I say this a lot, but I’ve been having so much fun at Fern’s workshop learning more about the techniques involved in weaving and setting up a loom. In past weeks, I wrote about getting the warp onto the loom, but now I can talk about how to make a warp!

• Appropriate warping board / warping mill
• Appropriate length of warp

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

In arts and crafts, you can occasionally find workarounds if you’re not ready to buy specific tools. For example, if you don’t have a yarn winder and swift, you can still make a passable yarn cake by using the handle of a thick wooden spoon and the back of a chair. However, I think that a warping mill is almost a non-negotiable when it comes to making a warp. The length of the warps are so long and having to mark it out in a straight line would be exhausting.

Anyways, the way that I was taught to make a warp was to make a guide string in the desired length, and then follow the guide string around the warping mill over and over again. The only thing that you really have to watch out for would be the threading cross that you have to make at the top of the mill. As far as I can tell, the cross helps to keep the warp in the right order when you get ready to put it on the loom, which helps with tension and reducing tangles. I was taught to make the cross by going across the top of pegs A and B, then under and over around peg C, back under peg B, and then over the top of peg A so that you can follow the guide string in the reverse direction around the mill. You can kind of see this in the above picture.

You do have to do a bit of math and counting to make sure that you have measured out enough warp, so I highly recommend double-checking the calculations long before you start winding or else you are setting yourself up for a headache. Depending on how you set up the guide string, each pass through the mill could represent different things. For this particular warp, each up-and-down the mill counted as two lengths of the warp. This warp was all white, so it didn’t matter, but for a warp where there is a pattern, you would have to be more careful counting the colours and order in the warp. People often say that math and art are like opposites and people who are good at one tend to struggle with the other, but I think it’s funny just how much math is in arts and crafts, and how much beauty there can be found in things like the golden ratio or fractals and rhythms.

Until next time, happy crafting!