Before the First Shot of the Shuttle: Prepping a Tricky Linen Warp
Looking through the reed
I have spent 4 hours warping yarns for a project that I want to weave with linen. The yarn that I have chosen is an extremely tricky one! It looked like a bundle of noodles when I saw it at the shop. It’s a thin yarn and has a natural wrinkly look and imagined that it would be a really nice airy summer blouse because of those wrinkles. Little that I know that this yarn is going to give me quite a hard time warping. I need to stretch them really tight or they will wrinkle up and come off the warping board pegs. The tension that it creates for the length of my warp which was 6m in total had broken my warping board. Not completely but it cracked part of the base wood where there were joints as the warp were pulling on the pegs so tightly. It made it until the end of the warping process, but now I will have to figure out a way to fix or strengthen the part of the warping board that has cracked.
Once warping is done, and I went on to the next step of winding them onto the detachable beam of my loom, to dress them onto the reed and heddles. Winding them on the beam itself took me 1 hour. And I stopped there because I was too tired and decided to continue the rest another day.
I continued with the next step a few days later. Threading the yarns through the heddles and reed. I had about 300 yarns strands for this project so I put on my glasses and went on putting them through the heddles and reed 300 times. Luckily my setting allows me to pull them through the heddles and reed at once so I don’t have to repeat the work twice for each of them. Thats half the time! It took me a little over 2 hours to finish them.
Once this is done I can then go on and set them up on my loom, tie the heddles to the foot pedals, and tie the wrap to the loom, getting them ready for weaving.
For those of you who are not familiar with weaving, these are roughly the basic steps for prepping the warp before the actual weaving process. There’s a lot more detail in each of them but this is roughly what one will need to do before even start weaving.
Warp the necessary length and number of strands of yarns that you will need for your project. I usually warp around 4m and 200 count of yarns, which suits my reed which has 5 slots every cm, and I usually will weave a 40cm width textile
Putting each strand of yarn in the slots in your reed to separate the yarns while weaving
Put the yarns through the heddles so that the yarns will move alternately or in a sequence of a weaving pattern. I usually will use either 2 or 4 shafts for my work.
Place the yarns on the loom by winding it onto the loom itself so that you can set it up for weaving.