Class Prep

While Mary worked on class prep for the Dyes from Nature workshop yesterday, I managed to thread the tea towel warp on the Megado.  However, today she needed to go to the guild room to do further prep that was just easier to do up there.  Since I also have a class coming up fairly shortly, I grabbed what I needed to wind the warps for my class and managed to start winding the class warps.

The photo shows how I deal with multiple yarn packages.  This warp was for tea towels and the warp was the design focus with stripes in a more-or-less Fibonacci sequence using three solid colours and a stripe of variegated yarn.

Over the years I got fed up with cones and tubes tipping over when I wound a warp on the warping board, so one day I stuck a couple of extra pegs in at the bottom of the board and laid a reed across them through which I thread the yarn.  It comes straight up off the yarn package and just makes winding a warp so much easier.

When I got to the guild room today, I did the same thing - extra pegs to hold a reed and thread the yarn from two tubes up through it so that they would wind off the tubes without catching or tipping over.  I also brought my little two peg stand so that when the tubes emptied they continued to stay upright.

In the end I only got two warps wound, but since I need five, it felt like a decent start.  I do, after all, still have to dress five looms.

This class is an Introduction to Floor Loom Weaving and students need have no previous experience at all.  I decided that it would be a lot easier to start them out actually weaving and then if they decided they were interested in going further, I will see about offering another class later in the spring where we will dig into the preparation of the loom, and some of the more subtle aspects of the craft, like figuring out density and such.

Mary says she will be doing class prep pretty much all day tomorrow, so I'm hoping I can sley the reed on the Megado and even begin weaving.

This 'holiday' is mostly 'work' for her so far.  I'm hoping we can go to the park for a walk next week.