Front of the Loom
Weaving is always done from the back side of the loom. The side you see in this picture will be “up” when the rug is placed on the floor.
You can see how the heddle is attached with string to every other warp thread so the weaver can pull them back or let them go forward all at once. Just below the heddle is the wood tool that lets the weaver select only selected warps. In this case she is weaving a line of white thread the entire width of the rug so she will just use it to open the gap to make it easy to thread her yarn the width of the rug.
When she is weaving a pattern where there are color changes on a given row she would use it to select only those rows.
This loom is not actually set up exactly right. Notice how the warps go over the tops of the round dowel. This won’t work in real life because it would make it impossible to complete weaving the end of the rug. On an actual loom thread would have been wound around the top dowel and the warps threaded through that. In this way the weaver can still work thread into place at the very end; with some difficulty.
This is why the wefts on one end of a genuine Navajo rug will always be looser than the other. This setup also demonstrates why genuine Navajo rugs don’t have knots at the ends.
