So the loom is ‘behaving’ but now the yarn is giving me fits.
A tiny little voice started to warn me that I’d made an inappropriate choice for warp…after the warp was beamed. Gee, thanks little voice. Couldn’t you have spoken up sooner?
Now that I’m not having to watch the loom I’m having to watch the cloth itself.
The cottolin is fine (2/16), slubby and grabby. The shed doesn’t clear properly and several threads (perhaps beamed under less tension than the rest?) don’t always lift high enough to engage in the rest of the cloth so I’m dealing with long lengths of unwoven threads, mostly on the right hand selvedge. Since I made the warp quite a bit wider than necessary, I can probably just cut my summer tops out around these areas. (Fingers crossed!)
With such a grabby yarn, the only way to try to get a ‘clear’ shed was to really crank up the tension on the warp.
Now I weave under a fairly high tension anyway and the AVL tension system is adjustable, to a certain degree. So generally I have high enough tension that the tension arm is up against the frame of the loom.
For this warp I tightened the spring even further making it more difficult for the loom to advance the cloth with each pick (I have the auto-cloth advance) which means that more tension is applied to the warp threads.
This is how my loom looks in order to get some sort of half decent cloth with this yarn that will no doubt be perfectly good as weft but isn’t quite so nice as warp.
I could conceivably shorten the string a tiny bit more but I’ve done that before and it makes it hard to loosen the cord later so I’m limping along with it this way.
As for this lovely 2/16 cottolin? Well, I’ve got lots of 2/16 cotton so no doubt there will be a run of lovely towels with cotton warp and cottolin weft sometime in the future!