by Buff
Weaving is an ancient and
wonderful art form, and I love doing it.
What I do not love, however, is everything that leads up to the pleasure
of throwing the shuttle and watching the fabric come into existence in your
hands. Like a warrior's quest, there are
a lot of obstacles and dragons to overcome (read "warping the loom") before
reaching the promised land of actual weaving.
"Warping" is the general
term for setting up the loom. The lengthwise yarns are the warp and the
crosswise yarns are called "weft" or "woof" or
"filling."
First, there's some math; I am
awful at math, but this is pretty simple if you remember your "times"
tables. It's like a school homework
question: I want to weave five scarves, each one 10" wide by 52" long. The "sett" (how closely the yarns
are crowded together) will be 20 "epi" (ends – or yarns – per inch). How much yarn do I need? You also need to add in fudge factors for
loom waste, as you can't weave every inch, and shrinkage when washed.
You decide on 208 ends at 10
yards long. Here's where string management comes in. Think about cutting 208 strings each 10 yards
long. Then think about having neat
parallel strings instead of something a bird could nest in.
Not to worry – there are ways to
keep the warp under control. But you
have to be tough and vigilant; give those strings an inch and they will take 10
yards. They are always looking for ways
to slither away or knot themselves up. The
solution is to keep them under tension at all times.
You start by winding the yarn
onto a warping board. You can see one in
the first photo below, the wooden thing in the foreground with dowels sticking out as pegs. As you wind your 10 yards, you must make a "cross"
in at least one end. Yarn number one
goes over this peg and under that one; yarn number two does the opposite. Each yarn is held in its own place by
crossing over each other. Heaven help
you if you lose the cross. Your lovely
series of stripes is now a pile of multi-colored yarns. (I know from painful
experience.)
When done winding, you put
"choke ties" (I said you had to be tough) at various places along the
warp, and you put "lease sticks" (two flat sticks held together by
shoe laces through the holes in the ends) into the cross to hold it in
place. Only then can you release the
tension, and chain the warp, using your hand like a big crochet hook.
Next is winding the warp onto the
"back beam" of the loom. You fasten
the lease sticks behind the "harnesses." These are the frames which hold the
"heddles" through which you thread the yarns. More about them
later.
You slide the looped end of the
warp through a stick at the back beam, and start carefully winding the whole 10
yards onto the beam. Still rebellious,
the yarns stick and try to knot together, and if you don't pay attention,
you'll find you are breaking threads as they pass through the lease stick
cross.
So as you pay out the warp, you
have to neaten up the threads before they get to the lease sticks. It's helpful at this point to have a couple
of extra hands, because the best way to wind on is with tension. It's hard to straighten the threads and hold
them under tension at the front of the loom while you're winding at the back of
the loom. Lacking extra hands, you might
want to recruit a friend. Do not
ask your significant other, however.
This leads to questions like "Are you sure this is the right way to
do this?" and tools flung across the room and general domestic
discord.
When you have wound most of the
yarn, it's time to "thread" the loom in one of the many configurations.
Remember the harnesses? They hold the heddles, which are vertical metal or
nylon pieces with an eye in the middle. When you weave, you will be raising and
lowering the harnesses to create the pattern. The more harnesses you have, the more pattern
you can create, but the more painful it is to reach the back ones; one of my
looms has 16 harnesses and it's a good thing I have long arms.
Here you discover that patience
is a virtue. Each yarn has to go through
one heddle eye, in the correct order, without skipping any or putting two into
one heddle. This step takes
approximately forever, even without making any mistakes. Photo two shows the threaded loom.
That done, each yarn has to go
through a "dent" in the proper-sized "reed." The metal reed consists of narrow slots
(dents) and controls the sett of the fabric. In my scarves, sett at 20 epi, I use a 10-dent
reed and put two yarns into each dent. Thicker yarns would need a reed with
larger dents. The reed is held in the
"beater" which you use when weaving to beat in the thread you've just
thrown.
Of course, as you are
"sleying" (I often feel like slaying the warp, but "sleying"
is the term used for pulling the yarns through the reed -- don't ask me who
made up this jargon) you find a mistake in the threading and have to re-thread
every yarn past the error.
We're almost there! You tie up the sleyed threads to another
stick on the front beam (also called "cloth beam," as that's where
the fabric will roll up), take out the lease sticks, and adjust the
tension. I frequently have tension
problems (in all senses of the word) and work to get it just right (I'm much
better now that I've been weaving for some 35 years).
Whew! Spread the warp by weaving
in few rows of rags or toilet paper and you're ready to go. The third photo shows the loom ready for weaving.
The yarns, now firmly under tension, are tamed at last (well, until you
throw the shuttle clumsily and break them, but that's another story). Now you can weave, which is soothing and
meditative, and have the thrill of watching a beautiful fabric emerge from
loose threads. You have reached the
promised land.
(Believe it or not, some people
really enjoy warping. I was thinking of hiring
a fellow weaving guild member to warp for me, but she moved.)
Notwithstanding the foregoing,
weaving is wonderful; please contact me if you want to know about the Woodland
Weavers' and Spinners' Guild, which takes in a large area on both sides of the
Delaware River, including Sullivan County, NY and Wayne County, PA. We meet at the Damascus, PA community center.
