You must put some tension on the warp to be able to add the lease sticks. I do it by wrapping the warp chains around the front beam once or twice and pulling it to the front. I can access the treadles from the back of my loom, so I push down on each plain-weave treadle and place the lease sticks in the two sheds. It’s a bit awkward. If you can’t open your sheds from behind your loom, you have to lean over the loom and insert the lease sticks, and you could probably even put something heavy on the treadles to keep them down as you work.
