I started weaving and realised that it would be nice to throw the shuttle from the side on which I was treadling as it would make it easier to remember where I was – I had been treadling on the opposite side to shuttle throwing. After this was changed I was off!

I quickly developed a rhythm of treadle, throw the shuttle, close the shed, move the reed to the desired vertical position, beat, change treadle.

As the warp had been evenly spread across the fabric at the line of hemstitching, quite a bit of deflection was required to get the warp to the width determined by the lower blue band on the reed marker. I wove about 20 picks at this position to allow this to happen. Once the warp had moved to the desired widths, I began altering the vertical position of the reed every 4 picks.

I found that I had to beat quite hard to get the weft pick to move into place because of the dpi in the narrow part of the fans. I had a few knots near the beginning of the warp, I was able to let these pass through the reed at the wide portion of the fan before lifting the reed to the desired position before beating.

I started at the lowest vertical position on the reed marker and wove 4 picks before moving the reed to the next position. I began by moving up the bands, wove 8 picks at the top purple position and then moved back down the reed marker ie a full cycle of the reed marker moving top and then down the coloured bands.

I liked the look of the 16/2 black cotton yarn so much, that I decided not to experiment with the 5/2 black and white, the 16/2 white or the 60/2 black and white.

After hemstitching, I wove a two-stick header, cut the fabric from the loom and wet-finished (hand wash in cold water, hard press on silk setting, lie flat to dry, trim loose ends).

Before wet-finishing, there were dimples in the fabric at the wide sections of the warp undulations. These largely disappeared after the wet-finishing process.

The completed fabric feels good. I decided to remove the warp ends from the straight section of reed (half of the left hand dark pink ends); this colour will now end at the centre of a fan, so I should still get a straight edge.

I noticed that the fabric is shorter on the right side than on the left side. As the reed is suspended from texsolv cord and buggy, it is able to move a lot as I am beating so I must be beating the right side harder than the left. I need to watch out for this.

Overall, I am VERY pleased with my first attempt at weaving with the fan reed.

	Fabric width (cm)	Fabric length (cm)
Pre-wash	47 (beginning) – 46.5(end)	15 (pink edge) – 14 (blue edge)
Post-wash	46 both ends	14 (pink edge) – 13 (blue edge)