Took a while to rev my engine yesterday, but did finally manage to start beaming the next warp.
The last time I worked with this black yarn (purchased in, oh, 1997 or somewhere about there, sitting in darkened store room since then) was for a warp a couple of months ago. During beaming there were several tubes that were culled out because the yarn kept breaking. That yarn was mostly used up as weft. But I still had tubes of black yarn so I came up with this warp.
Turns out that there are even more tubes that have gotten weak enough that they don’t like the tension of beaming so yesterday I got this far, culling two more tubes while beaming the first two sections.
I’m hoping that I’ve got them all now, but if not, there are 5 more tubes I can substitute and if I need more, there are a few really dark blue tubes, too.
The plan was to use up the last of the originally culled tubes as weft, then use up some of the ‘good’ tubes. Well, now there are four tubes that will be used up as a matter of priority.
And I’m thinking that I need to use up more of this yarn, possibly as weft, as soon as I can.
Black dye is widely regarded as being very harsh on yarn and this yarn appears to be approaching it’s ‘best by’ date very quickly. It can still be used as weft, but once this warp is wound, I am going to be very reluctant to use it as warp again. So now I’m trying to think about what I have in the queue that would benefit from a very dark/black weft.
Stay tuned!