A Drafting Oops This Time

Good grief. It seems to be my month to make mistakes.

I'm in the midst of another shadow weave project (been a little while since I did one, I was in the mood again). I wound warp, got it on the loom, threaded, etc., and started to weave:

The colors are actually nicer than this picture shows - white, two shades of grey and a steel blue, with accents of deep red running through it. (I realized after the fact that I had unintentionally used my alma mater's colors - red and grey.)

Anyway, do you see the big fat error on the right side? It's not symmetrical. Bugs the hell out of me. This isn't a threading error - I threaded it the way I meant to - it's a drafting error. I needed a mirror image of the left side on the right side and I blew it. Whoops.

Mr. Conall was actually in the mood to nap yesterday. Amazing. After two weeks of never napping more than a half hour (kill me now, lol), he actually took a two+ hour nap yesterday mid-day. WOW. Gave me time to fix this!

So, I unwove (is that a word?), took that little hunk of 11 ends back through the reed and heddles, re-threaded them, tied on again, and started over:



Ta-da! Better, right? Can you see the difference? I sure can, no longer bugging the heck out of me. I think the whole thing will relax a little when it's off the loom and I wash it, but I like the Xs and Os, this is a fun pattern.

Hopefully, that's the end of the mistakes for a little while!

Trouble Shooting

Oy. Every once in a while, there's just one of those projects. Everything that can go wrong, does.

I'm attempting to weave some dishtowels from some very nice, very fine, organic cotton yarn that I bought from Silk City Fibers. It's really lovely stuff, it feels almost silky to the touch.

Two major problems so far, though.... First, I was threading an Ms and Os pattern. Simple enough. On a four shaft loom, you thread it more or less like this:

12121212 34343434
13131313 24242424

I motored right along, tied it all on, wove a header, wove my hems, started to weave my first towel, and lo and behold, I got this:


That doesn't look like any Ms and Os I've ever seen, lol... It's pretty, but not what I was aiming for. What on earth happened?

Oh, goodlord. HUGE threading error. I skipped that second row up there (the 13131313 24242424 part) and just repeated the first line for the whole warp. DUH.

600 ends. 300 of them threaded wrong. Rip the whole thing off and start over? Nope, this yarn is much too expensive for that. So, I cut off the above, re-threaded those 300 heddles, re-sleyed those 300 ends, tied on again, and was finally ready to start over.



Well, that looks better. Except...

I put on a long (6 yards) warp. On my little Harrisville Loom. Which tends to give me severe tension problems with long warps. Which I had forgotten, since I've mostly just been weaving scarves or other single projects on it... So I blithely wound it on without paying extra special attention to the tension, which I need to do with long warps on this loom. So, the left third or so of my warp has gotten really loose after weaving not even one whole dishtowel...

One way for fix it for now:

Ha. Anybody with little kids will recognize those (they're the edges for the foam rubber alphabet mats that everyone seems to have now). I've heard of using upholstery foam to do this, but I didn't have any and thought of these. They're working ok, but once I'm ready to start the second dishtowel, I'll probably try to take up some slack in the warp by pulling it forward between the towels. We'll see if that works! If not, I doubt I'll have the patience to weave six or so more towels with a messed up warp...

Live and Learn. :) Two problems that easily could have been avoided if I'd been paying more attention!

Argh!

Let's play spot the threading error...


Can you see it? It is about halfway across in the photo. Ugh. See, this is what I get for my hubris/tempting the PTBs by saying that I rarely make threading errors. LOL. Serves me right!

Glad this fabric is just for me and Conall - if it were for a customer I'd have had to fix it. This way I get to be lazy. Now that it's off the loom, though, there's another problem - I think it's too short! Argh! Could I have made any more mistakes with this project? Well, yes, I suppose so.

Maybe I'll think of something else to use the fabric for... Little bags of some sort? Promo samples? I've covered journals with woven fabric before and they came out quite nice...

Oh - Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there! And what a gorgeous day for Mother's Day here. Sunny, low 60s, perfect weather, the lilacs are blooming (YUM). Not too hot, not too chilly, warm in the sun, but not too warm - I actually got some gardening in today as well as weaving. And I had the audacity to stop watching the Red Sox game before the 9th inning - oops. Missed the hugely dramatic come from behind win. Rats. A very nice, low-key Sunday!