Another Ravelympic Event

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Another big Ravelympic event today: I did the first part of my weaving project. That basically involved cutting the project that came on my little rigid heddle loom off and re-warping the loom. It took me about two hours to warp the loom, which is useful to know.

I used the direct warping method, and it definitely seems a lot faster than using a warping baord would be. One step in the process is re-threading every other thread, which was a laugh riot.

Pulling the warp threads through the slots

But to be honest, it went very quickly and a lot faster than I expected.

All threaded up

And pretty soon I was doing some of the most wobbly and terrible weaving ever. Yes, I do consider this object mostly a learning experience.

Very bad weaving

Mostly I think the trouble was with the warp threads and how unevenly I tensioned them. There's some crazy stuff happening there.

Very bad weaving, from further away

I did all this while re-dyeing my purple skein. As you can see in this photo, even with the bad colours (I blame the fluorescent fixtures), my purple skein, the last of the dyeing for my dyeing event, came out really, really pale. So after dithering over whether it would matter, I decided it would, with all the saturated colours in the other skeins, so there was nothing to do but stay up late and overdye it a deeper purple.

Purple skein, before overdyeing

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2 Comments

You're quite right that it's wonky warp tension causing the wobbly weaving. Try re-tying the front knots, or put a pencil or some such between the looser warp threads and the rest of the warp over the warp beam (you'll have to keep moving the pencil). But your selvedges look really very nice, and that's usually a much harder skill for new weavers to pick up!

Thanks, Lynn. After I took those pictures I decided to re-tie the knots and see if that helped (I haven't done that yet as I was up until 2am fixing my purple dyeing), so it's good to know that my problem-solving was working there. I think I did better on the selvedges because I was aware that I needed to be careful about them and had read a bunch about how to handle them, whereas the warp tension seems to be more of a feel thing.

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This page contains a single entry by Ayse published on February 21, 2010 2:02 AM.

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