A Little About Heddles
Over the past few months, in the course of reading articles and blogs and watching videos by various weaving instructors, I’ve come across different approaches people take to working with and threading heddles. So I thought I may as well share some of my own approaches and habits that I’ve developed over the years.
There are no rights or wrongs here, just doing what works best for what you are doing and the particular loom that you’re working on. And a lot of this comes from what you have been taught, what you have observed, and the quirks of the looms that you have.
I don’t remember all the particulars of what I was originally taught decades ago, but I do remember being told to count out all the heddles you need on each shaft and to make sure that they would be balanced on the two sides of your loom. Counting heddles is not someting that I particularly enjoy doing, and having to move heddles from one shaft to another, or adding heddles to a shaft that doesn’t have enough is something that I REALLY don’t want to spend time doing.
When I bought my first loom in 1984, a secondhand 8-shaft Gilmore floor loom that has been a trusty workhorse for me ever since, it didn’t have nearly enough heddles for my needs. Its former owner was a rug weaver working in fewer warp ends per inch, and I weave a lot in doubleweave, often in finer threads. Adding more heddles meant taking the shafts out of the loom, laying them on a table, pulling the metal rods out of their channels, adding more of the flat metal heddles that the loom uses, putting the rods back into their channels and the shafts back into the loom.
Since I only wanted to go through this process once in my life I calculated the maximum weaving width and the maximum number of ends per inch I was likely to ever use, and ordered enough heddles to cover that. I put a bit more on the front four shafts than on the back four, figuring they would get used more frequently. I have gone through this same process with every loom I have bought since then, always ordering enough heddles to keep me happy for the rest of my life.
My Gilmore loom has metal clips on the top and bottom heddle bars of each shaft which you are supposed to unclip to move the heddles around for threading, and then clip back again when you are done threading. This is another thing that I don’t want to spend time doing. When I orignally added the extra heddles to this loom I divided them equally between the left and right sides of each shaft. Instead of threading from the right side of the warp to the left or the left side of the warp to the right, I thread from the center of the loom out to each side. I never have to count whether I have enough heddles on each side because I already know how many there are. You have to retrain your brain a bit when you go from one side to the other and reverse your threading, but I figure that it keeps my brain on its toes.
A wonderful little aid that I learned about in the course of teaching workshops is these little plastic clips that fit right over the metal bars that hold metal heddles.
They work great for separating out groups of heedles that you are going to use in threading your warp. They slide off easily and slide back on when you are ready to put them in a new position. They also hold back all the unused heddles after you are finished threading and keep them from migrating over into your warp.
I bought a whole tub of them a few years ago when they were being offered in office supply stores. They seem to no longer be available through those venues, but the Eugene Textile Center carries them in packages of eight. It is well worth having a good supply of them on hand. They are one of those little things that, once I had them I don’t know how I ever got by without them.
While I don’t enjoy having to count heddles to move them around, I happen to really enjoy the process of threading heddles for my weaving patterns. I get a mantra going in my head of what the number sequence is, and keep that going as a meditation during the hours, or days, that I will be threading a particular warp.
Something that I always do, and can’t recommend highly enough, is to pull out the heddles that you need from each shaft for one repeat of your threading, and separate them from the rest of your heddles. That way the worst mistake you will make is inverting a couple threads in the sequence, but then it’s easy to fix because you still have all the heddles you need. You can then just rethread the ones that are in the wrong order rather than having to tie in any repair heddles. I also check my threading after completing about an inch of warp threads, make sure they are correct, and then tie them together with a slip knot when I feel sure there are no errors in that group.
Threading from the center of the warp out to the sides has become such a comfortable process for me that I thread that way on all my looms whether they have center clips or not. My two Louet looms have texsolv heddles and no dividers anywhere on the heddle bars. So what I’ve done is take a felt tip marker and make a mark on the center two heddles on each shaft. That way it is very visible where the center of heddles is and I can just start threading from the center of my warp at that place.
This is looking at the top of my shafts on my 32-shaft Louet Megado compudobby loom.
It can be pretty challenging to recognize which shaft you are on when there are so many. Rather than counting from 1 to 32, I’ve marked the top and bottom of the first shaft for every set of four shafts, in other words on shafts 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25 and 29. I think of each of these as being a separate 4-shaft loom, and think of them each as having shafts 1-4. I find that I am much less likely to make threading errors by counting in sets of four shafts.
Since I am often working in doubleweave, and particularly in block doubleweave these days, threading each block on adjacent sets of four shafts makes the threading go much easier. Here is an example of a warp threaded in eight blocks of four shafts each. You can see how each block has its own 4-shaft loom and how this makes the pattern easy to see on the loom.
In the same way that I thread my warp from the center out to each side, I also sley my reed from the center out to each side. My beaters all have a mark that I’ve placed in the center and each of my reeds has a mark in the center so that it can be aligned with the mark on the beater. I already know where the center of my warp is because of the way I have separated my heddles on the two sides. This seems to be much quicker than taking the width of the warp, dividing it in half, and then measuring that distance out from the center of the reed.
Once the warp is threaded and the reed is sleyed, you have a nice balanced warp on your loom with your leftover heddles perfectly balanced between the two sides of your loom. The only issue that can come up is if you are using the full width or most of your weaving width for your warp and there are a lot of heddles left on the sides. If this is going to happen you can intersperse extra heddles between warp ends as you are threading your warp.
There is such a feeling of peace and serenity that I get when I have a warp all set up on my loom, with all the threads in the right order, under perfect tension, and all the heddles right where they belong. It makes me feel like all is right with the world. If only that could be true beyond the walls of my weaving studio!
