Rolling, rolling, rolling: bins and warps

Preparing the warp for winding

On Friday afternoon I invited a couple of women friends for an afternoon beer in my back yard. My back deck is large enough to accommodate three socially distanced chairs, and covered so even if it had rained we could still meet. Since neither of them had been in my back yard before we wandered around a bit to look at the various flower and vegetable gardens. The previous owner of the property planted a lot of perennials so I cannot take credit for how beautiful it is in the summertime, but I do like to show it off.

Both of my visitors live a couple of blocks away; on a map our home locations would make a triangle. It just so happened that it was garbage day. One of my visitors, S, lives in a duplex and the person in the other half of the duplex asked S to put her compost bin out for collection as she would be away for the week. S agreed to do that, but she forgot. When she saw the garbage truck go by she suddenly remembered but it was too late. So she rolled her neighbour's compost bin down the street to a cross street where the garbage had not been picked up yet, and left it there with a note attached explaining why.

On her way to my place S passed the compost bin and saw that it had indeed been emptied so she rolled it to my place and parked it in the driveway. She didn't want anything to happen to it while she was visiting. When she left she rolled the bin back home with her. She is a tiny woman, the bin is almost as big as she is. What a funny sight: S and her compost bin rolling up and down the street!

My other visitor agreed to come by again in a couple of days to help me wind the warp on my loom. With great difficulty one person could do it alone, perhaps it would take an entire day that way. But with one person to help it takes about an hour. One person sits (or stands) at the front of the loom slowly advancing the warp toward her with a lever, while the other person stands at the back of the loom holding the warp tight and combing out tangles in the fine threads. There's a lot of stopping and starting to deal with tangles.

Now I have to tie the warp to the back roller and then wind it back from the front roller. According to my instructions I won't need a helper for that. This method of preparing a loom for weaving is fairly unique as far as I know, it was developed over years of production weaving by my former Halifax teacher Nancy Boyne. This method is good both for having numerous opportunities to check that the threading is accurate and for ensuring the tension is even due to winding the warp twice before tying it down permanently. It's not fast but it almost guarantees accuracy.

First winding completed

My warp winding buddy commented on how meditative the process was, a lot of repetition and concentration, with a little coordination thrown in for good measure.