I had a lot of time for my next foray into getting this ready, which is a Good Thing because I most certainly needed it! It took me 1 1/2 hours to get the rest of the heddles on (which is faster than before). I did end up holding the second warp in the pair with my middle finger.

Then, on to using a needle to go over one set of warp threads, and under the next (to lock in the beads, so when you take the piece off the loom, the beads don’t just fall off). This was very hard to see at first. Hard. I spent 25 minutes to get from one side of the loom to the other — and then there was one thread left, not two. Sigh, found my mistake back at about the third stitch from the beginning. Pulled it out, started over. In another 30 minutes, wove from one side of the loom and back to the beginning. Now I’m ready for the beads!

I think it took me 3 hours to do 2.5 rows. I do not have this motion figured out. I’m speeding up a little bit, but at this point, I’m moving at a glacial pace. And, AND on the second row, I noticed that one of the heddles looked funny. The right way to attach the heddles is to have one thread in the warp pair to be heddled to the top heddle bar, and the other to be heddled to the bottom heddle bar. When you rotate the copper tube up, it pulls the bottom bar and its heddles out away from the neutral position. Rotate the tube down, and the top heddles are pulled out. I had attached one side of this particular heddle loop to the top bar, and the other side to the bottom bar. So rotating the copper tube did nothing.

I at least had compensated, and didn’t have to redo the beading. So after finishing 3 rows (I was hoping I could get away with not fixing it, but decided it was too risky), I took back the heddles on the bottom, where it should have been attached. I grabbed the recalcitrant warp with a new heddle, cut the badbadbad heddle off, and managed to put it together again without dropping a heddle.

I’m hoping I’ll get better at this….