Prequel: before using the valet

... there must be a warp.
This is the making of the blue-white warp beamed here.
The warp consists of two: one blue warp, one white, to be beamed together. Both are cotton of various grists - 16/2, 24/2 and 30/2. The blue warp has (if I remember) three slightly different nuances.
This warp was woven into a message shawl.

Starting with the white, I put a "tube holder" under a row of hooks on the wall (the picture is a montage - the hooks sit at about 120 cm height).

I use 4 ends, mostly because I have 4 "slots" between my fingers... holding them like this:

This way, the yarns cannot twist around each other, which makes beaming (and, later, weaving) easier. I wind with only one cross, and I do the cross with all four ends. Like this:

After both warps are wound and chained, I take them to the table, take out the reed I will use for rough-sleying, put something heavy on the warp, mark where I will start the sleying:

The sley-hook is my favourite (read more here), and all my reeds has their midpoint somehow marked (here with a piece of wool).

I start picking out the loops from the cross.

Each loop has 8 ends - four "coming" and 4 "going".
For 8 ends per cm, I chose a 40/10 reed (standard Swedish reed-numbering - 40 dents per 10 cm). For the rough-sleying, that means one loop (8 ends) every fourth dent:

I make sure that the stick goes in the same loop as the nearest lease stick, to make transferring the cross easy:

Why, I have been asked, do I transfer the cross at this stage? Why not do it after beaming? I have two answers: 1. 'cos this is what I was taught and (more important) 2. 'cos I tried leaving it until after beaming, and had a lot more tangles. With the cross behind the reed, the reed will place the loops in order for the lease sticks for further separation and ordering.

Had this been the only warp, the rough-sleying would be done, and the warp been taken to the loom (and the valet), but, in this case, there is a white warp, too.
It is to be offset a bit, so I first determine where it should begin:

As this warp, too, shall be sett at 8 ends/cm, I use the second of the empty dents.
When the white warp is sleyed and it's cross transferred, too, both warps are combined on an extra stick:

The extra stick now hold the loops in order, and the whole thing can be transferred to the loom. I just shove the heddles to the side(s), so the warp can pass between them. (When having a wide warp, I take off the shafts - easy to do with this free-hanging type.)

The reed is put in it's normal place, the loops are transferred from the extra stick to the back "apron bar"(?), the two pairs of lease sticks are placed in their supporting hangers, the varp is routed under the breast beam and over the valet's roller: