large space and I believed it would be perfect for making the warp. I couldn’t work at the desk in my studio because my youngest daughter was using the entire space as a study to finish up her final papers and study for university exams. I was so excited to get this started that for a while I lost my mind weaving smarts. So the threading became 18 dark grey 18 light grey 18 white, 6 red. But at the last minute, I decided to add a shot of red yarn to the pattern.
#Weaveit rigid heddle full
I planned to use the full width of the loom and to do a kind of checked pattern – 20 dark grey 20 light grey 20 white, and to weave it with the same pattern. I spun them up (woolen) and when I lined them up next to the white yarn I made in Spinzilla 2015 – I new my dream for a blanket was going to be realized. At Olds College Fibre Week I purchased some dark grey and light grey rovings from a local producer. It wasn’t super soft, but it was beautiful greys. It was a process all its own, but much faster than starting from square one! Once I was finished, no threads remained in the incorrect reed, so it was easy to just pull it away.Īfter sleying all the ends through the reed, I tipped it upright and put it into the beater, then tied on to the front beam and checked for errors.The third weaving project was one that I had in mind for months. Then I pulled each group of threads out of the incorrect reed and placed them into the correct one. I pushed the incorrect reed back, and then put the correct reed in front. But because I had already done a lot of work grouping the threads together correctly, I improvised an easier and faster solution. To fix the mistake, I could have pulled all the threads out of the reed and started over with the correct one. (It was early, and my coffee apparently hadn't kicked in yet!) This mistake needed to be fixed, otherwise I'd end up with a narrow scarf as stiff as cardboard! Of course, because nothing is ever as easy as it should be, I grabbed the 15 dent reed instead of the 12 dent and was almost halfway through the task when I realized what I'd done. (A description is in the tutorial I linked above.) It was a lot easier than the way I learned and led to a lot less neck strain than the methods I'd tried before.
This was the first time I tried threading the reed laying down flat instead of upright in the beater. Looking at the reed substitution chart, if I used the 12 dent reed, and sleyed in a sequence of 2 per dent, 2 per dent, 2 per dent, then 3 per dent, I would get 27 ends to the inch. I have reeds that are 8, 10, 12, and 15 dents per inch. Since I don't have a reed that has 27 dents to the inch (most people don't!), I use a reed substitution chart to figure out what to do. This particular yarn is a 20/2 silk, which a lot of people set at 27 ends to the inch. After threading the heddles, I untie those bundles one by one and pull warp ends through the reed.
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