Time for Part 2 of the lesson! It took me a bit longer to get to this simply because I have been absorbed in the project. We left off at getting the warp onto the back sectional beam of the loom and ready to start threading.

When the warp is wound onto the beam, the threading cross is on the top so it’s easily accessible. The next step is to run lease sticks through the cross and attach them to the loom so they are suspended. By running a flat stick through each section of the cross, the threading order is visible and it makes finding the individual threads much easier. When weaving a design that has many colors and color changes, this is a great way to make sure your threads stay in the right order.

You can see in these pictures that I’m using two pieces of decorative molding I bought at Lowes a few years ago. It isn’t the best, but it works! Once the lease sticks are threaded through the cross and hung, I move to the front of the loom to begin threading heddles.

Now, anatomy lesson. There are many varieties of looms. Rigid heddle looms, backstrap looms, inkle looms, table looms, floor looms – you get the idea. In addition to that, there are different mechanisms used in floor looms, but the basic is that you have different numbers of harnesses (also called shafts) that move independently from each other. This loom has 8 wood-frame harnesses.

Each harness has two metal bars, one at the top and one at the bottom, along which heddles are strung and held under tension with spring clips. Heddles are made of either metal or string with an eye opening that allows individual pieces of yarn to be threaded/attached to one of those independently moving harnesses.

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Each harness, equipped with the number of heddles each weaver determines is adequate for their weaving, is threaded according to the pattern they wish to make. For this project, it is a simple plain weave, so I only need four of the eight harnesses. I begin taking small bouts of threads from the lease sticks and thread 1 end of yarn through a heddle on shaft 1, then another end on shaft 2, the next end on shaft 3, and a 4^th strand on shaft 4.

This process is repeated for the entire warp width. After every 2-inches, I double check my threading to make sure each thread is attached to the right harness and that no threads are crossed or wrapped around each other. They are loosely tied in front to keep them from falling out of the heddles, and then I move to the next section until every end of yarn is threaded through a heddle on the appropriate harness.

This, however, is not the ended of threading. Now the yarn has to be threaded through a reed, or, in weaving vernacular, sleying the reed is the next step. Why do they call it sleying? I don’t know, but I like it. Makes me feel like I’m “killing it” as a weaver. Anyway. Reeds are like metal fences, with evenly spaced openings, called dents, that the warp ends are threaded through in order to get your weaving to the right width. For this project, I decided on 18 warp ends per inch and it’s 26” wide. My reed has 12 dents per inch, so I sley one thread in a dent, and two in the next, opening after opening so that I end up with 18 threads sleyed in the reed for every inch. But you also have to make sure that you sley the reed in order with the heddles to keep the threads straight. So if my first thread is on shaft one, I have to make sure I grab THAT thread to go through the reed. The next thread is on shaft two. If I accidentally grab the thread from shaft 3 instead, the one on shaft 2 will either not get threaded, or it will cross over other threads and cause a headache when I actually start weaving.

This process progresses just like threading the heddles, all the way across until each thread is sleyed through the reed. And like the heddles, I tie a loose knot about every inch of width to keep the yarn from slipping back out of the reed. It’s a lot of tedious work to risk losing the effort while moving things about.

Next is to tie the warp ends to the front of the loom. Like the back of the loom, there is a front beam, also called the cloth beam, that the finished cloth gets wound onto as you weave. Attached to the cloth beam is a front apron rod. This extra rod is in place because the cloth beam is so far away from the beginning of the warp threads that there would be an enormous amount of yarn wasted if you tried to tie those threads directly to that beam. Instead, the smaller rod is attached to the beam with long lengths of twine or other strong, non-stretchy material so that it can reach over the front breast beam and much closer to the reed. The warp ends are tied to the apron rod in small bundles and pulled tight because one of the must-have’s for weaving is good, even tension on all the threads.

Next is the treadles. The bottom of each harness is resting on jacks and lamms. That is why this loom is called a Jack loom. There are treadles resting on the floor and they are tied to the lamms according to the pattern so that when one is pressed, it raises pulls down the lamm and in turn raises the jack and harness while the other harnesses stay stationary. You can see in the picture below (if you look closely) that one treadle is attached to harnesses 1 and 3, and the other is tied to harnesses 2 and 4. This is the basic pattern for plain weave using 4 harnesses.

Now I am ready to start weaving! Each time I press a treadle, some yarns rise and others stay flat, creating a V-shaped opening called “the shed”, and this is where a shuttle with weft yarn passes through. The shuttle is passed through and then the reed in the beater bar is then pulled forward to press the yarn down into a straight line. Each new piece needs a bit of work before the real project is started in order to spread the yarn out after tying all those knots on the apron bar.

In the picture above, you can see where I’ve woven a few picks (that’s the term for each line of weft yarn) to spread the warp, and then a few more to try to get a feel for how much force I need to use pulling the beater bar forward to get an evenly balanced weave. This project was warped at 18 ends per inch, so to be balanced, I need to weave 18 picks of weft per inch as well. To be honest, this project does not want to be balanced. It is averaging closer to 15 picks per inch and I’m beating the weft yarn fairly fiercely. So, I’m letting it be what it wants to be; otherwise, I risk taking the joy out of the whole hobby!

I am now in the middle of weaving this project, having only a few more inches of the second towel to go! I hope you enjoyed this update on the process of weaving. I’ll be back again soon with some finished products! In the mean time, I hope you can look at your fabric goods with maybe a little more appreciation for them. While the fabric of our modern lives has more than likely been made with a machine, remember there was a time when every woven fabric for clothing, upholstery, tapestry, you-get-the-idea, DID involve this amount of labor! It’s pretty hard to imagine, but makes a little more sense why old homes had small closets!