Murphy's Band

Day 94: Warning: you may want to have a pocket calculator handy.

It was Friday the 13th, and I'm not superstitious in the slightest, but Murphy was ready to try to change my mind. Prior to the grand Krokbragd Experiment, I'd measured off eight yards of warp for a band with 13 pattern threads. That's the three shades of green you see here in the center portion. The red "daisies" don't require pickup. I finished up the krokbragd and really debated whether or not I felt like starting to warp the new band on the bonker before bed, but decided to go ahead and get started. Now I've explained the Gatorade Method to you before, whereby I weight warp bundles with water-filled bottles to hold tension on the warp. The bottles have to be retied every 18 inches or so as I wind the warp onto the beam. In this case, I was using four bottles. Math: 8 yards divided by 18 inches is 16 reties, multiplied by 4 bottles equals 64 knots. It also means 16 times I needed to kneel down to do the tying. We're talking some serious genuflection here. I felt like I was at a Catholic mass before the warp was fully wound.

This particular pattern uses 73 threads which have to be threaded through heddles, alternating between those on the front pegs and those on the back. Additionally, it has those 13 pattern threads (doubled) which do not pass through heddles, but remain "floating" in the middle of the shed so that they can be picked up as required. Once the warp was wound, I began threading heddles. I was slightly over two-thirds of the way across when I noticed something very odd. "Where's my other light green pattern threads?" I said, separating the words with heddles of profanity. Yep, somehow I had missed winding them when I measured the warp. A goodly bit of deliberation suggested that I might be able to redeem the project without unthreading all the heddles if I drew the warp carefully back through them so that I could add the missing threads at the beginning. I probably should have gone to bed right then, but I didn't. Friday the 13th, 13 pattern threads. What could possibly go awry? Halfway through the process, a warp thread snapped, loosening the tension on the ones adjacent to it, those loosening the ones adjacent to them, and before I knew it, I had warp spaghetti behind the heddles. There was nothing for it at that point. I pulled all the warp completely off the loom, chained it and consigned it to the thrum bag for use as something else. And I went to bed, angry at myself for not being more attentive to potential issues.

The warp bundle haunted my dreams that night. I was not happy with relegating it to thrums. There was too much of it which was still usable. In the morning, I stretched it out across my living room floor, over a chair, and weighted the end with a book so that I could draw off one thread at a time as I rethreaded the loom. I tied each pair of threads together and attached them with a lark's-head to the warp beam. That's 36 knots for the warp, plus one odd one tied on singly, and another 13 knots for the pattern threads. When I came to the broken thread, I added a new one in, and likewise added in the missing light green threads. It took about two hours to complete the task. Then it was time to wind the warp again...another 16 genuflections as I retied 4 Gatorade bottles with 64 knots.

Perforce, the "new" warp was a little shorter than originally planned, but Murphy wasn't done with me yet. About three feet from the end, a warp thread tied itself around a fuzzy heddle and popped. At that point, I said, "Okay, that's it. I'm done." I cut off the last three feet of warp and threw it away in a fit of pique. I am now weaving Murphy's Band, and although it won't be as long as I wanted, I didn't have plans for a particular length of it. That said, next Friday the 13th, I'm staying in bed.