A whole post on winding the warp!?  Well, um, yes.  But it will be a short one, I promise.

See, first of all I decided to add a yard to the length of the warp.  I had about 10 wraps of so of the 5-1/2 yard warp and I needed to take that off and start over with a longer warp.

I was using about 8 different colors for the warp and I had to decide how to wind that most efficiently. Use a warping paddle? Warp each color separately and then thread them randomly?  Or wind them on randomly?

I wanted the threading to be what I call ‘human random’ – as opposed to true random.  With true random you might end up with 85% of the warp being in one color and the other 15% being spread out among the other 7 colors.  I did not want that to happen nor did I have enough of any one of the colors to have that happen.  Human random is making the warp thread appear random.

Using a paddle would not accomplish that, I would be stuck with the one sequence.

I could go with just winding each color until it ran out and then changing to the next, but I kept on thinking of the tangles and headache of warping the loom pulling yarn ‘randomly’ from different bundles of yarn

I ended up going with winding the warp in a ‘human random’ sequence.  It meant a lot of knots on the warping board as I changed colors.  Some of you might be shaking your heads and thinking there is a better way.  I am sure there is, but time was running short and I had to get MOVING!

Below is a picture of my warping board.  You can see all the little knots at the top right of the warping board (I warp with the cross on the bottom because I bolted the warping board onto the wall upside down – go figure.)

Let me just mention that it was a bit boring winding the warp this way.  I just could not get into a rhythm, what with having to stop every few winds and tie a knot and pick up the next color.  I took my time, unfortunately.

To help me along, I lined the colors up on the loom – these are the ones I used:

Remember I said that I made the warp an extra yard longer?  Well, I forgot to consider that fact when I was winding the warp.  Oh no, I measured it out correctly, I just forgot to consider that I was going to be using more yarn.  So I started to run out before the warp was fully wound.  I quickly added a new skein of yarn.  Nice to have lots of hand dyed yarn to pick from.

I still ended up a few warp ends short, I could live with that.

Warp ready to go!

It is now June 6.  Monday.  Workshop is this coming weekend.