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Tonight I finished warping my loom and created a piece of fabric. (Which I then promptly shrunk in the washing machine because I am a moron and forgot to set the machine to "delicate.") Here are the remaining steps to warping the loom.

Once the reed has been sleyed the heddles need to be threaded. This is like threading a needle, except on a much larger scale. Each heddle is attached to a shaft which goes up and down according to how the treadles (peddles) are pushed. The order of the threading and the order of the treadling will make a unique pattern in the fabric. I wanted to make a basic "tabby" pattern. (This is a simple under-over pattern.) This photo shows about half of the heddles threaded. You can see the reed in the middle of the photo with the yarn coming out of it. On the right hand side are the threaded heddles and on the left hand side are the empty heddles. I actually quite enjoyed this step (it's also a LOT faster than sleying the reed).

With the heddles threaded the next step is to tie up the ends of the warp to the front and back beam of the loom. This involves a bit of play to make sure the tension is right. In the first photo the warp is wound onto the front beam. In the second photo the warp has been wound onto the back beam and is ready for weaving:

As part of this process I also carefully examined each of the heddles to make sure I had threaded the warp in the correct order. I'd made two mistakes out of over 100 warp threads. I think this is pretty good for my first try! With the loom warped I was (finally!) able to start weaving.

It took me virtually no time before I had a finished piece of fabric:

The ends were tied and the extra loom waste was snipped off:

Technically the weaving isn't done until it's been set (washed). This is where I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to use the delicate setting. Fortunately this is "just" a practice piece and wasn't intended for anything specific. Overall I had about a 10% shrink rate. A little bit of shrinking is expected, but it's usually much less than this.

But there we have it! My first piece of fabric off my aunt's loom which is now my loom.