Another slippery slope...

Well, today was the day... you gotta love the Skully Gaffa tape !!!

... took me about 1/2 an hour to unpack it all and reassemble it. 
The previous owner had left it all warped up for me, which was very kind!

It didn't look quite right though, so I unwound and undid things. 

Seemed like a very good idea at the time :P

By the time I got to this point, my manshapes were home from school, so Thing 1 helped me tension it all up. 

(I knew the thick brown paper that wrapped Beasts new cymbal would come in useful :p)

I'd also found a *brilliant* video on warping so I undid the 4 knots that were attatched to the cloth beam and retied the warp directly onto the front beam :) 

I was rather pleased with my progress, and so watched another fab video ... 

At this point, I thought that the heddle was too fine for the chunky yarn, as when I was trying to weave, the warp threads were sticking together and I was unable to put the shuttle through without a lot of grrrrr-ing :P

I thought I was going to have to rewarp the whole thing (insert more grrrrr-ing) which I didn't want to do, I wanted to reuse the warp already in place.

But, thanks to a lot of wonderful advice from my friends, I had a break, cooked some tea and went back to it after.

Cranked up the tension a lot more, with the heddle in the *up* position (thanks Laura) and voila....

...and an hour and a few more stripes later...

There is no way in the world it is a perfect piece of fabric, but it's a start, and I am so happy that I understand the process. I knew it would be a steep learning curve, but it wasn't so steep I felt out of my depth at all.

And I wouldn't have got this far without the help of all my friends, as always :)