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Warping up with household furniture and some other things

Hi there all.

Bit of a picture heavy post the now. I've joined a group on Facebook called Weaving Hacks, which is a very nice group which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Anyhoo, I said I'd share some of the unconventional ways I make warps, so I'm going to do the indoor one the now as it's very cold outdoors so there's no way I'm going to do a "making a warp on fence posts / sticks in the ground / hammers tied to trees / sticks wedged into a dyke post while it's this cold.

Hate the cold me, totally hate it.

So, that's the craic for this post.

I'm going to start off with making paper bobbins so I can break down a large cone into separate packages.







Simple enough. Wrap a piece of paper Round a pencil, tape it and Bob's your auntie.

Then stick a pencil in a drill, put the bobbin on and wind your yarn on. Takes ages, I really miss having access to a bobbin winder. I took a couple of pictures of this but not gonna bother adding them because it's pretty straightforward.

Then knitting pins in a box plus bobbins equals a convenient way to keep your yarns in order while warping.



OK, not the best picture I could have taken, but this isn't the main thrust of the post and if I'm going to do a warping post I might as well do it properly and dedicate an entire post and a couple of videos. This is more for people who can weave but are just looking for some handy tricks.

So, onto the handy trick. I almost never use warping frames when making tablet warps, because I learned without them and am quite happy continuing that way. Warping for a loom is a different story, I'd feel very uneasy about making a nice wide loom warp without proper equipment, but maybe that's just my privileged education showing. Anyway, never mind that. Here's three pics of the warp in progress.

First, one end.



Then the other.



Finally, the whole thing, for context.



That's my parents' kitchen. Of course I made sure I had the place to myself for a couple hours first. That got me about 6 metres of warp which became about 5 metres of this.



Here's a full view of the loom.



So, that's that really. Now I'm going to talk about the loom a little because it's my baby and I like talking about it.
6 metres was really a stretch to warp on this loom. I don't believe in using warp sticks and prefer to narrow my warp as it winds on in order to avoid slop, especially as if I used warp sticks I'd be lucky to get a metre on here.

So, it went OK, not brilliantly and I had to bodge the edges inwards as I was winding, but I improved the process in the warp after this and was happier with it, though it's still not ideal. I still got tight edges from halfway through till the end but it remained weave able throughout and the finished band wasn't noticeably deformed apart from having decreased in density in the middle comparative to the edges, though I'm unsure whether that was a problem with the warping or my weft tucking, as I've always had problems with widening bands and am only now getting serious about addressing it.

Anyway, it worked but wasn't ideal do that part of the design and process must change. Watch this space, and indeed any other space in which I hang out.

Also, the cloth collection is not ideal and makes me wonder whether I even want a cloth beam at all. For TW it's not exactly necessary, but given i want thus loom to be capable of ingle and pickup weaving also for weaving slightly wider cloth I think I should keep it for now and attempt to improve it in a similar manner to the warp beam.

Anyhow, that's that. In other news I'm leaving for hopefully a new and interesting life in Greece in a couple of weeks where I can continue my weaving and loom development, now here's a picture of my dog Eris with her friend Blot. Eris is the little one.

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