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Twill on a Rigid Heddle Loom

A square wooden warping board with long pegs on a white wall, with four spans of grey yarn and a narrow band of teal looped across it, tied with yellow cord.
Beautiful warp on beautiful warping board. 11 feet? 4 yards? Something like that.
Because I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment (and user of tools in fashions for which they were not intended...see Exhibit A and Exhibit B), when K asked for a scarf for Christmas, I decided to weave it on my little rigid heddle loom. In 2x2 twill.

A small wooden rigid heddle loom, with pieces of magazine paper wrapped over the front and back beams, sitting on a green rug.
The catalog pages are to cover the sticky glue residue from the velcro I peeled off.
In case you don't speak loom, rigid heddle looms create two sets of warp threads, half of which stay in the plane of the woven fabric while the other half move above or below that plane. The stationary threads go in slots, and the mobile threads go through holes in the heddle. Over-under-over-under goes the weft thread, and that's all it does, and it does it very well.

For 2x2 twill (or any base-4 twill, but let's stick to this), you need to be able to lift four different sets of threads in sequence. If you have threads 1, 2, 3, and 4, you'll need to pick up threads 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and 4 and 1 as sets, and repeat that pattern as you weave your cloth. This...is a problem, on a rigid heddle loom, because it can only do two sets of thread.

I could put every fourth thread through the holes of the heddle, and lift each of the other sets with a stick I inserted by hand. Every row. That sounds kind of like work, though, and I'm allergic to work (yes, yes, it's very sad, incurable, terrible tragedy).

Instead, I've decided to use the heddle as a reed, passing two warp threads through each slot (so they can move freely), and make string heddles for each of the four sets of threads I'll need to lift. Lots more front-end work, but it'll make the actual weaving much simpler.

A white hand holding up a wood-and-white-plastic rigid heddle, threaded primarily with grey yarn, with a narrow band of teal at the left edge. The yarn is knotted in small sections behind the heddle, and all draws down to a single bundle at the front.
Weaving is a remarkable process whereby you cut a bunch of string and make a mess, and then you make it even more organized than it was to begin with.
I got the heddle threaded in about an hour, while baking crackers—so some of that time I wasn't actually touching yarn.

A small wooden rigid heddle loom, with the grey-and-teal warp wound onto the back beam and the heddle sleyed. the ends of the warp threads are draped over the front beam, and the loom is sitting on a green rug.
That rug really needs help. A washing. Or a match.
Winding on was slow, but fairly graceful, and I remembered that inserting sticks every once in a while to keep the threads rolling on evenly is a non-optional part of weaving, so my tension should be miles better this time than it was for the last scarf. (I didn't blog about that one. It was also for K, and is a lovely handspun-by-someone-else fawn alpaca with white alpaca in a semi-houndstooth pattern. It has...some selvedge issues. He still loves it, though.)

A small white and gold notebook sitting on a pink-skirted lap, with six bands of white cord tied around it. All the knots are at the right side, and the bands are concentrated at the bottom of the notebook, separated by equal amounts of empty space.
This is the most use that notebook has seen since 2009.
For twill, I needed to set up string heddles of some kind, and I have not been very good at making continuous heddles a consistent length before, so I decided to bite the bullet and make a few (hundred) individual heddles with leftover crochet cotton. The great advantage, other than being able to tie them around a notebook for definitely-consistent lengths, is that if I make a threading error, I can easily move the heddle where it belongs by unlooping it from the shaft and relocating it. (Keep scrolling, it'll make more sense in three photos.)

A small white and gold notebook sitting on a pink-skirted lap, with six bands of white cord tied around it. All the knots are at the right side, and the bands are concentrated at the bottom of the notebook, separated by equal amounts of empty space. A pink cord cinches them together slightly at the center, with a knot at the bottom.
I think weavers chain everything they can get their paws on.
I made sixty heddles for each shaft—two more than I needed, but extras never hurt. I sectioned them in groups of ten as I tied them, and chained each finished bundle to keep them organized until I could put them on the loom.

Three sets of cotton cord loops, in pink, magenta, and white, each tied with the color of the bundle to its left, sitting on a scratched white and grey table.
Yes, I did that on purpose.
Aren't they charming? I used a different color for each shaft, to make my life easier when I'm trying to sort through three shafts of 58 heddles apiece all draped across the warp.

A small wooden rigid heddle loom warped with grey and teal, with two flat wooden stick shuttles holding some of the warp threads up. A thin dowel holds the ends of dozens of magenta cord loops, and is laid on the near side of the heddle, while the loops disappear behind the heddle.
There's a lot going on here.
Shaft one went pretty smoothly; I used two stick shuttles to pick up each warp thread that belonged on the shaft, and they served as a backdrop while I looped each heddle around each warp thread for this shaft, and slid them onto a dowel.

A small wooden rigid heddle loom warped with grey and teal, with two flat wooden stick shuttles holding some of the warp threads up. Three thin dowels hold the ends of dozens of magenta, pink, and white cord loops, each dowel laid on the warp threads just behind the heddle, with the loops draped in three distinct color layers behind them.
Okay, I lied. There's definitely a lot going on here, though.
Shafts two and three, done the same way, plus very carefully sliding one stick shuttle through the next shed, and then shifting the second one before starting to thread everything. Here's hoping it all goes smoothly (okay, spoiler alert, this part happened well before Christmas, and it...did not. There will be updates).

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