Hand Painted Warp

I've been considering giving the back-to-front warping technique another try, but it's been five years at least since I tried it last and I needed to refresh myself by reading that chapter in Learning to Weave. I was struck by Chandler's advice to unhook the heddle bar hooks and slide the heddles to the left. No more threading from the center to the left, and then back to center to complete treading to the right. A complex threading pattern has to be reversed in the second half and I've made mistakes right there.

I got this far yesterday and couldn't decide what weft color to use. I knew that if it was the same as a color in the warp, the pattern would disappear and be lost. I want to show off all of the painted warp so decided to sleep on it overnight.

I usually lash the warp onto the front beam but I learned about this technique on the Facebook 4-Shaft Weaving group and wanted to try it out. Dividing your warp into inch increments, if you swap the last thread in each bout with the last thread in the next bout, the yarns straighten out promptly and produce less loom waste. I did it today and was really pleased at how effective it is, but the problem is that I need fringe so had to insert several venetian blind slats before I could start to weave.

I woke up sneezing in the middle of the night and had to get up to take several Benadryl so I could go back to sleep. My mind wandered while I waited for sleep to come and it dawned on me that the best color for this warp is black and I was right! This is my first hand-painted warp and while I'd do it differently next time, I'm very pleased with my little peacock scarf.

Someone in 4-Shaft Weaving supplied the link to a blog post with two Laura Frey videos with techniques on threading.  She called it fool proof which is like daring me to make mistakes.  But I tried them both and cut my threading time significantly.  Check out the Joy of Weaving post.  The only problem with the loop over the threading hook is that it went so fast that I kept losing my place.  I'd be at the end of my inch of threads but with no pattern.  Highly recommended!

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