Warping With Murphy

Day 63: I finished weaving Pippin's first band this morning (borders), three yards of a simple design using only five doubled pattern threads (the lavender "broken S" running up the center). The borders were loom-generated, i.e., I just had to thread them through the right heddles and the loom did the rest as I changed sheds. It went very quickly. I had already measured a longer warp (four yards this time), and as soon as I took the finished band off, I began winding it on. I had just reached the point where I was going to divide the threads as they passed through the raddle (a spacing device), but I seemed to be one short. Sure enough, I'd missed one when I was measuring. Because I wasn't very far in, this was an easy fix: just pull the warp back through, tie on the necessary thread and begin winding again, and it would have been just that simple if Murphy hadn't been paying a visit. "POP!" Suddenly, I had a slack thread, and it was the one I'd just tied on. I knew exactly what had happened. I'd tied it around one of the lease sticks as well as the warp rod. Fortunately, I'd allowed extra when I cut the thread. Murphy vanquished, I finished winding the warp and am now ready to get serious with the threading.

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.

Murphy's Law

Day 355: Weavers are no strangers to Murphy's Law: "If it can go wrong, it will." But there are ways around Murphy, even if you feel like just throwing the whole thing in the bin when he shows up. So far on this project, I've had four "catastrophes," and here's how I've turned them to my favour.

First of all, when I measured out my warp the first time, I had a particular colour sequence in mind. I was thinking I'd create towels which looked like real waffles. Somehow between reading the draft and stepping to the warping board, a six-thread repeat became a seven-thread sequence. I didn't realize I had one extra thread in each repeat until I began to thread the heddles on my floor loom. I used a lot of bad language just then! I didn't want to unwarp the loom, so I dragged out my table loom, re-wound a warp in the correct sequence, and then set to designing a weave I could do on a 7-thread repeat for the warp on the floor loom. I'm happy to say that it's working out well.

 

The second disaster came when I began weaving the correct warp on the table loom. One of the tie-up cords snapped. Fortunately, that was a fairly easy fix.

 

The third near-disaster was when I realized that my colourway simply wasn't going to work. It had looked fine in tabby, but wasn't suited to waffle-weave. A not-so-quick review of my thread stash finally resulted in a brighter, more heavily "buttered" waffle because I used yellow instead of brown, but hey, I like butter.

 

The fourth mishap was when I discovered that I had somehow missed Mary Black's instruction to double-sley. By adjusting the beat just slightly and knowing how much this particular thread plumps up when it's fulled, I didn't have to start over. 

 

Most of the time, the woopsies we make are not nearly as catastrophic as they seem. Don't despair if your project isn't going right. It may not be exactly what you had in mind, but it's still hand-woven, and you've had a valuable learning experience.

A Visit From Murphy

Day 75: Pleased that warping had for once gone without a hitch...no miscounts of heddles or dents, no annoying tangles in 21 feet of warp, no unnoticed manufacturer's knots...I sat down at the loom to figure out which bird's-eye pattern would kick off the new project. Little did I know that Murphy had not gotten the message about social distancing and was indeed standing mere inches behind me, chortling like Snidely Whiplash as he tied fair Nell to the railroad track. Nor did I feel his sinister presence when I said to myself, "Huh, that looks awfully wide." I did several tests of an inch or so of throws, each time saying, "Nah, that just isn't working" before picking it all back to conserve precious fibers. I tried overshot technique, spacing each pass of colour with a pass of white, but the designs were not showing up well at all. "Weird," says I. "Did I use a different thread the last time I did this?" I finally settled on making two passes in each shed, effectively doubling the weight of my weft. The pattern began to show itself and I wove about three inches before going to bed. This morning when I woke up, a thought occurred: did I use the 12-dent reed rather than the 15? The reed determines the width of the cloth. 288 threads spread out at 12 to the inch gives 24 inches; at 15 to the inch, it's a hair over 19. Even before I brushed my teeth or washed my face, I went to the loom and checked the reed. There, etched in the metal was the number 12. That's why the piece was wider than I'd planned. Murphy had exercised his law in a way it had never affected me in my entire career as a weaver, teasing me by smoothing the warping process all the while knowing I had the wrong reed in the loom. Now, I could have stuck to my guns and appointed the project to bathtowels, but that was not what I had intended. I made six more plain throws in natural, hemstitched the end and cut the "sample" away (that's what we'll call it: a sample...not a mistake, a sample). The right reed has been inserted and re-sleyed, and Murphy has been sharply reprimanded and banished for his unwelcome participation in my craft.

Update: Murphy has been defeated. The weaving is now progressing as planned. I believe I will still have enough warp for six hand towels in spite of having had to cut the "sample" off the loom. I always allow extra when warping.