A tangled web we weave

Gaah, I'm a bum blogger, guys -- sorry. Part of my excuse is that I was in Virginia visiting family for a while, but, well, most of it is that I was lazy/busy with other things. Like, for example, my first weaving lesson!

I have (am renting) a loom!:



My teacher, Julie, is having me start out by making a scarf. The process of weaving itself is only so complicated -- like knitting or crocheting, it depends on how complex and intricate you want the final product to be. However, while with knitting you start by picking up a couple needles (or with crocheting, a hook), grabbing your yarn, and you're ready to go ...getting a weaving project off the ground is a bit more complicated.

I'd never really thought about how the thread gets on the loom. For a scarf to be 60" long, I can't even remember how many yards we measured out (using a warping board), but it took a while. You take the colors you want and go back and forth, back and forth.... We then took it off the board, folded it up in a funky loopy-chain way (which Julie will have to show me many times over before I get it right), tie it off in a few places, snip here, snip there, and voila, you end up with several threads of a given length which you then have to roll onto a bar at the back of the loom, which, in the picture above, is where the brown paper is, on the left toward the bottom (the paper keeps each revolution of threads from tangling with each other).

At this point, I'll skip a step or two because a) I don't want to put you to sleep, and b) I don't remember exactly what we did. It involved lease sticks. Most of my time since has been spent thusly:




Threading the heddles. See those metal rods? Those are heddles. See the little holes in the middle of each of them? Each of the 160 or so threads had to be pulled one by one through each of the holes in a certain pattern. There is no way to sit up straight to do this, since you have to lean way over the reed to get to the threads, and since it took an hour and a half (then another 1/2 hour when I realized I'd screwed up and had to go back and redo about a quarter of it), I had the biggest knot in my upper back by the time I was finished.

PS, doing this all with a curious, not-declawed tabbycat watching your every move? It's like war... mindnumbing tedium punctuated with moments of blind panic.

Then I grabbed a hook and pulled each of the 160 strings through the reed (I wasn't quite finished when I took this picture, as you can see):




That was less tedious, or at least less painful, than threading the heddles, since I could sit up straight. It also went faster, and was kind of relaxing.

Purdy:



I'm now done until my next lesson, but I'm not ready to start weaving yet -- when Julie comes over this week, she'll show me how to tie down the front end.

Not only do I have the loom set up by the window, I also have a nice view of my beloved little apartment:



So that's the news here.