I confess that I may be a little OCD because I tend to obsessively count stuff. (Maybe it’s why I don’t get bored – I’m too focussed on my counting?)
Anyway, this warp is 36 epi – 3 ends per dent in a 12 dent reed with a 4 end threading repeat.
When I got to 12 dents full, I should have had no ‘extra’ ends left – the repeats (threading and sleying) should have lined up. They didn’t. That could only mean one thing. I’d made a mistake somewhere in that first group of dents.
Sure enough, one of the dents had 4 ends in it instead of 3. So I pulled out the threads, fixed the mistake and wahla, everything lined up as it should have.
And then it happened again. What can I say? Dark threads. Fine threads. Hard to see. But my somewhat obsessive counting saved me from discovering I had a couple of sleying errors after I was all done and finished. At which point all my nicely grouped ends (four per slip knot) would have been gone, all the ends would have been ‘loose’ and it would have been much more difficult to keep the ends in order.
Counting as I do stuff like winding the warp, threading and sleying helps me keep track of ‘patterns’ such as ‘by the time I sley 12 dents there should be an even number of ends in the dents’.
It seems to me that a whole lot of weavers also like to do jigsaw puzzles. I think it’s partly pattern recognition, partly because we are process oriented people. What do you think?