Weaving?...

Oh, my!... Oh, my!...

Is warping an 80 cm wide Ashford Rigid Heddle Loom so difficult or is it just me who cannot do it properly?
Or maybe it is the linnen thread that I was desperately trying to warp and got bad results?

First, we did it according to the Ashford instructions. Experiment failed.
(it was fun at the beginning, very easy to perform, especially with the second person helping, but we ended up with totally different tensions throughout the whole width...).

Then I unwound everything, tied one end stick to the headboard of our bed, pushed the loom as far as I could and stretched the warp, and pulled and tied EACH pair of threads SEPARATELY (a 30 threads per 10 cm heddle, 240 threads...).
Experiment partly failed too, because when I stretched the tenth pair of threads, the first pair started to hang down miserably, so I had to adjust them again.
I also had two types of a warp linnen threads: the white ones were very smooth hence slippery and stiff, the grey ones were very coarse and they tended to stretch a bit but they stayed stretched and were not coming back to their previous position. Which didn't help at all...

At 22:19 I wound up the warp onto the back roller and blocked the whole construction - there were still threads that needed pulling up, but I decided to leave it for Sunday, phew...

Early afternoon, after a good nutricious breakfast (pancakes with Nutella and bananas, and strawberry jam, and sugar - my favourite option, respectively ^^) I started with pulling up all the hanging threads and then I sat at the living room table to start weaving. (BTW, this is the place where I do all my crafts plus this is our dining table, too ^^). Robert attached the loom to the table with two blue plastic belts, because it didn't want to stay in one place when I moved the heddle.

I took some wool in two colours and kept on weaving, struggling with the warp threads as they didn't want to cooperate smoothly and some of them still kept hanging down whereas, for a change, some of them (the ones on the edges) were suddenly very tight. I must admit I definitely made a mistake here because when I was winding the warp up I put under them a piece of paper to prevent threads from catching up on each other, and I cut the paper a bit too small, so the outside threads on both sides were wound without a paper - this resulted in a tighter tension on the edges of the loom. So, after I woven about 20 cm, I had to cut off the edge threads to be able to tighten the middle threads. Well, it was the first trial weaving anyway.

My piece of fabric got narrower at this point, but I kept going and it soon turned out that my weft tension on the edges of the fabric was too big. The final result was a rather lacy, loose structure fabric, irregular in shape and colour scheme, but it was my first attempt at weaving on this loom. ^^ I don't know whether I can do anything with this piece, it's too loose to cut it and turn it into a bag or something, maybe it will stay as a memory of my first weaving. *^v^*

Tomorrow I'm going to try the woollen warp, I presume it will be more elastic and in this way easier to warp evenly. At least I hope so! ^^