Warping, continued

As you weavers know, warping is a long process. Here is some more of it.

Yesterday I removed the front beam, cloth beam, and the rod just below the front beam, which will hold the selvedge rollers, so I could set a loom bench inside the front of the loom. I propped the shafts up on blocks so they were all at the same height, and I removed the top of the beater, and also the reed, for easy access to the heddles:

Here is threading the heddles:

Then I had a major distraction, in the form of this little guy:

This is a baby squirrel which my cat brought home, unharmed as far as I could tell. Darn cat! I bell my cats, but once in awhile they get into mischief anyway. This fellow's eyes aren't even open yet, so he's probably less than 4 weeks old. We didn't know where his nest or mom were, and it was getting dark, so we found a wildlife rehab place to take him to. This is best when cats have handled an animal, as they have a lot of bacteria in their mouths and even an invisible injury can kill wildlife if they don't get proper care. He was quite calm and snuggled up in my hands to keep warm except once when he heard a dog barking. That made him squirm. When I opened up his towel to check on him he would try to crawl away from the light. His legs & feet seemed to work fine, no broken bones, and no scratches.

I took these pics just before we left home with him after 8 pm, and he was very sleepy. We were able to find a dropoff point for the rehab center that's open 24 hours a day, so we were able to get him to an expert within a few hours of finding him. He slept the whole way there.

I know the shop towel looks dirty, but it's fresh from the wash and in good shape. It's important not to use cloth that's raveling when you wrap up wildlife, so they can't get tangled up in the strings, which can kill them.

I finally got back to warping today:

In order to sley the reed, I laid some lease sticks from another loom through the loom from front to back, so I had something to lay the reed on, then sleyed with the reed lying down:

This loom was super fast and pleasant to warp, since I could remove so many parts & get right in where I could sit comfortably. If you have never sleyed a reed that was laid flat, try it. It's so much faster!

Next came lashing on:

Then winding a pirn on the bobbin winder that came with the loom:

That didn't go too well, the leather band has stretched too much for the winder to work as intented. It hasn't stretched enough that I could simply add a twist between the drive wheel and the wheel of the spindle, so I came up with a temporary solution: run the band under the bar of the C clamp that holds the winder to the table. I don't have the original clamp (that's the only piece of the loom that I think I didn't get).

Here is the shuttle that big pirn goes into:

And at long last, I can finally begin testing:

Hooray! It works! Now I am working on learning to adjust the tension so that the automatic cloth advance takes up just the right amount on each pick.