I took eight autumnal color and weave towels off the Liisa loom last night. They are amazing and will be in the shop when it opens. The warp is cottolin (50/50 linen/cotton) and the weft is cotton bouclé. The bouclé adds beautiful texture and absorbency. The colors are so rich and make me think how beautiful they would be lining a basket of bread on the Thanksgiving table. I found the perfect band in my basket of handwoven inkle bands for the hanging tabs, a little extra somethin’ that I like to add to my towels.
When I’m winding a warp there are knots in the thread sometimes. If I come to them near an end of the warp, I cut the threads (all of them) and pull the knot past the cut end, then re-tie as if I was tying a new color into the warp. If I come to the knot in the middle of the warp, well… that’s a whole other story. I tried pooling all the threads on the floor once and getting the knot out … let’s just say it was a mess. I leave them now. They are MUCH easier to fix on the loom.
There are a zillion ways to do this, but this is the way I do it most of the time. I watch for the knots as I advance my warp. That’s easy to do on the Glimakra and the Toika, because I actually have to be at the back of the loom to release the brake. I “time” it so that I can fix the knot in between towels (or whatever the project is). In this case, the knot was in front of the reed when it was time to fix it. I cut the thread at the knot and tie on a new end from the yarn source.
cut at knot 
new end tied on
I leave the tube at the front of the loom and pull the thread back through the reed and heddle towards the back of the loom. I make it long enough so there is plenty of slack. I go back to the front of the loom and cut the thread off the tube and tie a knot right at the fell line. Remember… this is between towels, so the new knot won’t show in the finished product.
pull to back of loom 
tie knot at fell line between projects
Then I go to the back of the loom, gather up the excess and clamp it in a pair of hemostats to hang off the back of the loom. The hemostat adds the perfect weight for tension and holds the threads together well.
handiest tool in my cart 
hemostat weights the threads
You can see that I add a lot of thread, so it’s hanging almost to the floor. It has to be hanging over the back beam so it can keep the tension on the thread with the weight.
I keep an eye on it and as soon as the original warp thread is long enough to make it to the fell line in a new towel, I remove the hemostat, pull the thread back through to the front, tie at the fell line between projects, making sure the tension is about the same as the rest of the warp and then I’m ready to go. This is one of those things that takes much longer to explain it than it does to do it. I’d say it’s maybe a couple of minutes total. Obviously, this only works if you’re in between projects on the loom. If a thread breaks in the middle of a project, instead of tying at the fell line, I place a T pin parallel to the fell line and wrap the old and new threads around that.
