Tips, Tricks & Techniques

Keeping your weaving orderly

Tape.  Barbara Thornburgh  uses blue painters tape, available at your nearby hardware store, to keep her warp orderly.  She does sectional warping and, after each section is wound on, tapes the end with the blue tape before she cuts it.  Her warp ends remain in perfect order for threading the heddles.  Masking tape will work, too, but  painters tape leaves less residue.
Barbara has also found some doll clothes pins at Ikea that are good for  clamping groups of threads together and also act as a light weight for  single threads.

Combs. When I was learning to weave, I was told that, if you wound your warp with even tension, it would lay smoothly.  I’m not sure what universe that happens in, but in our world, where we mix yarn types and textures,  combing is a fact of setting up the loom.  The best tool?  Afro picks and other large,wide toothed combs.  Buy several so you can always find one when you need it.

Marking your place in a weaving pattern. Arline Zerkel affixes a board with a clip to her loom castle.  She clips on her pattern and keeps a pen handy. When she is interrupted by the phone, the dog or some other calamity, she marks her place on the pattern–sometimes with a pen and sometimes with a paperclip.

Temporary Ties. Weavers always need to temporarily affix things to their looms.  Wendy Chavin likes to use strips of old tee shirts for that purpose, Arline and Barbara find shoelaces to work well and I find that narrow elastic works well, too.

What ordinary household items do you use when doing your art?

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