weavarrells

So, we went to the library and got a video called Warping and Loom Preparation, in hopes of getting a clue on how to set up these loom thingies that have taken over a room in our house. Sallie Guy is the instructor on the video. Even though poor Sallie had a bluish-greenish hue on our old and rarely used television in the dungeon, we settled in to watch with much anticipation and excitement. A few minutes into the thing, Sallie said that this video assumes that you have three things:

1. Basic weaving experience. (Hmm...barely.)
2. Have warped and woven on a 4-harness loom. (Uh, nope, haven't done that either.)
3. Can read a simple weave plan. (What's a weave plan?)

Well, okey dokey, then, we were completely unprepared for what lies ahead, but we were undaunted. After all, we already have the looms overtaking the house and, by gosh, we're going to figure out what to do with them! :-)

So we watched for a while, rewound frequently for reviews when we looked at each other with complete bafflement, figured out how to use that thing that Scott made last week but didn't know what it was (and oh, drat, I've forgotten the name again -- raddle? heddle? reed? -- see, it's all Greek!), and after a while agreed that we should turn the video off before our heads exploded.

We headed upstairs to bed and noticed that, hey, one of the looms already has some strings (fiber? thread? warp!) wound around the porcupine thingie in the back. Ooh, so maybe we could skip a few steps (the mathy parts and the warping board, which seems kind of scary) and tackle it mid-stream the next morning. Which we did.
Here's Leah threading the...oh, wait, that's the reed. Yeah, she's threading the reed. (Would this be called warping the reed?) Proclaimed tedious, but tolerable, according to Scott and Leah, the reedmasters-in-training.
Meanwhile, Jesse was setting up a bobbin-winder. We tried winding the bobbins using the spinning wheels, but that put extra twist in, so we'll need to use this manual winder or adapt the spinning wheel method next time.

Scott and Jesse crawled around underneath to hook the pedal chains to the uppie-downie things, following Sallie's instructions and a simple weave plan <---hey, look, now we sort of know what Sallie means by this! Leah took a few passes with the shuttle, and then Jesse and Scott and I took our turns. Noisy, clattery, fun!
We had to scurry off to a lobsterfest after that, but what we have in progress sure does look suspiciously similar to weaving! Yahoo! Claire, lookie what we did!