Explaining the Warp in Weaving

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Debbie the roboteer and I'm here with Expert Village today to tell you a little more about making a rag weaving on a loom. Right now we're going to talk about the warp. That's the part that holds it together and you put the rags through it. I happen to use jute, I really like it. You can get rolls of it fairly cheaply and sometimes you have it laying around the house. But what we've got here is, we've got it all ready to go and it's loosened up a little so that we can have it in storage. And on this side is where you can see that I've looped the threads over the top dowel and I bought them down here and they get kind of hairy as you tied them. But sometimes you have to tighten these up a little bit, so what we're going to do is, we're going to slide some back, and it's just a big bow and you'll see how it is. So you can see here, it's actually just tied to the dowel. You have a dowel down here when you're tying this up, and you bring your threads down from the top because they're just looped over and they're doubled like this. And bring it down and you take one thread on one side and one on the other side, and you make it fairly tight and you just tie it in a bow. So, if you don't know how to tie bows, now's the time to get somebody to teach you. And what you want is the whole thing to be fairly even, so I can see this one's kind of loose, let's get that one. And once again, it's the same process. You untie the bow, loosen it up and make sure you've got a good tie, and tie it back. After you do each thread, you want it to be kind of be an even distance apart so that when you're weaving, the weaving will look the same everywhere. So, I pretty much put it all so that it's straight down."