RADDLING

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

Before I started the raddling process, I went to the front of the loom and attached a somewhat heavy potato chip package clip to each of the bouts. I enjoy the fact that these clips are bright red!  What they do is make the unbeamed warp tight enough so that I can easily pick out the ends to drop in the raddle at the back of the loom.

So now to return to the front of the loom.  After she read yesterday’s blog post, Dorothy asked the following question:

I'm curious about the newspapers to lay over the raddle, I'm wondering why and how do you use the raddle? I have one raddle with a removable wooden top (that secures with locking pins), the other is a small homemade raddle with short pins and I tie a piece linen around the length of it when the threads are in place.

Here is a close up of the raddle. It is made by LeClerc.  The teeth are quite long and, instead of going up and down, they project towards me.  As the nails are quite thick and the heads very small, they do not pose as great a personal threat to me as do the nails in the raddle I made for myself. 

To the right is the first part of the warp I have raddled.  To the left is warp waiting to be raddled.  If the raddle didn’t have the newspaper underneath to support the warp ends, those warp ends would drop erratically into the raddle spaces, get hooked up on the tops of the nails, and in general get a bit tangled.  With 8/2 cotton it’s not too hard to get them out and untangle them.  But doing that is no fun with 60/2 silk!  As I raddle more ends, I keep moving the newspaper to the left.

But let’s take a closer look at that unraddled bout on the left.  That is the second bout. The bout I worried so much about getting right because I had not tied the end loop.  Well, it is all caught on the rod so I was successful in getting all the loops.  But.  Yes, it is twisted on the rod. What to do?

I had to remove it from the rod so I could untwist it.  That meant I had to remove the already-raddled warp ends from the rod as well, not to mention untying the cord that was keeping the rod from accidentally slipping out of the bouts.

First I put a cord through the loops of the already raddled ends.  I tied that cord so that when I was ready to slip the rod back into them, it would be easy to find the loops. In the photo to the right you can see the red cord I used to secure the loops, and the white cord that serves to keep the rod from slipping out of the loops.

So I had to put a cord through the already raddled ends on the right, so that I wouldn’t lose the loops when I took the rod out.  Yes, I took the rod out, after, of course, also undoing the tie that was designed to keep the rod from accidentally slipping out. 

Then I removed the twisted ends.  These were easy to untwist and slip back on. I have done this a fair number of times, so now it is really only an annoyance. I slipped the raddled warp back on and untied the red cord.  Then I tied the cord to keep the rod from slipping out.

I was off and running. Or so I thought.

The next bout also proved to be twisted.  Well, again, no big deal.  Or so I thought.

I went through the same process again but this time the troublesome bout would simply not untwist. So I just started kind of combing from the cross to put the loops on in the proper order, one by one.  But that is really impossible when I have used a paddle to wind two ends at a time.

Winding two ends at a time creates double loops where one loop is also attached to the next loop.  I should have taken a picture but I was a bit out of my mind by this time. Suffice it to say that I did get the bout back on….kind of right.  Better than it was.  Everything is fine between the rod and the cross, but it is a slight mess on the rod itself.  But I think it will be fine.  I cannot see how this slight mess can affect anything other than my own sense of neatness and order.  I don’t think this will come back to bite me……. 

"Raddling" was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on November 04, 2008. © 2008 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina