adventures in new loom and weaving unsupervised!

The plan is three towels, roughly 20”x30”.

Wound the warp over a couple of evenings watching tv (8 white, 8 purple, how hard can it be?)

Did my first unsupervised back to front warping, helped by the fact that I did my first SUPERVISED winding on that very week at the weaving class/studio.

The loom has a couple of screw eyes at JUST the right height to hold the lease sticks for threading. I love that.

Threaded. The jury is still out on the texsolv heddles - they don’t slide like the metal ones do. On the plus side, I can thread without using a hook.

For the record chip clips (or Ikea clips, whatever) are wonderful for keeping the warp under control, threading, sleying, etc. Fewer ties to cut later, fewer knots to undo.

Sleyed. Nothing exciting there. Tied on.

Did the tie-up. Finally figured out that I needed to use the springy things in the back to keep the shafts down when they needed to be down. (back hinge treadles).

Spent an inordinate amount of time chasing down why one thread wouldn’t behave - it wasn’t a threading error, and didn’t appear to be a sleying error, but I resleyed that batch of 8 and it went away.

Wove the first hem and started the pinwheels. Now working on making good squares.

2/28/17 need to work on getting uniform warp tension. Thought I had it, but not quite; looser on the right side.

Still working on getting a uniformly good shed - put Texsolv on the 5-6-7-8 treadle. Also, sorting though the heddle cords to put the shortest ones on the back 4 shafts; they aren’t perfectly uniform.

2/28/2017 Off the loom. 8” of bonus fabric

3/1/17 wove a tape for the hanging loop on the Harrisville Easy Weaver. 38 ends, which was probably a bit excessive; I’d try 32 next time. 7” for each loop, enclosed in the hem, then flipped up and stitched again.

Washed, mended the skipped threads (note to self, do that before washing next time), hemmed (machine, stitch length 3.5 on the Bernina 930).

Maybe I’d use a sett of 24 for this draft next time.

ooh, these are so cool!