Unbeaming and rebeaming on a table loom – a better way!

I have blogged previously about fixing tension issues in a warp already wound onto the back beam – that experience was scarring, and since I’ve just come across and tested a much simpler method, at least for the Table loom, I thought I’d report it here.

The problem: I wound a gradient warp involving three colours, so the order of the thread is very important. While the threading looked fine at the cross, somehow the threads had got twisted between the back beam and the cross. I knew it had to be something that would untwist itself, but I did worry that it might create tension problems as I weaved. This is what the back of my look looked like:

What to do?

As it happens, the warp was for a sampler in the wonderful course Understand Double Weave on 8 shafts run by the fantastic Cally Booker. It is impossible for me to convey how mind blowing I am finding this course, but it is pretty amazing, and the clue is in the first word of the title, “understand”: it is not a “recipe” course, but one where every lesson ends with at least one design challenge, where students are asked to put into practice the teaching of the lessons. The emphasis is on block design in double weave, and the possibilities are endless… but I digress.

The short of it is that I asked Cally, and she suggested to finish dressing the loom (so thread the heddles, sley the reed, tie at the front), then bring the whole warp forward onto the cloth beam (packing it with paper to avoid messing up the tension at the front) so as to clear the back beam.

Then sort any problems there, checking that everything is aligned, then rewind back onto the warp beam.

And this is precisely what I did: in an hour it was all done, and my warp looks so very even and pretty!

Isn’t the back of my loom pretty?!

I will just note here all the steps, just in case I need to to this again:

1. dress your loom as usual;
2. once the loom is threaded, if they are still there, remove the lease sticks (the heddles will already do the job of keeping the warp threads under tension)
3. release the tension on the back beam, and start rolling the warp onto the cloth beam, using a warp separator (heavy lining paper in my case). If there are crossed threads at the back, inevitably they will pull at the heddles as you advance the warp – just give it a shake. It did help to open a few sheds every so often to keep the threads separate and prevent tangles and bunching at the heddles. This pulling is not a bad thing though, as it means that the warp at the front is under tension.
4. once the warp has been rolled onto the front beam, if the threads on the back apron rod do not look even, just cut the loops and tie on (as you would for front-to-back warping), checking for even tension.
5. Open the two plain weave sheds and insert lease sticks to create a cross – this will keep the winding thension even.
6. start beaming the warp on the back beam again, obviously adding warp separators.
7. once finished, correct the tension at the front knots
8. enjoy how pretty and even your warp is looking!

and you are ready to go!

Just for the sake of completeness, here is the warp viewed from the front, ready to weave, with the gradient layer up:

Unbeaming and rebeaming on a table loom

Which is something you should ideally never do. But what if you have to? That is what I was confronted with when after threading each and every one of my 672 ends for my very first table loom project I realised that something was amiss from my 7.5m warp: tension!

My heart sank when I saw the disaster on the back beam:

paper warp separator improperly rolled on

So what to do? I scoured the internet, and while I could find some info in one discussions on Weavolution, all the information I could find was either on how to warp properly, or tips on how to solve minor warping issues, and one useful blog entry on rebeaming. In this blog entry everything went more or less uneventfully, which gave me courage, but I could not find anything preparing me for the awful tangles and problems that were to come – I guess there isn’t much pride in disasters.

However I’d like to bare it all here, as it is a story with a happy ending, reached however after several setbacks over five evenings that brought me close to tears (and to scissors!). I almost gave up at least three times, and the excellent advice on Ravelry is what saved my day.

First the theory:

1. divide your warp in bout;
2. tie some weights to each bout to keep tension;
3. if the warp is already threaded (my case), leave it threaded
4. start unrolling the warp from the back beam, chaining the warp as it falls off the loom, and retie the weights as they get to the floor, to keep tension.
5. chain the bouts as they come off the loom;
6. once you’ve unbeamed, rebeam the warp, as if you were warping front to back.

If you happen to have a trapeze, or can hack one (a broom handle held by two high back chairs, or whatever you can think of), even better. If you have a yarn that sticks together (my case), you can let it all roll and it won’t tangle, otherwise better to collect each chain in a separate container.

Then the reality…

Having said this, a lot can go wrong. All this happened to me:

• while UNbeaming, the weights on the bouts will be completely ineffective: this is because due to differential tension, after each turn of the back beam, some threads were pulled out more than others. And why is that? because…

• while UNbeaming, the warp threads will bunch at the heddles: the threaded heddles act like a comb. You should never ever comb your warp, as this is a sure recipe for tangles. But in this case the heddles will do so for you. To reduce the severity of the problem, insert lease sticks between the castle and the back beam. Now you will have bunching of the warp threads at the lease sticks, but these are much easier to straighten than those at the heddle. You will have to pull out to the front each and every one of these warp threads – requires steady resolve.

• while UNbeaming, the warp threads will be coming out at the front full of loops and tangles, by which I mean something like this: this and the bunching are what made my heart sink, and repeatedly so.

However fear not, as incredible as it seems, these horrible tangles can be and will be straigthened out while REbeaming. For that to be the case, standing at the front of your loom you have to grab the bout and do possibly each of the following multiple times:

• tug at it sharply;
• shake it vigorously, as if they were horse reins;
• beat it against the breast beam;
• strum it (as if it were made of guitar strings)
• make a shed and pass your hand through it to separate a top and bottom
• repeat
• do not comb if you life depended on it!

If you do the above, then miracously a minute or two of such exercise take each bit of you bouts from e.g. this: to this

You just have to keep going, steadily and patiently.

The good news is, it works! Just take plenty of time, and be prepared for getting very close to quitting multiple times. Just keep reminding yourself that, no matter how long and wide your warp, it is only a finite set of warp threads: with enough time and patience you can untangle anything!

When you RE-beam, do make sure you tension your warp properly, you don’t want to have to do this again! Use the “yank and crank” method (i.e. divide the warp in even bouts, and after each turn or half turn of the back beam, pull at each bout sharply) – some useful tips are on Peggy Osterkamp’s blog, among other sources.

The reward awaits you – a lovely, taut warp ready for the shuttles!

Warping a table loom back to front without a raddle

The advantage of this method is that you do not need any additional equipment other than what comes as standard with your loom, at least in the case of Ashford, where raddles are optional add ons.

The starting point is a chained warp, still uncut on both ends just in case, where the “tail” (i.e. unchained part) of the chain is away from the threading cross.

This is the end that would normally go on the raddle, but that will be rough sleyed through the reed instead. To do so, the reed is temporarily removed from the front beater, and used to space the warp threads while beaming. Once this is done, the reed is taken off the warp (how? keep reading to find out), and used as normal.

As standard warping sequence to be modified I will consider the one in Ashford’s videos:

Ashford: winding a warp on a warp frame

Ashford: beam your warp on a table loom

Ashford: thread your warp and lash on

The sequence below will differ at two points: the rough sleying of the reed and transferring the cross from the front to the back of the reed, so that you can take the reed off the warp and put it back on the front beater, where it belongs.

1. take the reed off
2. if your chain is “locked”, unlock it;
3. starting from the end, pull the loops through the raddle, with roughly the same number of loops per dent as you will have when you will actually establish sett, and slip the lease stick through the loops, securing them. It won’t be possible to replicate any sett requiring an odd number of threads, since now everything is looped. You could cut the threads, but this will mean a bit more more loom waste (the knots, as you will have to tied the ends, rather than exploiting the loops) and risk disaster (you will have to manage those cut ends so that they aren’t pulled back by the chain through the reed dents). So easier to go as close as possible to your actual sett, but keeping loops intact. For instance, if the sett requires three warp threads per dent, you can alternate a dent with 1 loop and a dent with 2 loops. For more on rough sleying, you can check Laura Fry’s blog.
4. Once all the loop ends have been sleyed, the least stick with the loops on gets installed the lease stick on the back apron rod.
5. beam as normal (crank and yank method): the reed will “comb” the warp and keep it spaced as a raddle would. Keep going until you get to the cross. The picture below shows the “combing” (the reed is behind the castle – heddles have been moved to the sides, one hand keeps the chain in tension at the front of the loom while the other winds the back beam. The tension and the reed’s weight keep it vertical).
6. now it is the time to remove the reed without destroying the cross. To transfer the cross behind the reed, you turn the lease stick closest to the reed on edge and slide another stick in the opening on the other side of the reed. You take the stick out that you had on edge and bring the second stick up to the reed, turn it on edge, and slide another stick inside the opening on the other side of the reed. The lease sticks are now in the cross on the side of the reed where you need them for threading.

(here with pictures of the process, scroll to the end). I did not have enough hands to take pictures while transferring the cross, but here is what the back of my loom looked like after transferring the cross:

And that’s it – now the front loops can be cut, and threading through the heddles can begin.

Of course things can go wrong, and did go wrong for me – after beaming I found that my threading cross had somehow been thrown in disarray!

Messed up threading cross

But here having the reed sleyed did come very handy: I pulled all the threads out of the cross, but since they were still in the reed slots, I could (patiently!) take them in the order they came out of the reed (also the order in which they were beamed), and put them through the cross again in the right order.

Cross back in order!