Old Dog, New Tricks

As the few of you who read my blog (you know who you are!) know, I sold my old Schact loom this summer and purchased a friend's Louet loom. (Not a tapestry loom after all, but I'm still waffling about keeping or selling the Glimakra.) Along with this lovely new loom came every possible gadget that one might want or need, and two of some of them!

One of the new-to-me tools is an AVL Warping Weel. It's supposed to be a wiz-bang gizmo to make warping your sectional warp beam (I've got one of those now too!) a breeze. You wind an inch of warp width at a time to the length you want. Then you attach that bundle, or bout, to the warp beam and wind on. The wheel has a tension device that you set so that each bout is wound on at the same tension. Sounds nifty, right?

I wish I could say that I love this new tool. I wish I could report that I got my three-yard-long, 20 end-per-inch, 20 inch wide warp on the loom in record time, easy-peasy. Sadly, I can't say either of those things. At least not at this point.

Through the reed, under the clip,
between the guides and wind another warp end...

On the plus side, I like that the wheel has a handy counting mechanism. It's really easy to change colors for a striped warp - though I did have to do some extensive planning to make my design fit in the one-inch warp increments that this style of warping requires. It's easy to turn the wheel, and after you get the hang of where the thread goes as you're winding, that part is simple too.

But it took a really long time! All day, in fact. And I still have four more bouts to wind. My back is sore, probably more from holding down the break to the warp beam with one foot, while bending to turn the beam to wind the warp on, while trying to reach across the loom to make sure that the warp was staying in it's little one-inch section.

So close to finishing, but I ran out of steam.

Honestly, for a three yard long, 200 end warp, I probably could have gotten the whole warp made, wound on and started threading in the same amount of time using my old method.

Still, I know there are people out there who loooove this gadget. I'm willing to give it another try (if this warp ever gets on and done!) or two to see if I love a Warping Wheel too. That, and the process of sectional warping, which seems like really a lot of bother to me at this point.

If all else fails I can switch from a sectional beam back to a regular beam. So if the old dog (that would be me) can't learn the new trick, I can always go back to the old way. :-)