In a previous blog post I talked about spinning Bourette silk on my charkha. I have finally spun enough to weave with, and it is time to warp the loom!
I am fairly new to weaving and have only warped my loom a handful of times, so this was a stressful process. I did a direct warp, because that is how I was taught and I haven’t tried anything different yet. While it worked okay, if I were to do it again I would definitely measure out my warp beforehand. The difference in length between the edges and the middle, caused by direct warping, gave me some problems, even though this was minimized by using my DIY peg board to spread out the warp on the other end.
I tried using scrap yarn to tie the warp onto an apron board to save on waste yarn, which is very important when you are weaving with handspun you have spent months making. It seemed straightforward enough, so I didn’t look up any resources on how to do it. This worked well enough to get me weaving, but I definitely would have benefited from a quick YouTube search first.
These setbacks aside, once I was warped the weaving went quickly and was very enjoyable! I only had a few warp threads break, and was able to pretty easily tie in a new length to replace each one. Because the end product I’m going for is fairly loose and rustic, the extra knots don’t bother me.
Other than a quick pause to spin a few more skeins when I ran out of weft, the weaving only took a few days to finish. Seeing the fabric cut off the loom after months of spinning was so satisfying!
In the next post I’ll update you on creating the pattern and sewing it all together!
