Week three was the week I wound my warps. I did a couple of other things, like finish the last bit of ball-winding, but I mostly worked on the warps. I had decided last quarter to do two warps and weave two separate panels on each one for a total of four panels. This meant that, after taking into account shrinkage and yarn waste, that each warp is 161 inches long. The warps used more yarn than originally calculated as well; the yarn I bought was finer than I wanted, so I increased the sett from 12 epi (ends per inch) to 15 epi. For each panel to be about 22 inches wide, I need 330 ends (threads).
My rigid heddle loom can convert into a warping board by turning it over and inserting pegs into it. A warping board allows you to wind your warp in one long continuous strand, keeps it neat and tidy, and helps to easily keep track of how much yarn you’ve wound on. It’s oddly very simple and very complicated at the same time. Since the warping board is just pegs, you can decide on what configuration your warp winds around. Then you wind. Simple, right? Except that you have to make a sort of criss-cross in two places: in one place you cross in groups of whatever the number of threads per inch is, for example, since I’m weaving with 15 ends per inch I went around and wound on 15 times for 15 threads, then crossed with another 15 threads, and repeated this until I was done. The other cross is composed of crossing every thread in order to keep the warp thread in order; it’s important to do this otherwise you’ll probably create a Gordian knot. In my case, I had 330 threads to keep track of when I was winding each of my warps.
Warping also took a bit of time to do because, as it turns out, 330 threads is a lot of threads. I also had to do it twice since I need to weave four panels; by weaving two panels on one warp I can reduce the amount of yarn waste. Winding a warp is very tedious, and a bit boring, and for me anxiety-inducing. I tend to recount things several times because I have a tendency to stop concentrating on counting even if I’m counting out loud. There have definitely been times where whatever I counted is completely incorrect (you’d think counting out three cups of flour wouldn’t be a problem, but I have in fact lost count doing such a thing. My brain is odd.) So, I probably made winding my warps take longer than it needed (spoiler alert: I still messed up – I had two extra warp strings on the first warp. See what I mean?)
