Threading

Yesterday I started threading heddles, which are the tiny wires with holes. In pre-industrial looms, heddles consisted of thread with a tiny loop. You can't really tell from the photo, but there are four banks of heddles, one in each harness. The yarn must be threaded sequentially into a heddle from each harness, 1-2-3-4. It's easy to make a mistake, and this is the stage where it's most crucial to keep the threads in order, otherwise the error will show up across the finished piece, and it's difficult to make a correction after this step.

Many people consider threading the heddles tedious and annoying. I find it calming and meditative. It helps to have a colourful, diverse warp. I worked a while longer this morning. It will take another hour or two to thread the entire warp.

Also this morning I had some more anal-retentive fun photographing most of the purchased yarn in my stash and cataloguing it on Ravelry. Actually this is just a fraction of the yarn I have lying around, but the majority defies organization, being parts and pieces of diverse skeins dedicated to The Yarn and another afghan project. I also have a bin of yarn hand-dyed by me and Danny; I will try to catalogue it another time. Check out my yarn stash on Flickr so far. If you're part of the Ravelry community, more information about the stashed yarn is available there.