Thursday, October 05, 2023

Table Runner Sampler: Notes on Dressing the Loom

Notes for my records.

1. Marking the reed as a ruler.


This idea came from Curmugeon Weaves via Michele over at Sweet Leaf Notebook. The reed is measured and marked with scraps of yarn. The center is tied with one color, another color marks out one-inch increments, with a third color for the five-inch marks. This is extremely useful! No more having to count and measure to figure out where to start sleying the reed with a new warp!

2. Tying on the new warp.


Not exactly necessary for a short, narrow sampler warp, especially since I had to re-thread the heddles. But I had two things in mind. One was to reacquaint myself with the technique of tying on, the other was to learn the weavers knot. I tried to learn it back in my pre-YouTube days, but found written descriptions confusing. Thanks to video demonstrations, I managed to learn it. I figured a narrow warp would be easier for learning and practicing on, rather than a big project warp.

3. Weighted winding on.


The goal, of course, is even tension across the warp. With my first table loom sampler and twill gamp dishtowels, I used Deborah Chandler's no-tension wind-and-tug method. That actually worked quite well, but I'm in experiment mode and want to see if the weight makes a difference.

Now, on to weaving.

4 comments:

Toirdhealbheach Beucail said...

Leigh, how long does it take you to do the set up on something like this?

Leigh said...

TB, for something narrow like this, a couple of hours(?) including measuring the warp. The longest part is the one-by-one threading of the heddles. So obviously, the wider the project, the longer that takes. I tied a new warp onto an old, so it took longer because of having to knot each one (and learning said knot, so a lot of fumbling).

Toirdhealbheach Beucail said...

Wow. I can imagine how much that would increase with larger looms and many more threads.

Leigh said...

There are some huge looms out there! My floor loom has a 59-inch weaving width. How long it takes also depends on the fineness of the thread. "Sett" is the number of ends (threads) per inch. The finer the thread, the more per inch are needed to make a nice fabric. Fat yarns require less per inch and so are faster.