Weft

Designing Wefts (Not Warps): Use a Doubling Stand 

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Introduction: 
The reason this is not a good device for warp yarns is because the upper and lower yarns will be of different tensions when they leave the doubling stand. This isn’t a problem with weft yarns. 

Have you ever wanted  to combine two or more yarns as one weft? Have you discovered it doesn’t work very well because, no matter what you’ve tried, one yarn always loops up so they don’t lie flat together in the shed? The answer is: use a doubling stand to double up weft yarns so they come out of the shuttle together and evenly.

Doubling stands can be homemade or purchased. The photo shows a commercially made stand. (Note the optional tension box for winding tight weft packages.) Notice how the yarn from the cone  is circling around another yarn coming up through a tube in the center of the cone.

Tension boxes can look very different from one another, but they all have a series of dowels—sometimes 3 and sometimes more—over and under which you thread the yarn. This threading puts drag (tension) on the yarn.  
If you don’t have a tension box, you can use your warping board, a spindle-backed chair, or the posts of the lazy Kate located on your spinning wheel. What you need is a series of dowels or pegs that the thread can alternately go over and under to put tension or drag on the weft as you wind.

One or more yarns are put on vertical posts with the yarn guided exactly up from the centers of the posts.  Above these yarns is a single cone or spool of yarn supported by a vertical tube instead of a post. The yarns below are guided up through their respective thread guides and then up through the tube and the center of the extra cone. Then, the lower yarns plus the upper one are taken together up through a guide above the center of the top cone. You can see what happens: the yarn from the upper cone encircles the yarns coming up through its center. This encirclement keeps all the yarns together without any of them looping up during weaving. To guide the bottom threads up through the cone on top, fashion a long hook from a coat hanger or use a long heddle.

Three keys to keep in mind when setting up a doubling “situation” or in making a homemade stand. 

  1. The thread guide for the lower spools must be exactly over the center of the pins or dowels that hold the spools or cones. 
  1. There must be enough space between the tops of all the packages and their thread guides to allow the yarn to whip off the packages freely. 
  1. The top cone or spool must have a way for the lower yarns to pass up through its center. 

A tube to hold the top cone is the hardest thing to find—try hobby shops or a good hardware store. There are many other ways to accomplish the job. I’ve seen one cone underneath an upside-down “milk crate” with another cone sitting to top and the thread from below coming up a hole in the crate and through the top cone. There are many ways you might make (or rig) a doubling “stand” yourself. 

Warp and Weft: Another Spelling Situation

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What do warps, wefts, and woof Mean?
Warps are the threads that are measured out and put on the loom first. Wefts are the threads that cross over and under the warp threads during weaving. I heard one person say, “Warp is the one that has the letter A in it.” When I checked for the definition of woof I first noticed: “a low gruff sound typically produced by a dog.” Further on, “the threads that cross the warp in a woven fabric”. I didn’t follow further, e.g., for woofer!

Warp
We can talk about a warp as a whole or a single warp thread or yarn. Warps are the ones weavers put on the warping board. It’s a strong piece of equipment used to measure out the threads or yarns to go on the loom. A group of threads for a project is called the warp and could inches, or feet, or yards long. Also, a single thread can be called a warp. However, every warp thread needs to be the same length.

Weft
The weft weaves over and under the warps that are on the loom already to make cloth.

Wefts come in any number of packages: Skeins often look like this.

Skeins must be completely unwound for the yarn to be useable. A skein as in the photo is used for dyeing but not for any other use that I can think of. To unwind a skein, you could put on the back of a chair and wind the yarn into a ball.  Then it can be used for warps or wefts or many uses.

Balls come in a variety of sizes and shapes. Weavers can use yarns in any package other than a wound skein.

Cones are another type of package for yarn. They are well known to weavers. The thread comes off easily and fast for making warps or winding shuttles for wefts.

Weft yarns or threads need to go onto shuttles so they can pass easily over and under the warp threads. There are many sizes but this type of shuttle is usually this shape. Usually they are made of wood. The word shuttle means to go  back and forth between two places. Like a space shuttle.

This is a boat shuttle and is much more efficient than the stick shuttle seen before because the yarn wound on its bobbin comes off faster and more smoothly. You can see that it is going over and under the warp threads. In this photo fatter wefts were woven already.