spool rack with yarn for shawl warp
tension box, ready to go
showing one of the modifications Doug did
warp 1/3rd wound
After a week filled with things going pear shaped this morning I found myself weaving on the Summer and Winter test warp and really unhappy about being there.
Why, I asked myself, am I spending so much time on something that is making me so unhappy? Time is precious, life is too short for struggling and if it isn’t fun, why am I doing it?
Especially when I had such a pretty warp waiting impatiently in the wings!
So after lunch I went down and cut the warp off the loom. I think I tossed maybe a half pound of yarn into the recycle bucket – if that – about $6 worth of yarn, maybe a little more – and saved myself 3 more days of misery.
A bargain!
I was going to set up the video camera now that it’s functioning again, but quickly realized that a) there was no room to put the tripod where it could capture what needed to be seen, and b) that a static camera angle wasn’t going to work, anyway. So until I re-arrange the studio and wrangle a cameraman, any video clip of beaming sectionally will have to wait.
The shawl warp is predominantly a darker rich forest green with a few brighter colours – a new green and turqouise – and an accent – the peach/salmon colour. The colours are scattered evenly but not strictly and will be threaded randomly as they come off the tape.
I don’t use a cross – just tape the bouts. For me and the type of yarns I use and cloth I design, this works just fine. Other weavers find they need the cross in order to accomplish what they need to do. Since I don’t make a cross, Doug removed the cross making mechanism from the tension box. He also cut the top off the gathering reed and added a wire gate so that I just lift the gate and drop the threads into the slots at the back, then thread them into the swiveling reed at the front.
He also made extra dowels in order to add additional tension to the warp when necessary – generally when I’m using cones and beaming directly from the cone top instead of using spools. In this case it’s faster to wind spools than to wind the skeins onto cones.