Deja Vu

With both looms needing warps and feeling somewhat better after a couple of trips to the chiropractor I got the sample warp for my student onto the loom yesterday and today. With just one student I've found that it's not a bad thing to dress the loom for them first, let them get the feel of the loom and weave a little before we start the process of how to actually dress the loom.

They weave a sample following the directions in Davison's green book and then if they want to go ahead and make a scarf or something, they can choose one of the patterns they have already woven. It makes the weaving of the sample relevant to the process. :) The yarn I chose is fairly thick so I made the warp 5 yards long and 16" wide. If she doesn't want to finish it it's no huge loss as the wool yarn was a mill end and quite cheap. OTOH, if she really enjoys it, there's lots for her to play with. And lots of different treadlings for a straight twill threading.



Once the Fanny loom was ready I turned my attention to the AVL. Running out of warp before I ran out of ideas, not to mention hardly making a dent in my rayon chenille stash, I decided to go ahead and dress the loom with another 40 yards of the same Diversified Plain Weave.

The second beam on the loom is quite low and I've always sat upon a stool to wind a warp on it. It's particularly important now because bending is not comfortable, particularly, even though I'm a lot more mobile. :)

I sit facing the loom and wind 20 turns with one hand, then switch and wind 20 with the other. Once again I'm putting an 'extra' 5 turns on because it looked like that was just about exactly correct to keep the two warps the right length. It's hard to judge build up because the two yarns are radically different in their thickness so I just guessed for the first warp. :)

We've been inundated with smoke from several of the many wildfires burning to the west of us. Last night was terrible and we're all praying for a good hard heavy rain, not just to help put the fires out, but to soak the bush. About 80% of the province is on either high or extreme fire hazard alert, many smaller communities are on evacuation order or alert and the smoke - gets everywhere. More info here: http://3.ly/86uX

Currently reading The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison