I have finished setting up my craft room. All my fibre making tools, crochet hooks, looms, and assorted yarns are in place and all boxes are labelled.  I have one crochet project finished, a Tunisian afghan and a regular crochet afghan in progress.  So it was time to learn about my new loom.

Up first was to figure out how to use my Ashford loom as a warping board. As well, I had to figure out the best way to make it easy to use and put away again.  I officially have no more room for looms, well, at least not in the closet 🙂  The pegs are fairly short so even though I can wrap 4 metres on it I’ll only get about 130ish 8/2 cotton warp threads. Which will translate into about four or five warp chains to make it 70cm wide . That’s okay I can break up winding up a warp over a few nights.

Next was figuring out how to dress a Louet loom and how to work with my short lease sticks (I’ll make some longer ones before I do this again). The built in raddle is neat and makes packing the warp quite slick. Plus unlike what I saw in Kelly Casanova’s class, I don’t need a raddle cross as the raddle is threaded with the threading cross in a different position. That whole process alone took me three hours to figure out..

Threading the heddles was where all the action was. I think I rethreaded parts and the whole thing about five times – sometimes even after I’d started to weave. It was a great learning exercise for me. I learned that I need to train my eyes to check the threading better.

Threading the heddles has taken three hours every night over four nights.

Up next, actually weaving this sample twill and getting into the habit of finishing my things. I have about four tea towels that need hemming. For now, I’ll put short fringes on all the finished samples and any towels I weave instead of sewing the edges. 🙂