The vest - not off to a good start

OK so I was saying to Liz last night 'Why all this fuss about an even tension on the warping board? Everything gets retensioned when beaming, right?' Another lesson learned!

The yarn I'm using for the vest is an acryllic mix and is really stretchy (I'm using up some yarns left over from Liz's knitting maching). Also it comes on knitting balls, not round but cylindrical figure of 8 balls - in this case huge ones. So I'm putting 180 warps of approx 9'6" (3m) on the board and the yarn is coming off the ball unevenly, wrapping around my legs, the table legs, the chair legs and the warping board pegs (wrong ones). I was really glad we don't have dogs, cats or small children for it to find. Still after about 60-90 mins I've got 180 warps and although I know the tension is irregular in places I'm not sure it's too bad and anyway, surely, it doesn't matter too much.

So tie up the cross, put a few choke knots around and lift the warp off the board to watch every other thread shrink back and leave me with this horrible knarly skein of warp - aargh!!

Still hopefully I'll get chance to get it on the loom this weekend and if it looks too tangled all I've lost is my time.

Off to the local weavers guild for the first time - think I'll take something small so just going to warp up the Tornadowood mini-inkle. Hopefully it will be a rarity here in S England and so become a talking point to help introduce myself.

First sample is off the loom!

The photos don't really show the detail. The sample contains several experiments in plain, basket, rib and twill weaves (and combinations thereof) and different wefts: wool, cottons, chenille, angora, plain and nubby yarns etc. There's even a small section of plain weave double cloth forming a little pocket in the middle of the sample.

Well, that was fun. There's a few places where changing weaves or differing wefts have caused the selvage to be a bit wavy and for some reason there are a few unintentional weft floats early on. As the weaving progressed the beat became more even, the mistakes fewer and the edges better defined. I also learned that some twill weaves can leave floating selvages which need a direction change or manually picking up. Also learned not to wind on so far that the fell is very close to the front beam or else beating becomes a strain and hence uneven.


Start 


Middle 

End 

Progress ...

Took a week off, Liz and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary in Dublin. Nice, fun city. Found a HUGE ball of white chenille in an Oxfam charity shop so spent half a day sightseeing with a great hump in my backpack.

Almost finished the first warp. Having a great time playing with various colour and weave combinations, particularly twills. Will post some pictures once it's off the loom.