USING TWO RADDLES

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

Note on colors:  These are not the real warp colors. The real colors are reddish brown and khaki green.  Whew!  The point of these photos is not to get accurate colors…..

I had read somewhere about a weaver putting a second raddle at the top of her/his loom before beaming the warp on.*  I thought this was an excellent idea and determined to try it out myself on my next warp.  So here it is.

First, a picture of the back of the loom as I was in the process of the first part of raddling.

 

This first view is from the back of the loom.

On the back my 4 dents per inch home-made nail raddle is visible.  A very amateur job of nailing, but it works.  At the top of the loom on the castle is a Harrisville raddle with 1 dent per inch divisions.

The newspaper keeps the unraddled warp ends from falling into the raddle spaces and getting tangled.  The little table is for my back rod to rest on until I am ready to attach it to the back beam.  Two little pieces of tape are visible holding it onto the table.  That is what I do when I leave the loom to go do other things.  That helps keep the rod from being knocked who knows where.

Viewed straight on from behind:

The next view is from the front of the loom. When I wound the warps, I put each bout in an individual sandwich baggie.  Then I grouped several bouts together in larger plastic bags.  Doing this has resulted in a warp I can handle without threads getting all tangled up.  Kitty is wondering if all this is really worth it.

I am now ready to beam on except for removing the choke ties near the castle.  Since my bouts were slightly less than one inch wide, the choke ties have no relation to the inch divisions of that raddle and would only choke everything up as they tried to pass through the raddle.

This process has already revealed to me a problem which I corrected.  One of the warp ends was very very loose and when I followed it through to the lease sticks I discovered that it had somehow gotten tangled and there would be no way those ends could pass through the lease sticks.  I fixed it.

Related Post:  Another Raddling Tip

*My apologies to the person whose idea this was.  I have no memory of who gave me the idea, or even whether the idea came from a weaving blog or from a weaving list.  If anyone would like to share the name of this weaver with me, I would be most grateful.

“Using Two Raddles” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on February 24, 2010. ©2010 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.