Necessity is the mother of invention. In the past 39 years I have warped a lot of looms and I have tweaked my technique along the way, over and over and over again.

If any of you have the Louet DVD you will notice that I don’t warp with a lot of tension…and in the new videos I am warping with a lot of tension.
That is a perfect example of necessity being the mother of invention…..early on it was just me in the studio working alone so I learned to warp looms without a lot of tension all my myself simply because my warps were never too long. Always around 10.5 yds. which made 5 scarves. It was easy to walk back and forth from the front to the back and pull down on the paper. 8 years ago we started to do retreats in my studio and we needed to bump up our warp length to 27 yds. This meant an adaptation to the technique.

I was spending a lot of time wandering from the back to the front every couple of turns…pulling down on the paper but by then I had Charlotte…a full time studio assistant. How good is that. She started to do the winding and I just had to stand at the front of the loom looking good :^)
One day I wondered what would happen if I just let the warp feed out of my hand and guess what….it just fed out of my hand and wound on perfectly. No fussing, just the occasional snap and whack on the fanned out warp which had been made with great care and was held under tension in my hand.
It was one of those ‘AHA’ moments along the road to learning. I can now warp these big long warps all by myself and you will see.

Not every warp goes on perfectly, sometimes we have bad days and we have tension issues in our warps and then we just deal with them like any other weaver…we move the tension differential along and keep on going…but it doesn’t happen often and when it does it is easy to manage.

I hope you like our method of warping…Back to Front is where it’s at for us…..If you have never tried it….give it a whirl, you don’t have anything to lose.

Happy Weaving,

Jane