As you can see, the kitties were very excited about us warping up the Union loom…

Actually, they were a little interested, once we really got rolling.  It takes several hours to warp one of these larger floor looms.  You first have to wind on hundreds of yards of rug warp, a sort of string.  And then you have to feed all these ends, or strings, in through the heddles and then the reed and tie them off to the front of the loom.  My Union has 19 sections and each section gets wound with 24 strings.  You don’t have to do all the sections, in fact, this time I only did 15 sections.  However, that is 360 pieces of rug warp you have to handle several times!  It can get a little tedious.  This is why when we warped up this old loom, we load it with many yards of warp so that we can make many rugs at one time.  I made 6 rugs on this pass.  I used afghan selvedge this time as the weft, so the rugs were very thick and soft.   This fills up the take up reel in the front of the loom, so it’s hard to do too many that way.  Six is a good number however and they are now all finished and up on our Etsy shop if anyone is interested to see them.

Windhaven Etsy Shop…  View the rugs!

However, please enjoy these pictures of our adventures!  It took Jessy and I about 4 hours to get it all done.  I do the winding on at first alone, and then after she helps me thread the heddles and the reed, I finish alone, tying all the ends off to the canvas apron up front.  It’s relaxing, in a sort of odd way.  I guess I just love weaving.  Sometimes life gets a little too hectic and I just don’t have as much time to get to it, but when I do, I always enjoy it!