It Was A Disarster Darling

With getting ready to move house I was behind before we'd started today.  I was supposed to clean my new loom up so that we could get started first thing.  But the loom had stayed in the shed for the week while I'd packed and in the couple of hours free at night I'd spun yarn in preparation for all the weaving I was going to be doing.

    Extremely dirty loom in need of love and affection

The loom was so filthy.  Heather and I rubbed it down with wire wool, we wiped it over with a damp cloth (Heather did more work that I did). I really don't know where the time went but we seemed to be at it for hours.  

We decided to use up some cheap acrylic yarn first in our weaving just to make sure that we didn't dirty our precious handspun.  Heather showed me how to use the warping board. I'm so embarrassed to say that I couldn't wrap the wool under and over and count at the same time! I felt like such an imbecile.  Finally, it did click, and to be honest it shouldn't be difficult for anyone, I don't know why I couldn't do it.

     Threads (all 112 of them) on the warping board

So we knotted the thing to within an inch of its life, place it on the loom and immediately the threads all stuck together and tangled up.  The yarn (which an old friend had kindly given me for free) was useless, all messed up and knotted.  We gave up.  We were tired dejected and the enthusiasm from the morning had disappeared,  so we all went home.

No image of loom tangled, threads cut and put into bin. 

Lesson learned - check the yarn for your warp thread before you start.  I can feel all you weavers shaking your heads and pursing your lips in my direction.  I can even hear a tut or two.  But I plan to make every mistake there is to make, I might even do them twice. 

I will go back and have another go, but just at the moment, I'm not speaking to it.