Okay, here’s how it’s going, after a weekend FILLED with learning experiences.

Friday night I took Frances the Dorset loom to project night, with my measured warp.  This is how I measured my warp:

That’s 5.5 yards of warp, in the lavender that I decided not to include.  The colors I did use are on the right, ready to sley on. (Sley = thread through the slots in the reed, which is what you beat the weft into place with.  I know, vocabulary.)

I only got through the sleying and the heddle threading on Friday night.

This is mostly because I had not planned my layout adequately – I had a piece of graph paper with the order of the colors marked on it in colored pencil – but were I to do this again, I advise piecing out the graph paper to the entire width of the reed, in scale to the reed, and doing all the coloring and counting ahead of time.  Why?  I’m tired on Friday night, the light where I’m working may not be good, and then when I come up short on a color, I don’t have to do it three times.


As I did on Friday night.  Then I made the same sorts of procedural naive mistakes on threading the heddles.  Not enough light, and not enough experience.  That’s okay – next time will go much faster.

(See this? – this is a group of four threads that are sleyed, but not
heddled.  This is a mistake.  Fixing it requires pulling all the yarn
on one side out and shifting it all down to make room, since I don’t
see how I can insert heddles on this loom.  But that might be
possible.  Ann?)

Here we are on Saturday morning, after I fixed the mistake from Friday night.  All those knots were drawn forward and secured to the back apron rod by larkshead’s knots via dedicated cord.  More learning.  But after the first few, I figured out how to make it go fast.

Can I just say, thank goodness for Librivox?  Jane Austen’s Emma got me through most of this process.

The cat helped.  (Her name is Squeek.)

Fortunately this is an extra bit of warp I’m letting her kill.

But she also liked rethreading heddles – imagine a paw swiping up from below, through the warp, and a nose poking through heddles.  I’m so glad this loom has floor treadles – twitching one scared her off.

Back around to the front of the loom.

Here we’re looking at the bulk of the warp, sleyed through the slots of the reed, and you can see the white string heddles behind.  I’m about to start cranking the back beam’s handle and winding the warp around the beam – also called ‘beaming’ the warp.  Squeek liked this part too – she helped comb out the warp yarns as they went up into the reed.

The Fib pattern goes from the right – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and then the 13 is broken up into 9 + 4.  That’s to help conceal tension irregularities that are likely to occur at the fold, which will be on the left.

And here’s where it is as it sits waiting for me to come back.

The first 24" or so of the shawl is one whole skein of Opal Gems, which was woven in about an hour and a half, including when I messed up and had to unweave.  I learned several things.

One: A drill works just fine to load bobbins for my shuttle. 
Two: That floating selvage advice for the fold, to prevent draw-in?  Take it.  (I weighted it with a candlestick – but have yet to figure out what thread won’t eventually break under the considerable tension.  I may try wire.) 
Three: Keeping an index card on the open side of the double-thickness helps to catch weaving errors before they become tragic. 
Four: Unweaving does exactly the same good for the learning curve that unknitting does – it teaches you how to read the structure. 
Five: Weaving is FAST!!  No wonder knitting didn’t develop as a popular method of fabric creation until almost the 17th century – if you need fabric to survive, this is a much more efficient way to create it.

I’m out of weft.  I’d planned on using the taupe thinner yarn (the Gems) for the whole thing, but obviously vastly undercalculated.  (I also think I could have made the shawl wider and denser in the warp, but oh well.  Next time.)  The darker weft is what I had spun up out of dark brown alpaca last winter, and I have a lot of the washed fiber left.  So I’m thinking I’ll spin the rest NOW, and use what I can to finish up this shawl at least.  It will be one part light, and two-parts+ dark, I guess.  Maybe that will be a clue about the ‘three-in-one’ aspect of the Treble Fib.

I’m starting to feel like I’m getting somewhere.  Perhaps I won’t freeze at Gatalop after all.  I’m terrified of what happens when I wash this shawl, though.  And the weavers say that you’re not finished until your piece is wet-finished.