Christmas towels are coming soon to the shop. I’m weaving three of each style, but several are already spoken for. I wound traditional colors, but am trying different things in the weft. I have a friend that is fond of turquoise, hot pink and a little lime green. I forgot about the turquoise, but tried lime green and hot pink which are actually working (it reads purple in the picture, but trust me, it’s hot pink). It never ceases to amaze me how warp and weft colors work together.
Christmas Warp 
Weaving bordered towels 
Full on plaid! 
Trying nontraditional colors. That’s hot pink not purple.
I’m still working on the forever warp of broken twill on the big Swedish girl. Found a black/grey cotton to try as a weft that looks amazing in the cloth. It actually looks like an old wool tweed jacket. It’s been fun, but after over a year of weaving the same threading, I’m really ready for that warp to be done. Time for something new on the Glimakra. I’m trying very hard to stick to a new rule for myself, I never let a loom sit empty. If I do, it’s empty for weeks. My new practice since working on opening the shop is to have a warp ready to go on it before I finish weaving the previous project, then I start getting the new project on right away.
For my weaving friends: When I wind my warps, I use a lot of different methods for holding the yarn. It all depends on what the yarn is packaged on, cones, spools, tubes or cakes.
This one works well when I’ve wound off thread to the cardboard spools that have ends on them. When I buy the bohonkin’ cones of yarn, I can buy just one and wind off on these spools so that I can wind a warp with multiple threads. Really, this is also the answer for those expensive yarns that you don’t want to buy several cones of. You can just wind them off onto these spools. I can’t stand them up on my regular spool rack that feeds off the top because the cardboard ends stop the thread from feeding off properly. The cardboard ends demand horizontal feeding, so this is my answer…. My portable “winding station” works a treat. It’s just a couple of clamps, some small dowels that will fit in the tubes and Texsolv. Works great and takes no room when stored. I will add that larger dowels add a little friction, but still allow the tubes to move freely, will add a little helpful even tension so things don’t just start free-wheeling and get out of hand when you start winding.
So what if I’m using cones you ask? Ta-da! Another multi-purpose, inexpensive tool… When doing cones, I clamp up my homemade raddle with eye hooks, line the cones up under and feed the threads up through the eye that is directly over each cone. You could do the same by just adding a few eye hooks to a small board, but I had the raddle already. I never use it as a raddle any more as I rough sley using a reed now, but I digress…. My raddle came from Peggy Osterkamp’s Special Raddle Plans.
This is another way I do tubes of thread. To be honest, this is the way I usually do it now, but the doorway Texsolv “station” I wrote about above is always an option and some might like it better.
These mini milk crates are ‘da bomb… I love multi-purpose tools and at $1 each… it’s hard to beat. They make great spool holders for winding bobbins, warp winding from tubes or spools and they’re great for storage. Chico is making sure I’m doing things right.
The nice thing about the crates is they are easy to park on the warping mill when you are winding a bunch of colors and don’t want to cut/tie every time. I wind the thread(s) around the warping peg a couple of times and then park the crate on one the cross beam of the mill. You can park your yarns on a mill a bunch of other ways, too. In the pictures below, you can see that I’ve clamped the crate with the yarns I’m warping as is, simply clamping a crate to the mill, you can just drop the cone or tube in, you can clamp the thread directly to the mill. Lastly, I had an old warping board that I’d built in my early weaving years. It was made of parts from old loom treadles. The cones fit nicely on the dowels, but I had to add screws as posts for the tubes to sit on. This was a little heavy and I could feel it as I wound the warp, but made from a lighter wood, it was handy:
Warping – Clamped crate with tubes 
Warping Parked Cone – Can also clamp just the cone to cross beam 
Warping – Parked Tube 
And when no one is handy when it’s time to wind the warp on, my trusty trapeze is ready to help. Everyone else seems to disappear….
