Today Greet came over again to help with getting all the heddles knitted so I can get down to some weaving. Greet brought her notebook (of doom...cause all notebooks that contain important info are notebooks of doom) with the notes from the wwweaving class that she took at Pennsic. We talked about how we would move the heddle thread through the threads and it was decided that a shuttle would work great (it did - I used a mini card weaving shuttle) We worked out how the heddles were knitted and started. It seemed a little different than what I had seen online (which isn't much - all the heddle knitting info everywhere is very vague...), but I figured there must be something that I didn't know since I have never actually seen a working wwloom in person - and then we finished. We were very excited. We moved the heddle rod and....nothing happened. We tried again. We walked around the loom and looked at it from many angles. We looked at the pictures in the book. We tried again. Nothing. We did it wrong. Greet had apparently been a few minutes late to class and had missed the writing down of the part about how the heddle loops around the thread. After discussing what we had done and discussing the vague pictures that I have seen online we deduced what had happened and figured out what needed to be done different. That was the good news....the bad being I had to knit all the heddles again - Well I did title this blog "My experiments..." :)
Greet needed to go to Ensemble practice so after she left I sat down and stared at it....and went and got a razor blade. We had discussed leaving what we had done in place - but it was just going to be confusing...and there is some kind of perverse satisfaction about cutting the threads and watching the heddles all fall to the floor. I then started to knit the heddles again. I was at least very competent at the knitting process since I had already done it once today. When I was finished. I crossed my fingers and moved the bar...success!!! Sort of...I had a few threads that had been twisted in the knitting process and I had to pull those out, straighten them, and using a yarn needle, put them back into the warp chain. I checked the sheds to make sure that all the threads were where the needed to be, added an extra weight to each side because it made it easier for the heddles to move freely, and re-spaced the top a little better (really understand why the card woven header is a good idea now). I also re-tied the warp chains to the uprights a little differently so that the sheds opened a little smoother.
Then I sat in a chair and admired the finished warp :)
See the glave in the picture...that was to hold the shed once it was separated - made it much easier to knit the heddles. Would have been even better had I had another piece of closet rod, but I didn't.
You can clearly see in this pic how the glave is working...
This is when the heddles were being knitted wrong...it's hard to see because of their color. This is also a pic of the little shuttle that I used.
This is a close up of the above shot...
Almost finished doing it...wrong :)
Up close of almost done...wrong...
Picture done the write way. Notice how you can see a lot more green and the threads are much further away from the heddle bar.
This is what the spacing and loom looks like when all the heddles are knit.
A closer look...
This is the natural shed that happens when the heddle bar in resting in the brackets. I'm holding it open with my sword beater, but you can see all the heddles and how they work.
This is the second shed that is formed when the heddle bar is moved back so that it rests against the uprights. 
Now the loom is all set to do so simple tabby weave....we'll see how simple it really is :)
This is about what it looks like at about the half way point on the back threads...
I then tied half a knot and 
and lastly, the beginnings of my sword beater.
Sword beaters are as hard to find concrete info about as is everything that was made of wood from that time period. The one surviving example that I could find is posted earlier in the this blog and is made of whale bone. It measures at around 15inches. However, since we know that looms came in varying sizes, some of them quite large, it is hard to imagine using a 15inch sword beater on such a loom. After discussion and examination of pictures of what others are using, it was decided that a sword beater around two feet in length would be a good size to start with.
This is what 100 threads looks like in my hand.
I moved the top bar down so I could reach it to tie on the warp. I have decided to not card weave the warp into a band and sew it to the loom due to that fact that this piece will be a test piece. Besides, not every piece of weaving was done in this way. If I was making a piece that needed to have nice edges I could see the merit in weaving the band and have band of card weaving down the sides, but since I am learning the basics - I figured it was better to keep things as simple as possible at first and then build from there. The warp threads are tied on in bundles of five and so far seem to be behaving themselves...
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