(No ..that’s not a typo. Read further to find out why) This post is probably going to be pretty photo intensive (You’ll need to click them all to enlarge them to get the full effect).

For the second installment of Warped Wednesdays we’re going to talk about sleying the reed. Sleying the reed is when you thread each of the ends of yarn you warped on the warping board, through the reed. The reed is the metal peice inserted in the beater bar of the loom. It has spaces set certain distances apart. The reed that I am using for this project is called a 12 dent reed. That is because the spaces are set at 12 ends per inch (epi).

But first….here’s what you need to get started warping the loom.

(click to embiggen and read the caption)

Remember I showed you my yarn on the warping board? Well, the next step is to take it off the loom and make warp chains.  This are my warp chains wrapped around the cloth beam and ready to be sleyed.

The next thing to do is to get one of the chains and start in the middle of the loom and start sleying the reed. When you wind the warp on the warping board you create what is called a cross. This is to help in sleying the reed and keeping the yarn neat and tidy. This photo shows the cross pretty well. 

At this point, I’ve not cut the ends of the yarn yet. To me, this is the scariest part of warping a loom.

Next up, after cutting the loop end of the warp chain is to begin sleying. I reach over my beater bar and pull the yarn through from the back with my sley hook.

You use the cross and take the first thread from the stack and pull it through the reed.

(yeah…we had fun with the macro setting on the camera!)

Anywho, this is repeated the width of the project (in this case the full width of the reed). I knot the back of mine so that they don’t pull back out of the reed before I’m ready to thread the heddles. Well.. in this case I had a helper.

She helped me speed this up by knotting after I had done a bit so that I could keep on going.

Here is a shot of the loom with the reed sleyed.

I think since this is so photo heavy, I’ll just stop here for this week and next week I’ll tell you about threading the heddles and finishing up the warp.  I hope you’re enjoying this new feature on my blog. I’m a fairly new weaver and writing this all out helps with my learning process as well as informing non-weavers of a really fun craft! (come on…you know you wanna. I can help you get started!)

See you next time!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Warped Wednesday, weaving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.