Admitting Defeat

I want this fabric to be sturdy, so chose a set of 40 epi. If you click on the photo you should be able to see the first tie up I used (the lower end, rounding the beam) which had a lot of plain weave in it with just a little twill for flexibility.

Unfortunately this weave structure at this set with these yarns did not want to beat in square, even with the use of a temple.

After nearly half a yard of fighting with the loom and the yarns, I decided to change the tie up to have more floats and tried again. It still wasn't beating in square so I decided to admit defeat and do what the loom and yarns wanted to do in this instance. Since I'm weaving under quite high tension, I figure that once the fabric is wet finished it will likely end up pretty close to square anyway. So why fight it?

When I decided to do what the loom/yarn wanted to do I had to figure out what the actual ppi was. So I took a contrasting yarn and laid it into the shed, wove 40 picks and wove in the other end of the contrasting colour. Then I measured how long those 40 picks were actually taking up and figured 36 would be a much better ppi - one that would allow the weft to beat in the way it wanted to beat in and yet still wouldn't be too far off 'ideal'.

Decided that the more elaborate twill was much more visually interesting and decided not to change that but leave it as it is.

I can weave about 24 picks before needing to move the temple so I count to 24, put down the shuttle and move the temple. Yes, it's slow - much slower than I prefer to weave - but that is what it is going to take to get this fabric woven.

Once I'm done with this I can switch to a different weft, weave structure and purpose - shawls don't need to be anywhere near as sturdy as this cloth - and continue without the temple.

With 40 yards on the beam, using up this much yarn to sample isn't a hardship. I know that most people don't have the luxury of 'wasting' that much yarn sampling for a project. But this fabric won't be 'wasted'. I'll give it to my local guild for samples for the newsletter.

The guild has discussed from time to time sending out electronic newsletters but several of our guild members don't even own computers, let alone get on to the internet, so for now we're still sending out paper newsletters and samples when ever someone has one to share.