I’ve watched ten Youtube videos about it, looks easy enough!

WRONG! Obviously. Winding the yarn and warping the loom turned out to be a very tedious process, much more so than I thought.

This is only a test run both to learn how to warp the loom, and to test weather the yarn I have can withstand the tension.

I made this process extra difficult on myself by using a yarn that I had unravelled from an old knit project so it was horribly crinkled and the fluffiness was exacerbated because I hadn’t restored the yarn. I probably should have wound the yarn around the chair legs, spray it wet and left to dry until tomorrow, oh well, live and learn.

I decided to dress the loom from front to back, in a basic 1-2-3-4 pattern. I don’t yet have a reed hook but I managed to find a small enough crochet hook to use to pull the yarns through the reed and heddles. This was definitely the most annoying part of the project but I got it right!

Once I had wound the yarn to the back beam and started to get everything straight and tied into the front apron, I finally started to believe that it’ll all work out. I tried lifting the shafts one by one and saw that everyhting looked even and uniform. While warping I added one extra yarn to each side for floating edges, which were missing on the warp the previous owned had left on loom and thus the edges came out ugly when doing twill pattern.

After three painstaking hours on dressing the loom I finally got to weave. I did a few rows with a thick waste yarn to even out the warp and then I finally got to the good part. I’m still using the same crinkly alpaca yarn so this isn’t as even as it could be but I mean to trial this out for maybe a metre if even that, then I’m gonna take it out and evaluate how the yarn, warp, patterns and tension work. If all goes well, I’m going to make a long and wide alpaca wool scarf with this.

Going uphill on the learning curve!