Peter Collingwood's No Math Centering method

Edited to remove bad ASCII art and hopefully be clearer...

As a brand new weaver I had the good fortune to take a workshop with Peter Collingwood.  He showed us how to centre a warp in the reed without using any math.  I have never forgotten it and use it every time I dress the loom.

Say you want a warp 10" wide and your reed is X length.

Lay a measuring tape along the length of the reed (in this case the reed is laying flat because I'm about to rough sley the warp).  So lay the measuring tape with zero at the left end of the reed.  Pinch the measuring tape at where ever the reed ends.  Let's say 36" just as an example.

With your right hand pinching at the 36" mark (the end of the reed) move your left hand to the 10" mark.  

Now still holding both points of the tape - 10 and 36 - bring your hands together and align the 10" mark and the 36" mark, effectively folding the tape together.

By moving your left hand to the 10" mark, you have subtracted 10" from the length of the tape, and then folding 10" and 36" together, you have divided the remainder of the length of the reed in half.  

Lay this 'half' down onto the reed again and where the tape ends is where you begin to sley the warp.

0-----10-----------------------------36-----------  one hand pinching 10, the other pinching 36

When 10 and 36 are pinched together to the bend in the tape is what you use to measure from the end of the reed to where you begin sleying.

In the photo above, the 10/36 is at the left hand side of the photo (my right side) and the loop is in the 'middle' of the reed.  This is where I will begin sleying.

No math.  Centred.  

Thank you, Peter Collingwood.  A technique I use every time I dress the loom.

Different Strokes

People adapt their processes to suit their personal preferences, the yarn they are using and their equipment.  I tend to weave within a fairly narrow range of yarns.  I'm very comfortable with them, know their limitations, how they will consistently behave.  (Doesn't mean they are always the same, just reasonably consistent!)

The above photo is an 11 meter long warp.  Half of it, actually.  The finished warp will be 24" in the reed.  With such a width, I only wind half of it, or 12".  The max width I will do on this warping board is 15" at 20 epi +/-

I tie off the four 'arms' of the cross, not the waist.  I used to just tie the waist, then would fight to find the waist and deal with how the threads became compressed.  So I take an extra few seconds and make four ties to save that PITA level I mentioned in yesterday's post.  Extra time at one stage to save time and PITA levels at the next is not wasted.  IMHO.  

Notice that I also do not tie this yarn every single yard.  This 11 meter long warp has the choke tie near the cross, the counting string near the end and just two more ties along the length of the chain.

Nor do I crochet the warp.  Here are the two chains for the next warp which will go into the loom later this afternoon.  Once the chain is tied off I take out the peg at the bottom of the board (the end of the chain, so to speak) and simply carefully drop the chain into a box or bin.  In this case, because two warp chains will go into the same container I use a larger plastic bin.

The bin is then taken to my work table (where I stand to work - otherwise I'd be sitting way too much - sometimes working standing up is A Good Thing to do).  The lease sticks and reed are set upon small boxes which raise the reed to a comfortable height for the rough sleying.

I also use really thick ties.  They are easier to see, tie and untie than a single strange of, say, 2/20 cotton.

This whole set up is now ready for me to remove the four ties securing the cross and to begin rough sleying.

Check the links 'rough sleying' or 'reed as raddle' for more info on this process.

Rough Sleying

When some people find out my preference for spreading the warp to it's weaving width is rough sleying there can be a variety of reactions.

One is, why do I 'waste' time sleying the reed twice?  If I'm sleying the reed anyway, why don't I just cut the loops and dress the loom front to back?  If I prefer back to front warping, why don't I just use a raddle?

The answers to those questions take longer to explain than a short answer, which is, this is the method I have tweaked to fit my needs and it works best for me.

How I got to that conclusion takes much more detail.

The warp above is an example of how spreading the warp using a reed is most definitely rough. 

I'm aiming for 24 epi, but I have - mostly - wound two ends at a time.,  Except for where I haven't.  This means that in order to rough sley there is a bit of mixing and matching going on.

I don't have a six dent reed wide enough, which would be the easiest size reed to use.  I have two six dent reeds - one of which is too narrow, the other which is way too wide.  So I tried a 12 dent reed, which is also 'long' and the spaces are narrow.

So then I picked up the 8 dent reed.  I am sleying \4\4\4\0\4\4\4\0 for the most part.  Except for when the stripes begin and end and I wound 2 ends of a colour to outline the stripe.  So where the stripe begins and ends, I am putting 6 ends in the dent.

When I used the 12 dent reed, I put those 2 ends in their own dent, but then the warp was spread wider than the weaving width of 25" and my warp packing was perilously close to being too narrow.  Using the 8 dent reed, I'm putting those two ends into the same dent as the background colour to make the warp narrower than the weaving width. 

Now this is not my preference, but for this textile having the warp beamed narrow is not going to cause any particular issues as it has enough elasticity to take the deflection from narrow to wide to narrow (as it draws in during the weaving).

When I demonstrate this technique people get very concerned about how 'messy' the threads can look.  So long as I have tied a good tight choke tie, any disruption in the threads isn't going to matter much as long as I don't yank on the ends and pull slack up out of the length of the chain.

So why don't I just use a raddle?  Well, when I started winding and beaming warps on the Fanny I did borrow a raddle.  But I found that filling the raddle really wasn't much of a time saver - the objection some have to rough sleying a reed - that it will take longer than filling a raddle.  The real reason I gave up on a raddle though was that the sections were too large for the usual yarns that I use.  I wanted a finer separation of the yarns so there would be less tendency for them to wrap around each other.

In the end, after trying both - and I tried the raddle several times - I find this method more efficient even though I may take a little bit more time at this stage which will save me a lot more time at the beaming stage.  Of course my default length is 11 meters.

Or at least...this has been my experience.

But there are many ways to accomplish all of the stages of weaving - from winding the warp in the first place, spreading the warp for weaving, beaming, threading (or the other way round if you prefer front to back), tying on.

It depends on your goals which processes will work 'best'.  It depends on your personal preferences, your equipment, yarn, environment. 

As they say...Your Mileage May Vary.

Currently reading The Nothing That Is; a natural history of Zero by Robert Kaplan

Cross Purposes

One of the things we forgot to tape for the DVD The Efficient Weaver was how I rough sley the reed as a raddle and how it gets put into the loom.  Since someone also asked about transferring the cross, here is a photo essay showing those steps.

Laying the reed across a couple of small boxes, I sley the warp into the reed.  In this instance I want 10 epi, but have wound two ends at a time.  Since you never want to separate the loops at the end of the warp chain, a complete loops goes into one dent, then three are left empty to achieve 10 epi density.

Once done, the reed is flipped over top of the lease sticks.

The loop of the warp is now picked up and held by a third lease stick.

The bundle of reed and lease sticks is laid across the bin (or box) and carried to the loom.  In this instance I also threw in the cones I expect to use for weft, just to keep everything together.

The reed is inserted into the beater (see picture below) and the third lease stick holding the loops is carried to the back of the loom.  The apron rod then picks up the loops from the stick.  In this picture you can see the loops are messy.  These uneven loops straighten out quickly by going to the front of the loom and gently pulling on the warp chain at the choke tie, which hopefully has done it's job and not allowed any unevenness to transfer beyond the choke to to the rest of the warp.

The loops have been straightened out.  Since this yarn is textured, it needs a little extra grooming.  I do this by grasping the choke tie, applying gentle tension on the chain and then sliding the lease stick back and forth to encourage the threads to even out.

The weight is applied to the warp chain to provide tension for beaming and the lease sticks are raised as close to the warping valet as possible without snagging any of the threads.  The goal here is to have equal tension on the threads.  Snags will increase tension on those threads caught up. in the snag.

The warp is beamed by rolling the warp forward.  The lease sticks will descend to the breast beam at which point the weight is removed and moved further down the chain and lease sticks raised as high as they can easily go.  Repeat, inserting warp packing, until done.  Here I've divided the warp chain into two sections.  If I didn't the warp is wide enough that the outside ends will have more tension than the inside ends for the last few feet.

Removing the masking tape (or whatever is used to secure the lease sticks) the stick closest to the reed is tipped up on it's edge to form a shed.

Using a longer set of lease sticks I insert one into the shed behind the beater and...

slide it to the back where it is inserted into the Angel Wings (sold by Purrington Looms).  I've found the front set of holes is about perfect for me to thread from.

Removing the first lease stick, the second one now forms the other shed of the cross and another long lease stick picks up the shed behind the beater and...

gets inserted into the front hole of the Angel Wings.  The clamps hold the lease sticks so that they can't pop out of the Angel Wings and the warp is secure.

I cut the loops at the beater and the warp is now ready to be threaded.