Last night I sat down at the loom, ready to weave the header rows. However, when I started lifting shafts I discovered two errors in heddle threading – one was the crossing of two threads, the other was incorrect threading order of four threads. I removed the offending threads from the reed in pairs and re-threaded them through the heddles and the reed in the correct order.

Finally, I was able to weave the header rows.

The next step was to wind the weft thread onto shuttles. As I won’t be threading a single weft thread across the entire width of the fabric, I decided to use stick shuttles instead of the lovely boat shuttle that I have. While stick shuttles will be slower than the boat shuttle, I will be able to insert them between warp threads more easily. So I filled two small stick shuttles with the plain blue yarn that will form the borders.

Before I could fill a larger stick shuttle with the beautiful variegated yarn, I had to wind the yarn from a skein into a ball and then from the ball onto the shuttle. To prevent the ball of yarn from rolling around all over the floor while I was filling the shuttle, I put it in a beautiful glass vase/bowl – the same vase was used for the plain blue yarn when filling the shuttles and when winding the warp.

• 

• 

• 

•