Ready to roll

We had an absolutely lovely day at Hopewell Weaving yesterday. I love Jennie's common sense approach to weaving and how she can do easily move between teaching absolute beginners (there were some of those) and experienced weavers (there were a couple of those), including those inbetween (the rest of us). 

This was one of those classes where you don't come away with one big revelation but loads of little gems about the warping process. 

A few of my new gems:

• You can wind small sections of warp. You don't have to wind and manage the whole of the warp at one time. I know this is going to sound silly to experienced weavers but I didn't know this. I've wound large warps where the strands were popping off the warping pegs because it was too much. Just wind smaller sections. BAM! Problem solved. Need to warp with different colors or yarns?  BAM!  Problem solved. 

 My purple and green linen warp fully wound on. 

• How do you hold the warp and keep it organized?  Use the loopers from the little potholder looms, of course. And super important to wrap one all the around the cross. 

•  Loopers and slip knots work just fine. 
• Before tying the final knot on the front beam, lift the shafts to make sure there are no crossed threads. 
• No one really knows why plain weave is also called tabby and the terms are interchangeable. There are theories but no one really knows. 

There's more but the main lesson is that when you get 9 people in one room who are open to learning new things for a day, it makes for a darned enjoyable day!

Rescue Scarf

A friend of mine got very interested in weaving a couple of years ago and, encouraged by her niece, bought an overshot scarf kit from Yarn Barn.  Another friend and I helped her get her loom warped (actually it was my loom - long story).  However the threading was a little off, she thought, and she just never got back to fixing it and getting started.  After a (long) while, she decided that she had lost interest and gave me the loom back so I could do the weaving.

In the meantime, however, the warp (which was a lace weight wool yarn) had weakened in the area where the heddle had been rubbing it so when I got it home, I realized I was going to have to rethread (to find the mistake in threading) and I might as well get the warp past the weakened area so I wouldn't have to keep fixing the broken strands.

I finally got everything together last weekend and got this far:

Not too bad until I realized that I had missed a strand between the 2 groups I'd threaded and had to rethread a whole section.  I finally got that done and here's where I am now:

If that looks like the same place, it is.  At least I got back to the point where I was before I discovered MY mistake!  Now all I need is a little time and patience and I might actually get this sucker re-warped and going again.

Wish me luck.