How We Wind a Warp for the Winter Throws

Before a single pick of weft goes into a throw, we have to wind the warp, the set of parallel threads that runs the length of the loom and everything else weaves through. For our winter throws, a warp usually runs somewhere around twelve yards, enough for four or five throws before we re-thread the loom entirely, and it starts on a wall-mounted warping board rather than the loom itself.

Winding a warp means walking a single thread back and forth across a grid of pegs, hundreds of times, building up the exact number of threads the final cloth needs at the exact length we've calculated, plus a bit extra for takeup and loom waste. For a typical throw warp, that's somewhere around four hundred threads, which means four hundred trips across the warping board before the winding is done.

We calculate the math before winding starts: how many threads per inch the weave structure needs, how wide the finished throw should be, and how much wool shrinks in the finishing wash, usually eight to ten percent for the wool we use. Getting this wrong means a throw that comes out narrower or shorter than intended, which is a mistake we've made exactly once and don't intend to repeat.

Once wound, the warp comes off the board in a long chain and gets threaded onto the loom's back beam under even tension, a job that takes two people and a fair amount of patience. Uneven tension at this stage shows up as puckering or a wavy selvedge in the finished cloth, so we check it thread by thread before winding forward.

Winter warps get set up in early fall specifically because the throws that come off them need time to finish, wash, full slightly, and dry, before they're ready to sell into the cold months. A warp wound in early October becomes finished throws by late November, which is roughly the schedule that gets our winter throws onto shelves before the weather that makes people want them.

It's slow, repetitive work, and it's also the part of weaving most people never see, since it happens before the loom does anything visibly interesting. We don't mind that. A good warp, evenly wound and correctly tensioned, is most of what makes a throw hang and drape the way it should, long before the pattern itself has anything to do with it.