There’s nothing worse than running out of heddles while you’re threading. Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to avoid if you count your heddles before you start threading. Counting heddles takes time and effort, though, and I’m usually impatient to start threading. I used to be tempted to “save time” by skipping this very important step – and occasionally paid the price when I did!

The solution for me was to add markers that make it VERY quick and painless to count my heddles. Now it only takes a few seconds to do the thing that’ll save me grief later, so I’m not nearly as tempted to take the risk.

Some weavers like to color or mark the heddles themselves, but I’ve never liked that solution. If you move heddles around, you have to be careful to put the marked heddles in certain places. Marked heddles mean something specific, so you can’t just put them wherever you want. If you make a mistake in counting and marking, you’ve got to move heddles around to fix it since the heddles themselves are the problem. If you add a bunch of heddles, you’ve got to either dig up some previously marked but currently unused heddles, or mark more. Plus marking the heddles isn’t reversible and I always like having the option to undo anything I try if I don’t like how it works.

Instead of marking the heddles themselves, I used a different solution on my loom: I added markers between the heddles. I like to count by 10s, so I put a marker after each group of 10 heddles.

Here’s what my markers look like on the loom:

They slide right along with the heddles and make it very fast and easy to count. If I ever have to take heddles off or move them between shafts, it’s easy to move the markers, too. If I ever notice one’s in the wrong spot, I just cut it out and add a new one in the right spot – easy peasy, and no harm done to any of the heddles themselves.

Making the markers for the heddles

You might be able to tell from the picture above that my markers are nothing but paper clips I snipped the ends off of with wire cutters. If you’re making your own, be sure to use paper clips that are long enough to slide freely but not so long that they catch on neighboring shafts.

Here’s an undoctored paperclip on the left, and another on the right that’s been snipped:

You can see that I cut out the inner loop entirely, and also trimmed the overlap in the outer loop a bit to make it easier to snap onto the heddle bar. Here’s a picture that shows how much I cut off in each spot:

When they’re trimmed like this, it’s easy to snap the markers into place even when the shafts are on the loom. It’s not as easy to take them off again, but they’re paper clips – you can just cut them off with wire cutters and make new ones. (Of course, if the heddle bars aren’t actually in the shafts, you can slide the markers off the ends along with the heddles.)

The only downside to these paper clip markers is that they occasionally get themselves hooked over the tops of my flat steel heddles, which hooks two or three heddles together temporarily. It just takes a second to flick the marker back over the tops again and unbunch things, though, so that hasn’t been a deal breaker for me. This should only be an issue for flat steel heddles, anyway – inserted eye or wire heddles don’t stick up above the heddle bar, so the marker doesn’t have anything extra to catch on.

I’ve had these markers on my loom for a few years now and they make me happy every time I sit down to thread!

This handy tip came out of our Live at the Loom series, see the full recording of Janet threading her loom here.

Want to learn more about how Janet makes warping easier? Read about her #1 hack for making warping faster and easier.

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