A$$ Over Teakettle

Sometimes things fall apart 

so that better things can fall together.  

~ Marilyn Monroe

I'm still working on preparing my loom for the first set of four Christmas gifts.  As I may have "mentioned" (i.e., bitterly complained about) already, the instructor in the Craftsy class I'm taking is teaching us how to warp the loom from the back to the front - and I've always done it from the front to the back.  

It's amazing how you can get some practice doing something one way and start taking for granted how comfortable you have grown with that method, until someone challenges you to do the same thing using a different method...  

In other words, doing things "backwards" has dumped me a$$ over teakettle!  

With my husband's help, I got the warp wrapped around the back beam - but there were signs that my tension isn't even, in that the exposed thread ends aren't all the same length - there is a discrepancy of several inches between the shortest and the longest!  That should NOT be the case...  :(

And you should have seen her warp on the video at this point - every thread exactly the same length and perfectly smooth!  :(

Next up was threading the heddles - I did groups of 4 and tied slip knots at the end of each bundle.  It was a little more complicated and twisty, because I had wrapped three lengths of thread at a time - so there wasn't a perfect "next one" at each moment...  

Step #3 - sleying the reed - again working in groups of four and "securing" each group with a slip knot - Ha! - as if that slip knot will secure the threads against Pepper once she discovers the dangling bunches...   

A close-up of the slip knots:  

Progress - the reed has been sleyed (long live the reed!).  

Another sign of messing things up - my warp is not centered in the reed - I have about 4 inches left over on one side and only about 1 inch left over on the other side...  This never happened before - although there is not really anything about this new method that should have made this step harder.  :(

Not sure how big a difference this is going to make - I'm probably going to try to go ahead and work with it - rather than pulling all of those threads out and re-sleying them into different "dents" (the slots in the reed).  

The last major step is to attach the warp to the front beam - hopefully I can squeeze that in some evening this week, after work.  

Let's hope that this is one of those times that Ms. Monroe was talking about and all this aggravation of learning to prepare the loom in a different way pays off!