Never a dull moment

The rosepath is done! Not cut off the loom yet but the weaving is finished. I decided to use a temple after the first yard or so just to speed things up a bit.


I'm not sure why I hesitate to get the temple out so often - I guess I feel like it's going to slow me down so I'd rather avoid it if possible. I must admit, there's also a sense of guilt, like I ought to be able to weave without one and I'm faulty some how for needing one. Where does that come from, I wonder? At any rate, I got out the temple and that sped things up quite a lot, as I didn't have to fuss so much about draw in, just about beating too hard.

Incidentally, in spite of my hang ups about temples, I have a lot of them and really like them all. The one in the pic is a wooden one from Glimakra that I got along with three or four others from Madelyn Van der Hoogt when I took her Weaving II course (including one for the Centre where I teach). It's the kind I use for delicate fabrics or narrow warps. I've also got two heavy metal Toika temples that I got from The Weaving Works to use on blankets and rugs.

Anyhoo, the rosepath. I realized today that I've been referring to it as "the rosepath" even though it's really bits of point twill on a basket weave ground. The treadling, though - that's rosepath. I like this angle because it shows off the stripes down on the cloth beam. Pretty, huh?


Not sure yet what this fabric will become - depends on what happens in the fulling, really. I'm still thinking some kind of cocoon but it might also be hats or pillows or something else entirely. I'm sure it'll let me know what it wants to be eventually.

I also wove a scarf on Joey this morning, so now there's only one or two left on that warp, too. Haven't posted a pic of that warp yet, so here you are:


I wove some scarves in this palette for the show I did last November and it was quite popular with the gents, so I put it on again. I hardly ever repeat warps like that but hey, rules are meant to be broken, eh wot?


I've also neglected to post pics of the socks-in-progress, so here they are as well:


This is my second time using this sock pattern and the first using my new needles with the more flexible cord - definitely an improvement! I've realized lately that I don't like my socks to come very far up my leg, so I made the tops of this pair shorter than the last. I'm afraid they might be just a bit too short, but this is a learning process. Eventually I'll figure out The Perfect Sock and then I can make loads of them!

I'm anxious to get these done so that I can try a new pattern that my mother's friend Peggy sent me. I used her instructions for Kitchener stitch to graft the toes of the blue and brown pair and they worked a treat, so I'm really eager to try out the entire pattern. I think Peggy's considering selling this pattern but she's given me permission to share it with my local fibrous friends as long as each person who gets it donates a pair of handknit socks to a local charity. Isn't that lovely? :D


In other knitting news, now that I've given away the gift, I can show you pics of the silly doggy shrug I made for my friend Marg and her dog Millie for Christmas:


The only explanation I have for this is that it seemed like a really good idea at 3:00 aye em. I hunted around online for a dog coat pattern that I could make pretty quickly and found this really cute one on knitty.com. Of course, with all those cables and bobbles, it wasn't a quickie so I just figured out the basic outline of her 10 lb dog pattern, did a ridiculously small tension swatch and then cast on what seemed like a reasonable number of stitches and knit a rectangle. I got a bit sneaky and used the casting off to sew up the legs and even used a version of the beaded cast off from splityarn for what I thought was going to be the neck. The legs turned out long enough that I didn't pick up any stitches to knit down cuffs and, in fact, turned up the cuffs a bit to shorten them. Even though the shrug is supposedly exactly the same top and bottom, I think the beads will work better at the bottom edge rather than the neck - maybe the cast off stretched the width?

I didn't have a dog handy to try this out on and our cats all objected strenuously, so I have no idea if it's anything even approximately Millie-shaped. I'm really anxious to learn whether or not it fits her and to see pictures if it does! Are you listening, Marg?

So now I have a date with a roast and the enormous new slow cooker that Ron got me for Christmas but then it's back to the looms - want to get Joey naked ASAP so I can dress him up in crackle (ooo, crackle for rocker upholstery - woot!) and I need to make some design decisions about the blanket for Letitia so that I can get that yarn ordered toot sweet. As I say, never a dull moment!

ER Heddles to the rescue!

As I was threading the warp I talked about a few days ago, I realized that I'd under estimated the number of heddles I needed on shaft 3, by a dozen or so. As luck would have it, I realized this once I had the warp half threaded and was at the centre of the loom near the treadle cords, where it's most awkward to add heddles without unthreading everything. It's possible, mind you, and I've done it but it's no picnic and usually requires about five hands and a fair bit of swearing.

Fortunately, I had a stroke of laziness and thought of a trick to try. It worked so well that I thought I'd share, in case someone out there hasn't already thought of this. One caveat: this works with string or texsolv heddles and on a loom with wide, wooden heddle bars, like a Glimakra. I haven't tried it on Joey so am not sure how it could be adapted to metal heddles on a skinny metal bar.

To make two ER heddles:

1) You need: two texsolv or string heddles the same size as those already on your loom and a safety pin. The pin should be at least as long as the heddle bar is wide but not too long - you don't want any more stuff than strictly necessary getting tangled up under there.

2) First, thread an end of Heddle 1 through an end of Heddle 2, then through the other end of Heddle 1.

3) Pull on the loose ends of both heddles to pull the slack out of the knot. As it begins to snug up, you'll see that Heddle 1 is forming a lark's head knot around the end of Heddle 2. Pull on the end of Heddle 1 to flatten it out, so that the two heddles together form a square or granny knot. It should look like Picture 3.

4) Pull the knot up tight, then drape the heddles over the top heddle bar with one heddle hanging in front and the other behind. Make sure they hang past the lower bar in the same configuration, then safety pin the bottom of the heddles together under the lower bar. This maneuver is easier if you've lifted the bottom heddle bar slightly to take the tension off the heddles.

Then just go ahead and thread the two heddles like they were on the bar normally. When I did this, the front one tended to sit slightly to the right of the back one, so I threaded that one first. When you're threading and there's no tension on the warp threads the heddles will shift up and down rather alarmingly but don't worry. Once there's tension on the warp threads, they'll want to find a happy medium and, since both threads are on the same shaft, they'll even themselves out.

As you can see from the first pic, I added 12 ER heddles all in one spot. You can see all the safety pins holding the bottoms of them. You'd think it would be especially problematic to cheat so much all in one spot and, had I realized sooner that I was running out of heddles, I would have spaced the cheater heddles out some across the width of the warp. Much to my relief, however, it worked so well that I can't even tell where they are when I'm weaving. Frankly, I'd forgotten all about doing this until today.


Here's the proof: these are same threads from the first pic. Can you see any unevenness where the ER heddles are? I bet you can't!

Q: How smug am I?

Lawks! I cannot tell you how excited and smug I am feeling about what I'm up to today, but I am going to try!

Here's the thing: I made a sectional warp beam for Mabel (my 60" DIYmakra) a few years ago and have been using it almost exclusively for the past couple, but I've never been all that thrilled with it. For one thing, it's slow to wind on the warp. Probably less time over all than winding the warp on the mill and then beaming the warp chains, especially when you consider Ron's time when he helps me beam, but it still seems frustratingly slow. I am all about instant gratification, after all. For another thing, it's been really blinkin' uncomfortable to crouch down under the threads as they come from the spool rack behind me and then slide back and forth on my toosh between the bout I'm winding on and the wheel that turns the warp beam around. For a third thing, the spool rack is kinda big and awkward and gets jammed up underneath the stairs that the loom backs on. Ekcetera, ekcetera. So... although I have firmly believed all this time that the sectional system was preferable to The Old Way, I've been dragging my feet whenever it comes time to put a new warp on the loom 'cause it's been frustrating and tedious.

All of this is behind me now! Or rather, most of it is in front of me now, which is TONS and TONS better. Let me explain: it finally occurred to me that I could put the spool rack inside the loom and put the tension box on the back beam in the other direction. This means both that I don't have to crouch down under the threads (oh, happy happy day!) and also that the rack doesn't get jammed up under the stairs. And the non-crouching and extra space behind the loom means that I can sit in a rolly chair and sail back and forth between bout and wheel, which not only increases speed and comfort, it increases the fun factor exponentially. Who doesn't love zooming back and forth in a rolly chair, I ask you? I've also got enough room for my little rolly drawers to follow me along, so that I have a surface on which to put all the stuff that used to fall off the warp beam as I was working and to which I can stick all the little bits of tape I use to secure the cut bouts - no more sticking tape to poor ol' Mabel. She's never complained about it, but I've felt a bit guilty nevertheless. AND it's all at a much more comfortable height - no more bending over to mess about with knots and things. I cannot tell you how much better this is than the old way! WAIT - I just did!


Note the rolly chair! Please try not to also note that the rolly chair is covered in cat fur. This chair belongs to Brown, No.3/4ths cat.

I should perhaps mention here that I figured out the whole sectional business on my own - I've never seen anyone else put on a sectional warp, in the flesh or by vid, so I'm just figuring out what works as I go along. Undoubtedly these are not revelations to anyone who really knows what they're doing around a sectional beam, or perhaps those folks know even better ways of doing things, but this is pretty darn exciting in my world.

But wait! There's more!



Since putting the sectional rakes on the loom, I've been doing a lot of cotton blankets (like the baby blankets in previous posts) but far fewer of the wool blankets that used to be one of my staple products, since they don't really lend themselves to (my version of) sectional warping. My wool blankets don't (or didn't use to) have stripes that were full inches, nor have the same inches repeated ... er, repeatedly, and so on. I've figured it out and made it work, but have had that nagging dissatisfaction with the process and the results and that dragging of feet re: planning warps, only compounded for the wool blankets. Blah.

So anyway, this morning I decided I wanted to 1) use up some of the singles wool that I'd bought last year, 2) try a striped rosepath twill style of threading that I think will make great blankets, pillows and garments, and 3) try reversing my sectional arrangement as described above. The catch is that the threading I wanted to use has the same five colours across the warp, but every single inch is different from every other - not something I've ever attempted to do on my sectional before.¹ Still, I decided to give it a whirl, in a short warp so that the wailing and gnashing of teeth would be kept to a minimum and be over as quickly as possible.

I examined my threading's colour arrangement and determined that there are at most six white ends in each inch, four blue ends, four pink ends, three purple ends and three green ends², so then I wound all those bobbins. That's 20 bobbins even though I'm only using 10 epi. I bunged 'em all on the spool rack, threaded them all through the first and second combs of the tension box (and the tension rods in between the combs) but not through the comb on the extender. Then I pick out the 10 threads that I need for the an inch, secure the others out of the way, and wind the first bout with just those 10 threads. This made a big mess until I figured out the best way to secure the unused threads so they didn't get tangled up, but has worked a treat since then. At the next inch, I whip all the threads out of the extender's comb, pick out the next set of 10 threads and pop them into the comb, and then start winding. And so on!

Here is how I figured out how to secure the unused ends out of the way:


NB: it's important to keep them raised up above the ones you are using, which are pulled tight against the bar at the bottom, so that the ones that are moving past don't snag on the loose ones and carry them along with. I have one purple thread in particular that's been a bit fiddly but every once in a while I stop and have a few (only slightly swear-y!) words with that one and pull it tight again and other than that it's all worked like a charm.

So I spent a very relaxed couple hours before lunch messing about, winding bobbins, figuring out how to get my spool rack at the right height inside the loom (it's up on a bench that goes across the treadles) and then winding on half my warp, whilst having a rolly good time (yeargh - sorry!) zipping back and forth on my rolly chair and feeling...

A: Very, Very Smug Indeed.

1. When I've put on this type of warp in the past, I've wound each colour as its own chain and then dressed the loom from front to back. Although I learned F2B first, this is just about the only thing I still put on the loom that way. Sectional is EVEN BETTER.

2. It turns out that I really needed four purples and four greens but I didn't have them, so I'm changing the colour patterns as I go along. NB: this is operator error, i.e. I Screwed Up, and not a problem with the system, which works GRATE!

WebCam 20.04.07

First, I should introduce my looms. I have two: Mabel, a 60" Glimakra-clone 4 shaft counter balance with brand spankin' new DIY sectional beam, and Maybe Joey, a LeClerc Minerva 22" 8 shaft double back beam jack. Mabel was so named because I thought at the time that she was made of maple. Good job I didn't know then that she's actually made of birch! Maybe Joey was so named because I wasn't really sure what to call him. Seven years later I'm still not.



At the moment, Mabel is wearing a lovely 100% cotton warp threaded in the unplain weave I use for quite a bit of my production. I've got two blankets done so far - the first in vieux bleu and the second (at left, and in the pillow pic in previous post) in orange pale. There's enough left on for some pillow fabric or maybe a baby blanket. This is an experimental warp in many ways: it's my first full sized (i.e. 50" wide) heavy cotton production blanket warp, it's a new colour palette and, apart from a short 16"x 3 yd tester warp, it's the first time I've used my DIY sectional beam. (More on this later.) I am happy to report that the experiment is a success! I love the colour palette (which Mom has dubbed "Seaside"), nothing that might've gone wrong with the sectional system has, and the fabric weight promises to be quite lovely for blankets once it's wet finished - which will happen just as soon as the delivery guys bring my new washing machine tomorrow!




Joey, on the other hand, is sporting a more au naturel look - I wove off his last warp a few days ago (the fabric in my Very First Pillow, in fact!) and haven't put anything new on him yet. He's not completely bereft of company, however, which is very au naturel for both looms in a house with four cats, I assure you.