I think I like it. Maybe. Just maybe.

So, I have finished week 3 of my weaving lessons and until the third lesson was almost over, I was thinking that weaving just wasn't for me. Really wasn't for me. You see, first you need to wrap the warp. That was pretty easy and not brain taxing. One could wrap a warp in less than half an hour. It's just over under over around around around and over under over - repeat until you have completed half the number of wraps as you need warp threads. If you need 200 warp threads, you need 100 complete trips around the warping board. As you wrap, you have to count to ten - that's about the hardest part.

Then, on the second week, we prepared to thread the warp threads through the hangy down wire things AKA heddles.

Dressing the loom, that's what its called. We started putting the warp onto the loom. (I really can't remember exactly how we did it though)

That's over 200 yards of 2/8 orange cotton thread. Yup, 200 yards that have to be threaded through the hangy down things without tangling them. And they have to go on in order. You can't just grab one and put it on, you have to sort them all by the little groups of 10 that you made when you were wrapping the warp.

Okay, so all the little bundles are tied onto the steel rod thing. and the "X" that we made when we were wrapping is separated by the lease sticks (lower part of the photo for those who are actually interested.)

This photo is a little out of order of events, but here we are winding the warp and using tissue paper to ensure the warp doesn't get snagged.

end of week 2

Here we have the warp hanging over the lease sticks just waiting for me to thread each one of the little suckers through the heddles. But, that's not as simple as it sounds. There are 4! yes 4  rows of heddles, and you have to thread them in sequence of row 1, row 2, row 3, row 4 then back to row 1. I found out it wasn't such a good idea to twist the warp threads around the heddles, but anyway I had the entire 200 heddles threaded at the end of 1.5 hours.

I really wasn't liking this weaving experience. Mostly because I hadn't done any weaving. 


But! Then the sun came out. After a few minutes of instruction on how to wind a bobbin (fun!), and how to thread the shuttle, I was weaving, Really really weaving. A few false starts because of the twisted warp threads around the heddles, but I wove a tabby (?), did the hem stitch and a whole bunch of actual weaving. And it was FUN! Noisy! Rattly! Banging! FUN!

And this is what I have completed so far. Four different patterns. I love it.

So does Purrl. Apparently, a loom makes a really good hiding place.