Contortions To Save Expensive Thread and Work

Yesterday I wrote about a problem with the beam and talked about how I would compensate for it by winding some of the thread off onto the spare loom to weave later. Here's how I am doing it.

First, I moved the setup loom and put together the frame of the spare loom to hold the empty beam and raddle in place for the transfer operation. It's quite crowded with all the looms set up at once!

Then, I attached the long sections to an empty harness bar and pulled them up into place for sleying. Since I'm not weaving, all of the harnesses have been moved out of the way. I am, however, using the 20-dent reed so that every thread gets its own dent. This will preserve my threading order and allow me to transfer that order to the new beam and back to the old beam when this operation is finished.

Next, I am separating the threads into seven units per section and threading them through the raddle. The eighth section is where the section-separating pegs are. With any luck, this will guide the threads into the sections with ease.

Here's the view from the back of the warped loom showing the course of the threads heading toward the new beam. I've got the whole day schedule for transferring the thread (including time to work around whatever problems arise in this strange operation), capturing the threading order on the spare beam and the original beam, and tearing the whole setup down.