The end of my Bergman adventure, part 1

Once the competition was out of the way for fall, I decided to attack a project I'd been wanting to do for a while.  I saw a picture circulating on facebook that absolutely called to me.  Lately when I am inspired it manifests in cloth, it has to.  So I decided to warp the Bergman, give it a test, and make a wrap project to get this need for this cloth out of my system.

First, I needed heddles.  Lots of them.  I read, and read more, and even more.  I ended up buying seine twine and made a little over 1000 string heddles, with Pi's help.

It took a lot of time.  My wrists and fingers hurt.  It was a labor of love, and honestly, money saving, because that many texsolv heddles are NOT cheap.  I was told string would be just as good, if not better anyways.

Well, long story short, lies!  They were twisty and a pain to thread.  When I finally finished, everything threaded and on the loom, it was catastrophic.

I think the whole project was pretty doomed from the beginning.  Warping back to front was painful.  Trying to maneuver to thread from the lease sticks there, into the heddles, it was a nightmare.  My hand didn't fit, and reaching made me ache so bad.  That in itself was just a loom structure issue, not anything I could help, but if I could get it to work front to back later, that would be another thing I could maybe overlook.

But once I got it threaded, the reed sleyed, and was ready to weave, things were not good.

Knots were coming undone.  Heddles were ripping off the bottom shaft.  My knots weren't secure enough.  It was a mess.

Not only that, but there was obviously continuing problems with the uneven levels of the shafts.  I was getting a ton of thread skips.  It was unworkable.  It sat on the loom, skips all over, for weeks and weeks while I contemplated what to do.