The Measure of a Warp

Despite the fact that I have aircon, it was still too freakin’ hot on Saturday for doing anything mentally taxing. My workroom and our bedroom is on the north end of the house, above the garage, and the aircon struggles against baking head on all sides – even from below as the garage tends to turn into an oven. Usually I head downstairs to the lounge and knit.

But I wanted to warp up the loom. It occurred to me that measuring up a warp was the easiest task and probably do-able. And the warp for the Leftovers Blanket would be the most fun to measure so I chose that project.

The idea is to make a warp out of lots of leftover yarn:

Then weave with a single colour weft, which means no fussy colour changes during the weaving. I hadn’t bought a weft yarn yet, but decided that I’d poach the black Bendigo Classic set aside for another project. I set out my leftovers again. I didn’t have much in the way of yellowy-orange yarn, and I couldn’t find a good place for the white… wait a moment.

Add a bit of food colouring and vinegar, wrap in glad wrap, put in jar in sun on a 46.4 degree celcious day – hey presto!

In the meantime, I worked out how long the warp should be. I decided the blanket or wrap it would turn into was going to be the width of the loom and about two metres long. Add loom waste and take up. Use a piece of scrap yarn cut to length to set up the warping board, then start winding…

I love an arty warp shot:

The next pressing question was whether I’d get enough warp ends out of the yarn I had. So I started cutting the smaller balls and writing down how many ends I got out of them. To keep track I cut holes in a card and added samples of each yarn.

When all the small balls of yarn were used up I counted the ends and worked out how many more I needed, then spread the remaining number over the larger balls. I also got more ends by cutting a ‘border’ of the weft yarn for each side of the blanket. At the end of the day the yellow-orange yarn had been well and truly cooked by the sun. I rinsed it, and it dried in the hot winds within half an hour. I cut it up and added it to the mix.

Then I divided the warp up and laid it out in the colour sequence:

Last night, after a long, depressing day watching and reading reports of the bushfires and their victims, I trudged upstairs to start binding warp to loom. Before long my spirits lifted. Warping is not my favourite part of weaving, but with a colourful warp like this, in twill rather than plain weave, it’s actually rather fun. But it’s still hard on my back – even with the beater dismantled so I can get to the heddles easier – and after an hour I had to stop. I’ll have to finish at lunch, or tomorrow night.

5 thoughts on “The Measure of a Warp

  1. I love the arty shot of your yarn on the warping board. Sounds like you are having lots of fun with this warp.

  2. The warp looks pretty!
    Horrified/devastated by the fires, places we knew gone, hopefully not people we know….

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