Lessons Learned

 

Just finished weaving the lime green towels, and wanted to check a few things.

The first 5 towels on this warp were woven with a natural white cotton slub plyed with a 'natrual' (beige) linen yarn.  This yarn is quite textured, and I was essentially weaving natural on natural.  When I finished those yesterday, I set up to weave off the lime green in a similar but not quite the same treadling.

The lime green was smooth, not textured, and the colour was enough different that I could actually see the design.  And as I wove, my eye kept catching on an anomaly.  As I was nearing the end of the lime green I became quite certain there was a threading error where my eye kept snagging.

When I finished the green I rolled the cloth forward, dug into the heddles (of *course* the issue was in the last 8, not the front 8) and sure enough, I'd made a basic mistake.  Instead of threading 9, 10, 11, 12, I'd threaded 9, 10, 11, 13.  Then I had carried on by threading 12, 11, 10.  So I had a thread on 13 where it should not have been, then there were two threads on shaft 10 - because the next repeat started on 10.

Sigh.

OK tie a repair heddle in where it was needed on shaft 12, move the thread on 13 to 12.  Now I had two threads on 12 because I needed to move that progression down to 9 instead of ending on 10.

Tie another repair heddle where it was needed on 9, move the 'extra' thread from 12 down to where it was required on 9.

I could have cut off the warp at that point, but before I did that I needed to check the ppi for the next set of towels.  So I just tied yarn onto the threads I had to cut in order to move them, pinned them into the web, and rolled the cloth forward.  

Since the linen had almost zero draw in I had to weave at least an inch for the draw in to stabilize, then I used a contrasting colour (barely seen in the photo - rose thread) and laid a short length of it into the shed and wove 36 picks.  Eyeballing it I could see that 36 picks was longer than an inch, so I closed that group off by laying another bit of the rose thread into the shed and wove 30 picks.  Then I closed that section off by laying another bit of rose into the shed and finished with about 8 more picks.

By weaving some at the beginning and at the end, the picks are stabilized and you get a more accurate count.

I could adjust the tie up by removing some of the plain weave, but I kind of like how this is looking so far, so I'm going to go ahead and weave some towels with this set up - perhaps six?  Dunno.  Then I might change my tie up and weft colour and finish the rest of the warp.

However, I designed the treadling sequence for 36 ppi and since is is actually going to be 30, I need to edit the sequence and delete some of the picks so that my towels are a reasonable length.

Yes, I tend to make my towels larger than commercially made ones, but they shouldn't be so large they don't function all that well.  So, out comes the calculator as I re-do the math and work out how many picks I need for a towel, then adjust the treadling.

And yes, I anticipated this last bit and made my plans accordingly.  It was the threading error that I had *hoped* not to make, but oh well.  Still Not Perfect!

(And the threading error in the first 5 towels is invisible while I doubt the person who will be getting the lime green ones will care.  Since the threading error won't interfere with the function of the towels, I'm not fretting about it, especially when it was a fairly simple fix.)