Dressing The Loom 1

Day 174: At a time when I'm desperately short of natural-history materials for my daily posts, I am pleased that several friends have expressed interest in the step-by-step process of weaving. Because this is a large project made with relatively fine thread, one or two phases are all I can hope to achieve in a single day.

Having wound the warp onto the back beam using my (jokingly) patented "Gatorade Method," I was ready to proceed with drawing the threads through their individual heddles yesterday morning. The heddles on this loom are held in four harnesses (i.e., it is a "four-shaft loom"). To weave a twill pattern, the heddles must be threaded in precise order, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. There's no room for mistakes here, so of course that meant I committed one: I miscounted heddles on the #3 harness, shorting the pattern by 20. I was not so far into the threading when I discovered the error, but even so, fixing it was a major undertaking because the heddles WERE partly threaded and I didn't want to pull out two hours' work. The alternative solution was to figure out how to add additional heddles to the harness, if indeed that was even possible. By raising the #3 harness and supporting it with a spacer, I was able to access the screw securing the lower heddle rod. By lowering the #3 harness, raising #1, #2 and #4 and supporting them with a spacer, I was able to get at the screw for the upper heddle rod somewhat more easily. This part wasn't as hard as I'd expected it to be, and I thought I was home, free and easy. However, when I threaded new heddles onto the lower rod, I discovered they were an inch too short to mount on the upper rod. Bugger! Apparently I'd bought them for a different loom (probably the table loom I never use). Now the heddle-exchange project had taken on a much larger dimension. I had plenty of spare heddles on other harnesses, so by means of a lot of fiddling and diddling, I removed them from #2 and placed them on #3. In the process, I knocked a plant off the shelf and spread dirt all over the craft room floor. Needless to say, by this point, I had used up my daily allotment of profanity and was taking out a loan for more. By bedtime, I was still 75 threads short of done, but my nerves and back were shrieking. This morning, I finished up the threading of the heddles and am now ready for the next phase: threading the reed. Then let the weaving commence!