Yesterday my friend Suzanne and I got away from our usual daily schedules and headed over to Old Oaks Ranch Fiber Studio to learn how to weave. 

My sweet Dad recently bought me the rigid heddle Flip Loom by Schacht, so I took it along.  It is a nice, fairly simple loom and it is portable.  That’s the main reason I wanted it. 

So Suzanne and I and another student sat down at a table and began to learn.  The first thing we did was figure out how many wraps per inch we would get from our particular yarn we were going to use.  We did this by tightly wrapping our yarn around a ruler and seeing how many times we could wrap that yarn tightly in a one inch space.  Once we get that calculation we divide it in half and that number gives us our E. P. I. (ends per inch), for the warp.   (Is any of this making sense to you?  I know, me neither – I’m still learning)!!!

This is my rigid heddle Flip Loom

We did a whole bunch of other calculations that led us to deciding how many warp ends were needed to thread through the reeds on the loom.  My number came to 112 total warp ends for a 60″ x 9″ scarf.  Cool.

Then we did some calculations for the length of our warp yarns.  Mine came to a total warp length of 102″.  So I cut a suide string (a very bright pink) so that I could use a warping board thing to measure out my warping yarn.

This is a picture of the contraption that I used to measure my warp yarn.

After this was done the yarn was taken off , we learned some more about the parts of a loom, how to find the center of the heddle to keep our piece in the middle of the loom, and proceeded to thread our looms.

My warping yarns all orderly and tied strategically so that I can warp my loom effortlessly!

My loom threaded with warp and bundled in groups of 10.

From the other direction.  The opposite end all wrapped tightly around the front of the loom for stabilization when gathering the groups of 10.

The ends are tied to the apron bars in the front and back of the loom.

There will be more posting tomorrow when the weaving really begins!