I’m still over the moon that I get to live out my weaving dreams by volunteering at Fern’s studio, so here is another blog post that attempts to digest my new knowledge about weaving in order to summarize it into a blog post. This week, I got to move past the reed and on to the heddles.

• Appropriate loom
• Appropriate warp
• Heddle/reed hook

Tutorial by Fern at Fern’s School of Craft
Alternative: Tutorial by Paivi at All Fiber Arts

If you recall from last week, Fern and I had just started to warp a loom from front to back. My first job was to sley the reed and get one warp thread into each dent. This week, I got to bring the warp closer to the back of the loom by threading the heddles. Interestingly enough, this step was actually done sitting behind the loom and pulling the warp threads through the heddles from that position.

For a refresher of what a heddle is, it’s a wire with a little keyhole shape in the middle. A typical loom has hundreds of heddles attached to the different shafts. Each heddle is on a fixed shaft, so while it can slide from left to right, it cannot move from one shaft to another. As far as I understand, the way that the heddles are arranged and tied to the treadles plays a huge role in determining the pattern of the final product. For my rug, the heddles were in a 1234 pattern, whereas this new project had a more unique 1212 3434 pattern.

Similar to sleying the reed, this new step of threading the heddles isn’t difficult, but it is time consuming to get each warp thread through the correct heddle and shaft. You also have to pay a bit more attention to where you are pulling the threads from, as you want to be pulling the warp sequentially from how they are arranged by the reed. If threads get crossed, it will have to be fixed afterwards, so you really want to try and get it right the first time. One tip that Fern provided was to start threading the warp from the approximate midpoint, and then working outward from there. This helps to balance out the amount of extra heddles on each side of your working piece.

So far, I am absolutely loving my volunteer time at Fern’s studio! I genuinely feel like I am getting more out of it than Fern is – I’ve learned so much already, and all she has is a half-dressed loom. All my friends have had to deal with my glee from having this chance to learn something new, and I look forward to going back every week. Fern is such a patient and thoughtful teacher and I can’t say enough nice things about her! I can’t wait to continue learning from her.

Until next time, happy crafting!