I am in the midst of weaving a beautiful Tencel shawl on my 8-shaft David. My warp was only long enough to weave a single shawl. The threading for this particular pattern was really complicated (at least for me it was!) but I would like to make another shawl with a different colour warp. My question is, is it possible to attach a new warp to the old warp (thus avoiding threading and sleying again)? I was thinking if I tied on each new warp thread to the old warp thread at the end of the first shawl between the back beam and the heddles and then pulled them through to the front of the loom before warping the back beam. Is this a bad idea? I am a newbie weaver so any advice is appreciated!
Tying one warp to another is often done when you don’t want to rethread a loom so it is not a bad idea at all, it is a good one. Usually, this is done at the front of the loom, however. If you have not taken your last project off the loom you could step on both of your tabby sheds and insert lease sticks into them essentially making a cross in front of the beater. String the lease sticks between the castle posts and the front beam to support them. You would then ideally have about 6″ of warp in front of them to tie on to. The cross would give you access to the warp threads coming out of the reed in the proper order. If you only have 1 end coming out of the reed then you don’t need to put the cross into the front, you can just tie on to each individual end coming out of the reed. I would then insert another set of lease sticks into the new warp and attach them between the breast beam and the castle posts. You would then cut a few ends at a time and tie them to the warp threads coming from the first set of lease sticks. After you have tied all your knots you can remove the lease sticks (both pairs) and then pull all the knots through the reed first then the heddles and then beam your entire warp.
