weave4fun

I had the priviledge this week of paying host to Laura Fry and Kerstin Froberg. Sadly, they arrived the day before the bank holiday and had to leave the following afternoon so were unable to receive the tour of the School of Textile And Design they were hoping for. Never mind though, as weavers are weavers and we love to talk about weaving. Over dinner and a pint or two we discussed many subjects including Vadmal, the pros and cons of AVL looms and the routes by which each of us came to weaving. It was a very nice evening and a real delight to meet other weavers with such a depth of passion and knowledge. Why I didn't take any pictures I'll never know, I guess I was just too busy chatting away about looms and yarn and going on about how I learned to weave upside down and back to front and made myself do everything the hard way (which stands me in good stead when I have to rescue other people's warping errors). Interestingly, I'd had it in my head the Laura wa...

Not much else to say. Sometimes you run out of heddles, or perhaps you have to add one after you're started warping due to a threading error, so here's how I do it.

Getting ready to put as large a warp as possible on my 4-shaft bigloom, it occured to me that since buying the thing, i've never counted the heddles. So i did, and it turned out they were unevenly distributed across the shafts, which isn't much good is it? So, i took the frames apart, recounted all the heddles along with the spares and find i have about 1000 metal heddles. Which is nice. Making a warp of 30epi, as i tend to do (based on 2 ends per dent on a 14 dent reed on my table loom), that should give me a warp of a width of, ooh, let's see 1000 % 30 = 33.33' So, about 2 and 1/3rd feet or so. which i suppose ain't bad. but if i want to ever consider weaving silk i'm gonna need a lot more heddles like. Now, as i'm in the mood, i might as well calculate the metreage of a 4m warp of 1000ends which isn't difficult, that's 4 KM of yarn. not bad. Am i wittering? Maybe Anyhow, I'm making a warp with blue and grey yarn running concurrently, to make a...