that funny raddle and a bunch of fives

A week or two ago someone in the Online Guild asked about using the built-in raddle on a Louet loom. It reminded me that I have come a long way since I started using my Delta and was baffled by the line of little black bumps on top of the castle. I am now a confirmed built-in raddler and find that using it is a very helpful step in the process of preparing to beam.

I wind my warp in bouts these days (after this ghastly experience) and each bout is wound with a cross at one end only. I am not usually organised enough to wind a new warp in advance of finishing the old one so, as I take each bout off the warping board, I put it straight onto the apron rod at the back of the loom and slip it over the lease sticks as well. The sticks are supported just in front of said apron rod using a couple of extra apron rods poking through the loom from front to back – here is one end of the configuration:

I always keep the lease sticks tied together at one end then, once the warp is all in place, I tie them together at the other end. And for extra security I slip a long string through them and tie them round the front and back beam — just in case those supporting rods get knocked out of place by a helpful cat, for instance.

The look I am aiming for is this:

with this just above it:

Unfortunately… I seem to have mislaid the pictures I could have sworn I took (or did I just mean to take them? It is so easy to confuse thought with action) of the actual business of placing those warp threads in the raddle. Here follows a wordy description; do feel free to skip over it.

In order to stop my warp getting tangled in those little black bumps, I cover over most of them with some stiff white paper, my trusty calendar pages, in fact, which are nice and curvy from being wrapped around warp and cloth beams like this. I can then casually fling the warp bouts over the top of the loom and start to place them in the little divisions working outward from the centre which has been marked for me by Louet with a handy black line.

To do this I need to work out the equivalent of a sett for a more-or-less 5-dent reed, since the divisions are 5mm wide. On the present warp I want — for the cotton part — 36 epi which would be approximately 7 ends per division. However, I want to keep the threads in pairs since that is how they were wound (no point in creating tangles for the sake of it), so for each set of 48 ends my plan is to place 6/8/6/8/6/8/6 ends in seven divisions. The eight ends of wool/silk are placed 4 and 4 in the next two divisions, then back to cotton.

It sounds fiddly but, since the ends are laid out one by one right there in the lease sticks, it is actually the simplest thing to pick them off in groups and place them into the raddle. Easier than sleying even (one of my favourite things!) since there is no need for a hook. The bumpy shape of the black thingummies (do they have a real name, does anyone know?) keeps the threads pretty much in place, but I am a bit paranoid about it so I tie a piece of string around the whole thing. In my first couple of goes I tried putting the string in and out round all the bumps as I would on a ‘normal’ raddle but — besides being a hopeless fiddle — the string takes up a lot of space in those tiny divisions and I reckon it is just a cause of unnecessary friction.

Beaming the warp is my very least favourite part of weaving, although I dislike it less than I used to. At first I thought it was important to be able to warp my loom entirely on my own, and I think I was right to make sure I could do it but I did find the beaming painfully slow. So rather than refine and develop my solo-beaming skills, I decided it was time to train up my husband. He is now a very capable manager of the back of the loom while I take care of the front. Stuart cranks the warp beam, puts in the separators — warp sticks for the first turn and then lengths of corrugated cardboard wrapping — and watches the lease sticks to warn me of any potential snarl-ups. I shake and comb any tangles out of the warp as it unfurls and endeavour to keep an even tension. If little knotty bits should arise either at the raddle or the lease sticks then we stop and I sort it out.

The first time we did this it took HOURS. But we’ve learned a general survival method for joint tasks, which is that we always have a foreman and a gofer. In the case of warp-beaming I am the foreman, Stuart is the gofer. When it comes to tinkering with electrical supplies then he is the foreman and I am the gofer. And so on. The only place where this method breaks down seems to be the campsite: when we put up a tent, we both try to be the foreman. This is disastrous, especially when it is raining. Anyway, not so at the loom where my gofer is competent and cheerful. I have no idea how long it is ‘meant’ to take to beam a warp. Does anyone collect statistics on this sort of thing? But on Saturday we took it very gently and steadily and put a seven yard warp on in 40 minutes, which is our best time so far. Fabulous as far as I am concerned, since it gets me to the threading sooner!

You know when to stop with a Louet raddle because when you get to this…

…you have just enough yarn in front of the lease sticks to get on with the threading.

Now, as if this post weren’t long enough already, I have some questions and answers to share with you, courtesy of Alice.

What were you doing five years ago?

1. Being the chief breadwinner and therefore
2. Being rather short of bread, but nonetheless
3. Going camping at weekends (and squabbling over the tent as above),
4. Planning the renovations which eventually gave me this, and
5. Learning to spin on a drop-spindle.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?

1. Start baking for Saturday’s concert,
2. Read about system dynamics,
3. Post that letter,
4. Weave the next colour in the current scarf,
5. Remember the other thing I need to do.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1. Ginger nuts dunked in fresh, hot tea,
2. Twiglets,
3. Nachos,
4. Stuart’s home-made shortbread,
5. Stuart’s home-made scones (buttered while still warm).

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

1. Give the cathedral vestry enough money to make St Paul’s fully accessible to disabled people,
2. and then a whole lot more money to re-order the interior as has been planned for years.
3. Build/restore a house somewhere near the coast,
4. preferably with enough room to do something mad like establish a sanctuary for hedgehogs,
5. and then live as a recluse, organising internet campaigns for peaceful, democratic change in Zimbabwe and Burma (and once I had sorted them out, moving on to the rest of the world).

What are five of your bad habits?

1. A tendency to be reclusive,
2. and to be sentimental about the cute wildlife while cringeing at bugs and such.
3. Spending too much time on the internet,
4. Not washing up as I go along when baking,
5. Picking at scabs.

What are five places where you have lived?

1. York (England),
2. Cambridge (also England),
3. Pasadena (California),
4. Blairgowrie (Scotland),
5. Newark (New Jersey).

What are five jobs you’ve had?

1. Silver service waitress,
2. The girl in the lab who grinds up samples of rape seed for testing,
3. Research and intelligence officer (my favourite ever job title),
4. Database designer,
5. Translator.

Which five people do you want to tag?

1. Lynne at Weaving Yarnz
2. Lynne at the Twisted Warp
3. Bety at Deep End of the Loom
4. Jane, the Shuttlepilot
5. Alison at the Open Shed

but there is absolutely no obligation on anyone to participate if you find tags annoying rather than fun. By the way, I love the names people come up with for their textile blogs.