Here is warp number 3 (as in counting down from the 8 I had left to do after I thought I was done with them) rough sleyed ready to be beamed.
How much longer does it take to rough sley instead of use a raddle? I don’t know. I haven’t used a raddle for 15 or more years when I decided that a raddle really wasn’t giving me the results I wanted and switched to rough sleying a reed.
Why did I change? At the time I was using quite fine yarns (2/20 and 2/16 cotton) – the raddle I had borrowed simply had too many ends per section so they tended to grab onto each other and snag, then tangle. The 2/20 cotton was around 36 epi, the 2/16 at 32 epi. A raddle just wasn’t working all that well for me and rather than continue to fight with it during the beaming, it seemed a lot more productive to just use a different tool.
What I’ve found is that rough sleying works for every yarn at every set I tend to use. YMMV.
The above warp is 16 epi, wound two at a time and is rough sleyed in an 8 dent reed. There are 160 ends in total for a width in the reed of 10″. I turned on my boom box, set up the reed, lease sticks, removed the ties from the four arms of the X and rough sleyed it, all before the first cut on the cd finished.
Before the 12th cut on the cd was over I had beamed the warp, threaded, sleyed and tied it on, throwing the first 6 picks of header. The cd in question was one of Neil Young’s so the cuts are maybe a bit longer than normal, but not all that much. 🙂