When we left things last week, I was threading the loom up for an overall tabby with two stripes of twill near the far edges. The sun shone through my window as I was finishing the threading. This is a rare occurrence, living in a basement in foggy San Francisco, so I dropped my work and grabbed the camera.
The next task is to get all those threads, in the correct order, through the reed. Now there’s no more masking tape. The order is held by the threads and heddles themselves, following a clear threading plan. This is my last chance to catch threading errors before they become a real pain, so it pays to take my time.
The result of sleying is that the right number of threads per inch are pulled through the reed and tied in front. Some spaces have one thread, some have two. It depends on thread count and thickness. With a stripey fabric and threads that migrate in wet finishing, there’s a little fudge room, but not much.
This is how I separate each section out into its pattern repeats. This lets me check the threading and helps me to sley the threads in the correct order. This is the angle that I look most of the time, down into the loom as one hand holds threads and the other grabs them on a hook and pulls them through the reed.
See how tidy it all looks? A mistake would really stand out.
And these two shots show the heddles as seen from the front of the loom, through the reed.
Tonight I will weave a test section, get approval from the client, and begin to produce yardage. Woohoo!
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