USING THE WARPING BOARD

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

I am winding bouts 52 ends wide, or very slightly less than one inch.  Because colors are changed at precise places, I keep a running record of what I am doing.  It looks, in part, something like this:

212-264
265-317
318-370 (change to middle green with end #354)
371-423

I chain each warp bout.*  The following photo shows the chain looped to the last top peg on the right and hanging down from that peg.

Before I take it off the warping board, I put the chain in a sandwich baggie.

Then I put a pickup stick in each side of the cross and another stick at the opening formed at the end peg. 

I remove it all from the warping board and bring it to the dining room table.

Here the bout is lying over the end stick and lease sticks.  So the next thing I do is insert those into the places the the pick up sticks and stick shuttle are in, remove them, and slide it down to lie against the rest of the warp bouts.

In this photo is visible a large plastic bag tied at the top.  This contains all the individually bagged warp bouts done in color #1.  My next step is to place the three individual baggies here into a large plastic bag, because these are all color #2. 

I had quickly decided that having dozens of individual baggies hanging free was a recipe for disaster when I take them to the loom to proceed with the warping.

There is another thing I am doing differently with this warp.  Normally I make all the bouts and then, when I am done, I bring them to the dining room, insert the end stick and lease sticks in preparation for taking the whole mess to the loom for warping.  But because these bouts are so small and because there are so gosh darn many of them, I decided it would be better to get them on the lease sticks and end stick as I went.

They are sitting on rotary cutting mat because it is easy to pick up the mat with all the bouts and sticks and move it somewhere else when I want to use the dining room table for----shock!---dining…..

I think I am going to do the same thing from now on when I make warps, at least warps with fine yarns.**  I always have a devil of a time trying to figure out exactly which yarns are supposed to be up and which down when I put in the lease sticks, and how to get the loops onto the end rod without twisting them.  The way I am doing it with my current warp solves those issues.

COLOR AND THE CAMERA

The color in the photos, by the way, is not at all accurate. All the yarns look just plain red.  Not true.  But color accuracy is not the point of this post.

*I must confess that I had forgotten all about the technique I discussed in this post:  Chaining the Silk Warp—Not.  Sigh.  Still, I would have had to buy more (lots more!) bobbins had I chosen to use that technique.  I probably would have, though.  And I probably would have used much thinner yarns to tie the warp bouts. And I would probably have grouped the bouts into plastic baggies to make life a little easier.  Still, I think the technique I am using will work just fine.

**Or at least that is what I planned on doing until I “found” the above blog post I had written earlier………..  Now, who knows what I will do next time!!

Related Posts:  
Warping the Green Crackle Project
Preparing to Raddle:  Some Problems

“Using the Warping Board” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on January 18, 2010. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.