Labor of Love

Two warps of a doubleweave - side view through the heddles 

At last post I had knotted on the new wall hanging warp and was preparing to wind it on the back beam.  It has taken me several weeks, but it is almost all wound on.  Since I am under so much less time pressure than I was last time I did this, I am discovering that I actually enjoy this part of the process as much as the weaving!  It's very intimate, this combing out of the matted warp threads.  I touch every warp many times, run my fingers through the lengths of yarn to separate every one from every other so they don't catch and knot as they go through the heddles and just like with people, the more you interact with them, the better you get to know them.  And I've fallen in love with this warp.  It hasn't been very sunny in my studio this month, but when the sun has broken through, the colors bloom and I am mesmerized.

What the warp looks like once it's all separated out and run through the heddles

So in the interest of showing the painfully slow process of moving yarn from front to back of the loom, here is a little journey in pictures:

Here we go...

New warp knotted to old one, pulled through the heddles already, heading down to the back beam, right to left.

View from above the reed and heddles - the 1836 eyes of needles it has to pass through. Twice - once through the reed and once through the heddles, which are holes in those rows of white grouped strings on the harnesses in this picture. Warp moving from bottom of picture to top.  

About halfway done winding on...The color pattern from white at top to blue at bottom foreground is the length of one wallhanging. There are four of these lengths on this warp and this is the third one...

Almost all combed out to the end - generally I comb a bit and then wind on, but towards the end, it's easier to comb all the way to the end of the warp to fix any annoying twisting that may have been pushed down to the bottom.

Another view from the very back.  Quelle couleur!

It occurs to me that I am weaving a canvas here. I've sectionally dyed the warp in a very precise way, and the weaving is merely the mechanism that breathes life into the layers. I can't predict the exact outcome of course, but instinct tells me this one is going to be good.