On a Weaving Tangent

Well, maybe the New & Supposedly Improved No-Longer-In-Beta Blogger has a few bugs left in it, because I could have sworn I shared all four of these photos from PhotoBucket with this blog... yet, they were invisible. Let's try again.

First off, my apologies for being so, er, difficult in the last post. End of the week exhaustion coupled with frustration over the estate resolution process just got to me, I guess. I hope I haven't offended anyone for good. (Please come back... I promise to lighten up a bit!)

I've gotten some sleep and feel much better now. Perhaps I mentioned earlier that my local Weaver's Guild had a scarf exchange last week? It's on the loom and I've been weaving away. Here's what I have so far:

From the warp provided to me...


...to the yarns I pulled FROM MY STASH thankyouverymuch for the weft...


…to a bit of the actual woven piece (from the fuschia/teal ball on the far right)…


…to a view from under the front showing the earlier part I wove.


Now. This warp gave me a few problems in the beginning. Or should I say, "provided opportunities for inventing creative solutions". *ahem* The kind lady who warped this forgot to tie off her cross into counted bundles of 10 (according to her EPI of 10 ends per inch). It's not necessary, but it's extremely helpful because it makes it easier to keep things in sequence when putting it on the loom. Non-weavers, don't worry about grasping that. It's too complex to explain without showing you. Take it on faith.

I fixed that by putting the warp on the warping board and tying off the crosses myself. Grumble. There was tangleage. Grumble. But I prevailed. Soon, I sleyed my reed. (Buffy the Reed Sleyer?) Then I moved on to threading the heddles. That's when I forgot to do something very important but minor and screwed myself up bigtime. I forgot to periodically check that I was threading the heddles in the right order and that nobody crossed over.

Ooops.

Somebody crossed over, AND some of them got out of sequence.

Grumble.

I didn't notice until I had the warp tied off on the back beam and was tying off on the front beam. Something didn't quite move right when I opened the shed (put my foot on a treadle to lift the associated harnesses and create an opening between two layers of warp, called the shed).

Untie half the warp from the front beam, pull it out of the reed, re-thread the affected heddles, re-sley the reed. Since I'm doing tabby rather than twill it's not as finicky a deal, but it was still a PITA. (Tabby is 1-2-1-2-1-2...; Twill is 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4...)

FINALLY got all situated and tied up. Checked everything. Looked fine. Loaded up the bobbins and started weaving.

It wasn't until I got through about two feet of it that I discovered I'd mis-threaded One. Measly. End. Instead of every other one raising up when I put my foot on that treadle, there's an area where two threads go up. Just two. In the middle. Two fucshia ones. That's what I get for trying to thread dark yarn at night in a poorly lit living room. Well, darn it, I was not about to undo two feet of weft, untie the front beam, unsley the reed (again), unthread the heddles (again) and fix it. I've decided that according to tradition, some folks purposely weave in an error to avoid competing with The Gods for Perfection. That's my imperfection.

I meant to do that. *ahem*

There is also an issue with the warp yarn itself. The black is a little more delicate than it looked. The whole warp is wool; the black ones break more easily under tension so I have to be a bit cautious. I'm holding my breath because I don't have any of it on hand should a warp thread break and I'm not sure what yarn the lady used. So cross your fingers I make it to the end sans breakage.

Troubles aside, I'm liking the way it's turning out. I raided my stash and found a schload of yarn containing the same colors as in the warp—except for the yellow. I have very little if any yellow in my stash. But that's ok. It just means the yellow stripes will stand out more. I'm using the Fibonacci system (my sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 but I keep skipping 2) and just sort of winging it. It works really well with weaving. I am, of course, writing down the sequence I've used in case I ever want to repeat it.

posted by Jeanne @ 6:55 PM