Half done. And now that I’m this far, I’m almost thinking more of how I want to handle 300 warps! I am not weaving them back in, I know this for sure.
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I went back and read my previous warping posts, and it took me more than 6 hours to set up the loom. My guess is that I can cut that by perhaps a third next time (provided I don’t make a mistake back at the beginning of warping and have to take it back).
It took me a very long time to do the first few rows. I can’t string an entire row of beads at a time — I don’t know exactly the number of colors I need to match the image behind the loom. The first row was all red, that was easy. Then it’s counting the spaces, bracketing by the warp threads, in each color, putting on maybe 15 beads at at time. This piece is 74 beads wide. So, I string the beads, put the needle between the warps for at least the distance of the beads I’ve strung, then exit out the front of the warps. Then I coax one bead between each set of warps. This can be awkward — and then some will just daintily fall into place. Then I look at the picture again, grab another bunch of beads, put the needle back in between the warps where I came out, and continue.
I wonder how others do this, if they try to string the entire width of the piece at one time?
After completing a row, I change the warp to the opposite it was, lock in the beads, and start on the next row.
The beads I’m using for this piece are size 10, all French or Italian. My warp and weft are both dark green, and the look of the piece almost looks like miniature tile or mosaic to me, with the thread between the beads looking almost like mortar.
I had a lot of time for my next foray into getting this ready, which is a Good Thing because I most certainly needed it! It took me 1 1/2 hours to get the rest of the heddles on (which is faster than before). I did end up holding the second warp in the pair with my middle finger.
Then, on to using a needle to go over one set of warp threads, and under the next (to lock in the beads, so when you take the piece off the loom, the beads don’t just fall off). This was very hard to see at first. Hard. I spent 25 minutes to get from one side of the loom to the other — and then there was one thread left, not two. Sigh, found my mistake back at about the third stitch from the beginning. Pulled it out, started over. In another 30 minutes, wove from one side of the loom and back to the beginning. Now I’m ready for the beads!
I think it took me 3 hours to do 2.5 rows. I do not have this motion figured out. I’m speeding up a little bit, but at this point, I’m moving at a glacial pace. And, AND on the second row, I noticed that one of the heddles looked funny. The right way to attach the heddles is to have one thread in the warp pair to be heddled to the top heddle bar, and the other to be heddled to the bottom heddle bar. When you rotate the copper tube up, it pulls the bottom bar and its heddles out away from the neutral position. Rotate the tube down, and the top heddles are pulled out. I had attached one side of this particular heddle loop to the top bar, and the other side to the bottom bar. So rotating the copper tube did nothing.
I at least had compensated, and didn’t have to redo the beading. So after finishing 3 rows (I was hoping I could get away with not fixing it, but decided it was too risky), I took back the heddles on the bottom, where it should have been attached. I grabbed the recalcitrant warp with a new heddle, cut the badbadbad heddle off, and managed to put it together again without dropping a heddle.
I’m hoping I’ll get better at this….
