Materials & Techniques for Weaving on a Frame Loom

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Debbie the robateer, and I'm here with Expert Village talking about making a rag woven rug on a handmade loom. I wanted to tell you a little bit about the process before this part because it would have just taken too long for me to show you all of this. We can do that at some other time. What I did is I got the frame and I got the dowels and I went and bought some rolls of jute so I could make the warp. This part's called the warp. And I added that on and tied one piece each time that's folded over double, and tied it to here. It's a process that took about two hours. And then I started weaving so that we'd have something to work from. What I want to show you is your technique of using your fingers to get the weaving going. But what I did is I just wove back and forth and this is another forty-five minutes to two hours through in here because I wanted it to be the right shape. Now there's things that you want when you're walking on a rug, and one of them is not to hit a big lumpy knot on the end, so this is actually something you don't want to do is put a knot in there. You can easily fold the rags back inside here when you're weaving so that it's a smooth transition, or just plain old cut them off when you're through because you can give a little stitch with a needle and thread, but what we're going to do is we're going to learn how to use our fingers to pull each one of these lines in the warp up in the right order so that we can have a good strong weave. We won't miss any pieces, we won't go the wrong way with anything, and we can also put in some patterns."