Back to the workshop!  June 17th was my third session at the Chicago Weaving School.  I made some good headway with my weaving, though I had some trouble getting the beating consistent.  Stress really made a difference in how I interacted with the fabric, which I found interesting.

In this view, you can see in the bottom left corner of the image how the same color in the weft as in the warp comes out in the fabric.  Remember that the warp are the threads that are tied onto the loom, and the warp are the threads the weaver passes back and forth.  (Warp = vertical, weft = horizontal.) 

For the detail-oriented, there is a stripe in the bottom third where I forgot to more the heddle and there are two weft rows right next to each other, making a wider stripe of color than usual.

Here is a close-up of the heddle with the warp passing through.  The purple paper wrapping around the back beam keeps the threads from tangling up with each other.  As you can see, the last red thread is falling off the edge of it; we found that with this loom, it’s better to not go all the way to the horizontal edge when weaving because that seems to happen.

Here is a front view of the loom with the fabric; there’s quite a bit finished already.  The two clamps hold the loom to the table – which, having forgotten them the next lesson, I have decided are very necessary.  It keeps the loom from jumping back and forth.

Here is the weaving with thread already on the spool for the weft; we’ve progressed up to green tones at this point.

Same view, but from the back of the loom instead.  There is a cone of thread in the extreme left of the image, along with my notebook tracking which colors I used in the piece.

More of the green, this time with the heddle in neutral position for traveling.  When the heddle is in the neutral position, it lays the threads on top of each other.  If you set the spool inside the shed before you do that, then it closes over it to allow it to stay in place.

Another shot, this time horizontally across the top of the warp, showing the heddle in neutral position.  You can see the unevenness I mentioned in the yellow section right in front of the camera; it’s rather wavy here.  The edges also waver in and out from this day’s weaving.