Shawl It Up

Here is the beginning of the painted warp shawl.


And here it is coming round to the cloth storage roller at the back/bottom of the loom.

I really love my AVL for the cloth storage and auto-advance systems. I never have to stop to advance the warp (unless I'm working finer than 48 ppi), just keep on weaving until the bobbin runs out.

While it may not seem like stopping to advance the warp would take all that long, every time you stop throwing the shuttle is 'lost' time. Being able to just continously treadle, throw and beat stopping every 10 or more minutes instead of every minute or two adds a lot more productivity to the day.

I have extra storage beams. When I go back down to the studio this evening, the first thing I will do is cut the shawl from the apron, insert the plain storage beam and tape the cloth to that.

The bad thing is that sometimes I ignore the webs on the beams and then I have several beams to deal with before I can clear one or more of them off. That is the situation I am about to encounter now - one storage beam has some of the red shawls I wove months ago, still waiting to be fringe twisted and cut off the beam. One beam has some painted warp shawls that I've been ignoring for several months, and a third beam has the Diversified Plain Weave afghans on it. The fourth - and last - plain beam will go into the loom tonight.

Time to clear off some of the storage beams!

It's also time to start packing my suitcase for Missouri.